On their digital transformation race towards an intelligent enterprise, organizations are putting heavier pressure on their CFOs and finance leaders to uncover hidden value and achieve new levels of growth for the entire organization. This means confidently steering the organization’s decision-making through heightened insight, accuracy, and speed. Many, however, are struggling with inefficiencies in their financial close and reporting structure, primarily driven by disjointed and outdated financial applications and manual processes that simply cannot keep up with constantly changing business needs and requirements, making this a difficult task.
To gain a competitive edge and achieve new levels of success, organizations must look to a modern, holistic approach to financial close management that grows with the organization’s changing requirements.
In this on-demand webinar on Achieving Modern Financial Close With SAP Analytics Cloud and Group Reporting, we here at Analysis Prime along with SAP product experts, look at common challenges organizations face in managing their end-to-end financial close process. We also analyze and through detailed product demonstrations show modern planning and analysis capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) and Group Reporting help to not only overcome these challenges but also achieve greater time-to-value by:
Eliminating inefficiencies in reconciliation and analysis processes
Bringing real-time data to your entire organization for immediate results
Accelerating the financial close processes by combining financial and operational data into a single repository
Enabling continuous accounting through real-time performance management
Driving finance and accounting team collaboration
To better understand why more enterprises are choosing SAP Analytics Cloud with SAP Group Reporting to accelerate their financial close processes, let’s explore some common challenges facing today’s Finance leaders and how SAC with Group Reporting enables modern financial intelligence needed to deliver business outcomes for the future.
Understanding the Challenges of Today’s Financial Close
A volatile economic landscape certainly creates new business complexities. Simultaneously, Finance, in particular, is now faced with increased regulatory pressures and heightened demand from stakeholders for transparency and real-time analysis of their organization’s financial performance.
Meeting these new demands while navigating evolving complexities of financial consolidation processes is problematic, especially when facing these additional challenges:
Lack of collaboration across teams Finance and accounting leaders aren’t connected to each other or the information they need in a timely manner.
Limited visibility Disjoined communication between disparate systems and manual data entry/updates doesn’t allow for one source of the truth.
Delayed forecasting Managers must wait for period-end processes to take place before being able to extract valuable information.
Legacy technology Out-of-date platforms can’t keep up or support evolving business requirements and tend to hold CFOs back.
In most cases, trying to rise to these challenges while creating new value with legacy software and processes simply isn’t practical. Finance and accounting leaders should be leveraging today’s technology to work smarter, not harder.
SAP’s modern finance platform combines all of the reconciliation tasks and processes which traditionally took place at month or quarter-end, to run instantaneously throughout the month. There are no longer batch programs, processes, or reconciliations that need to be run. Finance no longer has to spend two-thirds of their time on operational tasks like feeding and caring for data, loading cubes and financial reporting systems, and reconciliations. Instead, through increased automation and embedded analytics, they are able to achieve Continuous Accounting or a new way to manage the accounting cycle through real-time insights and deeper analysis.
“We are now able to spend 80% of our time analyzing and working with data and making decisions based on real-time insights.” – Ron Corsello, SAP
From Rear to Windshield View with SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Group Reporting
To meet new and evolving market demands while paving the way to a truly intelligent enterprise, financial leaders are turning to agile technology that streamlines the financial consolidation and close processes by marrying group and operational reporting with combined BI, augmented and predictive analytics, and planning capabilities in a centralized solution.
A robust Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) planning solution like SAP Analytics Cloud facilities a true end-to-end user experience by allowing all users across Accounting and Finance teams to:
Discover, analyze, plan, and predict in one experience
Make end-to-end decisions with data management and analytics in a single place
Quickly and seamlessly scale to meet the changing needs of a business
Reveal hidden KPI drivers and relationships through machine learning
Accurately forecast with confidence
At the same time, Finance for group reporting automates key processes such as consolidation calculations and cash flow reporting while removing data redundancies – all in real-time – enabling your accounting and finance teams to:
Uncover a single source of truth by combining financial and management accounting data
Reduce risk by leveraging a singular data model
Perform deep analysis of financial data on the fly
Close the books faster with greater confidence
Jointly, SAP Analytics Cloud and SAP Group Reporting streamline consolidation and financial reporting through a holistic user experience that fosters collaboration and promotes increased transparency into the business.
Equipped with an automated and connected financial close and more accurate insights, you can quickly close the books and dedicate more time to running deep analyses and bring additional value to the organization through strategic initiatives. Additionally, by breaking down data silos and inefficiencies of disparate systems and manual processes, you instill greater confidence in your employees and shareholders alike.
Take the Next Step Toward Intelligent Finance
If you want to prepare your organization to take on and lead a more competitive marketplace, you’ll need innovative ways to combat your current challenges and deliver higher-value experiences. Adopting a modern, end-to-end finance solution designed for the future, will help you achieve these goals faster and more successfully.
In this recent webinar, Analysis Prime and SAP product experts walk through detailed demonstrations of the powerful capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud and Group Reporting and show you how you can embed and automate period-end tasks into daily activities and get instant insight into your business. To see a live, personalized demonstration tailored to your specific business needs, contact one of our experts today.
With the right software in place, your organization can meet uncertainty with confidence and deliver more valuable growth by:
Improving efficiencies and eliminating manual tasks.
Leveraging real-time data insights to make precise and confident decisions.
Increasing engagement through advanced built-in collaboration features.
Reveal top performance drivers through predictive planning for more accurate forecasting.
Want to learn more about how you can accelerate your journey toward an intelligent enterprise? Choose from a series of on-demand webinars curated specifically for you.