New financial regulations have ushered in change, globally. These shifts, along with the demand for swifter financial reporting, have opened an enormous possibility for savvy enterprises. The siloed and traditional accountant who was unaware of the daily operations is a thing of the past. The future is a connected enterprise with swifter access to most relevant and accurate enterprise-wide information.
Financial operations deal with mammoth amounts of granular data processed at high speeds. All of this calls for flexibility in reporting. SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud responds to the business trends of today. With features like real-time reporting, unified source of truth, maximum granularity, future-ready planning, and expedited financial closing, it offers finance organizations a future-proof solution with a pleasant user experience each time.
SAP S/4HANA has made it possible to carry out significant finance transformations in these past years. Here are some advantages of using SAP S/4HANA Finance Cloud to relieve pressure by optimizing operations and enhance decision-making.
- Universal Journal: To speed up period-end reconciliation and closing, the universal journal tool integrates data and the features from Financial Accounting and Managerial Accounting (old SAP ECC elements). All of this while working with real-time data.
- Reporting Simplified: The S/4HANA database table stores all essential financial data and generates precise, real-time reports using in-memory computation. Besides, this capability further reduces the requirement for batch operations and data replication.
- Quick Financial Closing: S/4HANA innovates, creating financial closure on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. S/4HANA Finance Cloud gives you near-instant visibility into your P&L, enhancing decision-making capacity based on real-time trends and data.
- Consolidated Business Plans: The financial planning process is simplified using a Microsoft Excel-based interface. Using S/4HANA Finance Cloud to automate the transfer of financial data such as cost center, profit center, and the internal order, streamlines and speeds up the process. Furthermore, it also enables real-time reporting and analysis.
- New Asset Accounting: The Finance Cloud platform’s new asset accounting capabilities are likewise a significant advancement. You can now use ledgers and accounts to handle asset valuation in tandem. Keeping track of depreciation areas is a thing of the past. Real-time valuation is in.
Figuring Out Local and Global Complexities
Dealing with evolving regulatory environments and external factors daily requires enterprises to be flexible and resilient in executing their ERP roadmap. SAP S/4 Finance Solution adheres to country-specific requirements and regulatory needs while supporting business operations globally.
Secrets for a Successful SAP S/4HANA-based Finance Transformation
| Vision | Build a lucid and collective vision for a finance organization and persistently move to achieve it. |
| Roadmap | Develop a clear and agile implementation roadmap centered on providing value sooner and regularly. |
| Users | Craft processes and regulate changes with users in mind. User-centricity includes a company’s expertise to manage people change competently while the finance transformation is in operation. |
| Data | Establish an intelligent data framework. Identify all data sources, integrations, and restrictions and apply automation and ML to secure any data gaps. |
Automation and Innovation | Include the correct processes in your SAP S/4HANA solution with AI and ML to expedite processing, enhance data accuracy and creation, remove reconciliations and perform allocations in real-time. |
| Governance | Manage business process models, blueprint processes, and integration flows according to global and local complexities. |
| Global vs Local | Determine robust governance for decision-making to ensure that the solution and critical stakeholders align with the original objective. |
The essential role of SAP S/4HANA within your finance transformation:
Establish a Unified Data Basis
A unified database is one of the most important goals of a successful finance department redesign. Consistent and homogenous financial data enables quick and accurate reporting, deep dives, additional analyses with a few “clicks,” and thus the most exemplary decision support. SAP S/4HANA provides the ideal technology foundation with the “Universal Journal.”
Integrated Business Planning
In the SAP S/4HANA Universal Journal, legal and management accounting data is combined and stored consistently. Different sources for administration and legal details are substituted by one single source of truth. Big organizations are taking it one step ahead by establishing Central Finance to conform to global structures. As a result, businesses can witness these essential improvements:
- HANA in-memory processing results in faster transactional processing
- Enhanced productivity with Fiori applications that combine multiple processes into a single view application
- Reporting directly from the database with drill-down
Conclusion
Choosing the best fit S/4HANA product and deployment option is the key to a successful digital finance transformation. Some of the critical aspects that organizations should consider while making decisions include:
- Finance product maturity and innovations
- Cost and profit analysis
- Finance process harmonization
- Technology landscape assessment
Understanding these criteria influences organizations to be better equipped to make the right decision while embarking on the S/4HANA finance transformation journey.
As a seasoned SAP Gold partner, MOURI Tech’s SAP practice caters to a global client base. We deliver capabilities across SAP Financials, including all central functionality in ECC and S/4HANA, Central Finance, Receivables Management, Real Estate Management, IFRS compliance, and Automation.
Contact our experts to initiate personalized Finance transformation with SAP at pace.
