Improving Financial Close with SAP S/4HANA Finance Tools

SAP S/4HANA is a finance system used to operate hard financial close. You may also use a handful of financial tools to obtain increased efficiency, insight, and governance.

In this post, we aim at helping you know about enhancing financial close with the help of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

SAP Financial Closing Using SAP S/4HANA

The companies that are using SAP ERP currently will get used to the SAP Advanced Financial Closing package easily. It is an advanced monitoring system to serve as the add-on. It lists all the steps that need to be operated as a template for the close and creates a task schedule called the task list for the parts of a specific close. It then monitors the tasks’ execution for that close.

However, SAP S/4HANA 1709 has been directly integrated and converted into an SAP S/4HANA environment. Since the cockpit is located directly on Universal Journal’s top, it successfully leverages every single foundation of truth.

The SAP Financial Close with SAP S/4HANA does the planning, monitoring, analysis, and execution of tasks relating to financial closing that periodically recur. It involves a stipulated chronological sequence and multiple agents in the process of closing.

It supports the optimization process of the financial close by controlling and monitoring every step of processing posting, producing reports and close cycle through 5 core capabilities-

1. Highly standardized and automated functionality
   in managing accounts and reconciliation performances including the execution of
   remote and event-driven tasks.
2. Set equipment for helping with sequencing,
   controlling, and monitoring workflows in a business. This is done to ensure the
   overall efficiency of the close procedure.
3. Closing Templates
4. Supporting several factory calendars
5. Full monitoring
   of closing process along with flexible notifications

Additionally, the Financial Closing Cockpit Task List also produces an outline of different tasks along with their statuses and other information. It also displays dependencies, attachments, notes, log information, etc.

Components such as central storage of attachments and logs, comprehensive auditing trails, to set authorizations, and other internal controls that ensure proper governance and compliance of this closing process.

To execute complete insights into the entire process, pre-executed KPIs provide a vivid view of financial closing activities of different close cycles and entities.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud Featuring Advanced Financial Closing

Do you wish to make use of the cloud-based system only? Then, you can opt for SAP S/4HANA Cloud to support advanced financial closing. The given feature was made accessible via SAP S/4HANA Cloud 1811.

You can use this tool as a closing hub that enables users to plan, monitor, and process the financial closing for several on-premise systems. It focuses on groups and entities close to financial reporting on the roadmap. It has specialized features as:

1. With SAP S/4HANA Cloud, define your templates to plan and model closing cycles concerning automated and manual tasks.
2. You can generate the task lists from templates for any particular key dates.
3. The task template set consists of all the standard financial closing jobs and applications including the respective interdependencies and sequences for accounts payable, accounts receivable, cost accounting, and standard ledger accounting.
4. The systems can be configured that can automatically trigger the notifications and send certain events when required.
5. You can model the closing tasks in a particular approval workflow.
6. You can enable the financial close monitoring from an overview page. You can also come across the analytical list for monitoring with respect to completing the closing activities.

The following is a clarification of the content of the monitoring capabilities –

Those closing tasks which are country-specific can be initially supported for Germany and the United States but particular content for other countries can be expected to be in the form of an extension of the task templates.

Conclusion

To sum up, SAP S/4HANA Finance offers several advancements to different processes, for instance, period-end closing and also, hard financial close. This article explored 2 financial tools available that can help you in facilitating a hard financial closing. With the SAP financial closing cockpit, you can speed up the complicated closing cycles and meet the standards of financial reporting and regulatory requirements. This financial tool helps you to increase the efficiency of the users through control, enhanced automation, and centralized monitoring.