SAP Finance offers a robust suite of business financial software. It includes accounting management, planning and analysis, and more.
Designed to improve forecasting accuracy, shorten reporting cycles, simplify decision-making, and enhance risk and compliance management.
Also referred to as SAP Controlling, this module enables your analysts and managers to work with the same primary data as your financial accountants. This is accomplished through a common reconciled database for unique ledger postings that roll up to the new general ledger.
Asset Accounting
Capabilities of SAP finance, often called SAP Financials or SAP FI (Financial Accounting), are modules within the SAP ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system that focus on managing financial transactions and reporting within an organization. For utilities using an external solution to manage asset accounting and depreciation, the Business Network could be a game changer. Bringing fixed asset accounting back into SAP eliminates the capital accounting “dead end,” where settlements for maintenance work orders are recorded outside the ERP as a lump sum in a 300 account (such as FERC 101 PIS, 106 CCNC, 107 CWIP, and 108 Reserve). It also increases traceability by making every posting to and from assets visible in the universal journal, allowing for more accessible research and responsiveness.
Another hidden gem is embedded analytics in SAP Commissions, which can automatically generate standardized reports for sales reps, managers, and stakeholders, including commission statements, payout summaries, and performance scorecards. It helps ensure that compensation-related data is timely, accurate, and understandable to all involved.
Having an SAP system that enables you to capture, store, and analyze all of this data is critical for energy and utility businesses moving towards formula rates, which require more defensible fixed asset accounting data at the document level. It enables companies to save time and resources by automating data reconciliations and reporting, thereby improving cash flow and reducing regulatory lag.
Bank Accounting
Finance teams face increasing demand for actionable insights amidst many economic challenges. It elevates the need for agility and adaptability, especially within SAP’s data management and reporting functions.
To better address these challenges, SMEs need the right tools to simplify procedures and achieve growth. As an all-in-one business management system, SAP Business One emerges as a potential solution to help SMEs manage their finances effectively and efficiently.
For instance, the platform’s bank accounting capabilities enable them to manage cash flows and track receivables and payables. The feature also facilitates the reconciliation of bank accounts and automates the posting of cash receipts and payments, thereby eliminating manual steps and enhancing efficiency.
Moreover, the platform’s resource allocation features provide visibility into project-related time and expense management to improve budget compliance and overall project profitability. It helps avert resource misallocation and inefficient deployment, reduce project-related costs, and optimize supply chain operations.
Additionally, the platform’s POS Data Management functionality allows SMEs to gain control over their retail sales transactions and protect their businesses against financial losses caused by point-of-sale fraud. Essentially, the software solution detects suspicious patterns in transaction records and flags them for further investigation. With its embedded analytics, POS Data Management can help avert a substantial percentage of losses caused by cash register fraud.
Financial Close
Financial close is a critical process that involves verifying and adjusting account balances for a specified period (typically the end of a quarter or year) to produce financial reports representing your company’s actual financial state as of that date. These reports are used by management, investors, lenders, and other stakeholders to make strategic decisions and inform disclosures.
The challenge with financial close is that it’s highly time-sensitive and requires a lot of manual work across many spreadsheets, making it prone to errors, inefficiencies, and data loss. Delays in delivering accurate financial statements can be costly and impact your ability to provide timely numbers for business leaders to drive growth and agility.
This is why accounting and finance professionals need a tool that can help them reduce financial close cycle times and deliver more value to the organization. Fortunately, financial close software is available to automate processes and eliminate manual workflows that can slow down the financial close. It helps teams avoid costly delays in delivering accurate financial statements and provides them with the tools to streamline budgeting, planning, reporting, financial consolidation, and disclosure management processes.
Financial Planning and Analysis
The Financial Management Module (FI) is a central part of the SAP Business Suite, consisting of Financial Accounting (FI) and Controlling (CO). FI handles external reporting, including balance sheets and profit-and-loss statements. It integrates with other SAP modules, such as Materials Management and Production Planning.
The redesigned SAP S/4HANA Finance, previously known as Simple Finance, has many new capabilities that can help you run your organization more efficiently and reduce processing times. Its innovative features include a universal journal, streamlined design, and real-time analytics. This solution is also designed to speed up the financial close, provide improved financial data for accounts payable and accounts receivable, and enhance management accounting and financial planning processes.
Using SAP S/4HANA Finance’s document splitting feature, you can manage multiple ledgers with different accounting principles simultaneously. For example, the GL can record IFRS-compliant general ledger postings while maintaining parallel IFRS ledgers in the FI-GL. Furthermore, you can also create a new extended ledger for specific organizational requirements. It allows you to create unlimited ledgers for different segments or profit centers.
The Universal Journal in SAP S/4HANA Finance combines the data from all the FI-GL, FI-AA, and FI-CO tables into a single journal. It simplifies the data model, eliminates duplicate data, and makes a real-time transaction view available to all users. Additionally, it removes the requirement for a synchronization process with linked data warehouse systems and makes reporting much faster.