Introduction

SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting is a comprehensive solution. It helps business, FP&A team members, and financial professionals streamline and automate their group reporting processes. It provides a single source of truth for all financial data. This enables real-time consolidation and reporting, and improves collaboration and visibility.

We recently implemented SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting for one of the largest steel manufacturing companies. The company has a complex organization structure comprising more than 200 consolidation units and 30 consolidation groups following different accounting standards. Thanks to the salient and robust features of SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting, we were able to smoothly customize and cater to the client’s business requirements and deliver the system swiftly.

Key features provided by SAP S/4 HANA Group Reporting

Real-time data access and consolidation: SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting provides real-time access to transactional data, eliminating the need for periodic extractions and replications. This allows for real-time consolidation and reporting, and faster decision-making. SAP has come up with standard task Release Universal Journal (1015) that makes it easier and simpler for business to extract data from S/4HANA integrated entities (ACDOCA) to consume for consolidation and financial close activities in Group Reporting (ACDOCU).

Unified consolidation and transactional activities:

SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting is a fully integrated component of SAP S/4HANA, providing a unified environment for consolidation and transactional activities. This reduces data movements, eliminates reconciliation processes, and improves efficiency. SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting provides lots of flexibility to end-user addressing their requirement and needs with pre-delivered configuration for ranging consolidation scenarios:

• First consolidation
• Subsequent consolidation
• Step acquisition
• Capital increase and decrease
• Partial and total divestiture
• Partial and total transfer
• Horizontal and vertical merge

In group reporting, the following approaches are available:

• Rule-based consolidation of investments.
• Activity-based consolidation of investments.

Management (Matrix) Consolidation: Pre-delivered configuration providing On-the-Fly Elimination for Management Consolidation using hierarchical elimination for Master Data Fields like Profit Center, Segment, Business area and others.

Intercompany Matching and Reconciliation (ICMR):

Speed up your intercompany reconciliation process from company close to corporate close. As a built-in solution in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, it matches transactions without any ETL (extract, transform, load) processes and reconciles your financial data in real time. By defining flexible matching and reconciliation rules, you can achieve high degrees of automation and continuous accounting. In addition, its in-app communication and workflow features eliminate the latencies very often seen in dealing with intercompany discrepancies, and, at the same time, improve visibility and transparency of your reconciliation process.

             

Flexible and Advanced Fiori Interface: SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting provides a more attractive and adaptive interface for the end-user to perform different task and activities in the form of fiori Launchpad Catalogs and groups.

Ad-hoc Reporting with in-built App: SAP S/4HANA Group Reporting comes with an in-built data analysis and reporting application i.e. Group Data Analysis and Group Data Analysis (with Reporting Rules) for Cash flow reports. Also, we can easily create Ad-hoc report with Analysis for Office in Excel with standard provided cube and query.

• Trial Balance of Parent (CU_H), Subsidiary (CU_S), Associate (CU_A) entities:

• Consolidated Balance sheet and Income statement of CG01 group

             

Tighter Security Control: SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting have in-built base roles for Local accountant, Group Accountant, Administrator, Business Analyst, External Auditor and others which ensures SODs between performer, reviewer and checker and restricting access and authorization depending on their respective requisite roles. Below are the standard roles provided by SAP Group Reporting:

• SAP_BR_GL_ACCOUNTANT_GRP: General Ledger Accountant – Group Reporting
• SAP_BR_GRP_ACCOUNTANT: Group Accountant
• SAP_BR_ADMINISTRATOR_GRP: Administrator – Group Reporting
• SAP_BR_EXTERNAL_AUDITOR_GRP: External Auditor – Group Reporting
• SAP_BR_BUSINESS_ANALYST_GRP: Business Analyst – Group Reporting

SAP Group Reporting is a valuable tool for any business that needs to consolidate and report on financial data from multiple entities. It can help businesses to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and increase the accuracy and visibility of their group reporting processes.

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Disclaimer : All the opinions are solely for information purposes and the author doesn’t recommend or reject any tools . It should be done after your own due diligence.