Category: Financials

Some may be familiar with transaction F.01 or trial balance in ECC. At its simplest, it's the sum of all accounting debits and credits broken down by chart of accounts, general ledger account, company code, and some additional fields or dimensions. In other words, it is the sum of all financial accounting that ECC has recorded in your production instance general ledger that serves as a basis for financial statements.

The basic process of accounting and bookkeeping hasn't changed for hundreds of years and during financial monthend close involves a large effort in the accounting department. Or maybe, it had until HANA has arrived on the scene.

Think of this. What if we were to put the most important subtotals (ending balances, flows, etc.) into a Hana cube to see how quickly we can navigate the dimensions through one of the simplest reports available or the out-of-the-box Excel Pivot Table? The current Excel row count limitation of 1,048,576 rows is not affecting us provided we stay within the manageable number of subtotals and try not to get everything at once from the Hana cube.

 

In this interview, SAP Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Becher discusses the role of the CMO in the “Brave New World” of modern marketing. He explains his view on the role of marketing and discusses customer value in this one on one interview.

The instant access to data and information provided by the likes of Google, iStore and Spotify has made people increasingly impatient with some of the legacy systems we use in our business lives – me included. There is nothing worse than waiting for a report to compile or a screen to refresh and it’s particularly annoying when you’re trying to do other things – and there’s time constraints. So bear a thought for folk in the finance team reconciling various ledgers for the period end close:

A new Aberdeen report finds that cloud-based expense-management software offers a better alternative to today’s Excel-based or other on-premise software and processes. The verdict, according to Aberdeen survey research of 50 service firms, is that the cloud does offer advantages over on-premise systems. Cloud-based systems contributed to: a 52 percent increase in billing speed compared with those firms using on-premise management software; a 26 percent higher increase in payment speed; and 21 percent more consultants and other employees using the expense management system to create and submit project expenses, notes the report.

If you are considering implementing SAP FSCM the one simple tip I would give you is to remember that the project is 80% business change and 20% system change.

You may never have heard of it, but The Executive Value Network for Finance is a business community of practice for the senior business leaders (CFOs and senior finance executives) where SAP customers can meet their peers from leading companies to discuss today’s challenges and solutions. The purpose of the network is to facilitate the exchange of customer success, innovation, and best practices – but don’t worry their subject matter goes well beyond software

I guess this is an instance how seemingly small investments can deliver a big impact. With over 750 subsidiaries, The Dow Chemical Company faced the all-too-familiar challenge of reducing their financial close. This was no easy task for its finance team, which runs over 1,000 financial close jobs a month. To streamline and automate the process, they deployed tow SAP tools that often fall below the radar, but which can deliver impressive results for a small amount of effort – the SAP Financial Closing cockpit and the SAP Central Process Scheduling application by Redwood. Now Dow’s financial close process runs with greater efficiency and transparency at far lower cost.

With pressure on margins, there is renewed interest in profitability reporting and a lot of global companies investing in new initiatives. If it’s a concern for you, as a first step I would urge you to benchmark yourself on a simple on-line assessment tool that SAP has put together. It’s quick, easy - and most revealing…

Managing asset retirement obligations is challenging for companies in asset-intensive industries. Learn how the SAP® Asset Retirement Obligation Management application can automate many of the calculations required to meet these requirements -- all while complying with relevant accounting principles.

CFOs and CIOs should theoretically be united in a common goal to shift from cost control to growth. But in reality, many organisations have been poorly equipped to make the business case for IT investment in disciplines such as planning, budgeting, forecasting, performance monitoring, compliance and internal management reporting. That’s often because IT and Finance don’t have a unified view of what success should look like – or how to get there.

Without stealing too much of their thunder, I can reveal that my colleagues responsible for our planning and budgeting solutions have been doing some research to uncover exactly how companies are adapting their planning and budgeting processes to cope with the stubbornly volatile global economy.

In September, I asked people to describe how they would explain the term GRC to their CEO if they met on the elevator. The results are in, and in this post I will discuss them – with no names or attribution.

This article on the board at HP demonstrates very clearly how a dysfunctional board is the source of major risks. It is fascinating that the infighting among the board members led to their hiring a CEO that the majority had not met  - and who had been terminated from his prior position as CEO of SAP after a short tenure. Just one quote: Interviews with several current and former directors and people close to them involved in the search that resulted in the hiring of Mr. Apotheker reveal a board that, while composed of many accomplished individuals, as a group was rife with animosities, suspicion, distrust, personal ambitions and jockeying for power that rendered it nearly dysfunctional. The COSO Internal Control Framework tells us that board operations are a major element in an effective system of internal control. How can internal audit say that this source of corporate risk is outside the scope of their responsibilities and fail to even consider it for inclusion in the audit plan? Let's leave aside for a moment how we will assess it. Surely, this is a risk we cannot afford to ignore!

95 of fortune 100 companies in North America are looking at moving to built-in approach as they have realized challenges of bolt-on to solve the XBRL needs. Had the privilege of speaking alongside thought leader and LastMile topic guru Mike Willis, trying to highlight few aspects of this in this post

PwC’s 2011 Finance effectiveness benchmark study 2011 has an interesting title: “Drifting or Driving”. While it does not say it bluntly, the clear implication is that while some finance functions are drifting along, with much higher costs and a lower level of effectiveness, leading finance functions have taken and are continuing to take significant steps to improve.