Financial Reporting with SAP S/4HANA

Aylin Korkmaz

• Publisher: SAP PRESS
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781493221882
• eBook ISBN: 9781493221899
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

Having access to clear, accurate financial reports is key for any organization! In this comprehensive guide, you'll walk step by step through creating such high-quality reports in SAP S/4HANA. You'll learn about key reporting requirements for finance and how to guide system design to produce the best reports for your company. Coverage includes core financial areas like general ledger, AP/AR, assets, cash management, overhead costing, margin analysis, and more. Make sense of your financial data with this expert guide! Highlights include: 1) General ledger
2) Segments
3) Tax reporting
4) Accounts payable
5) Accounts receivable
6) Asset lifecycle
7) Cash management
8) Treasury and risk management
9) Overhead costs
10) Product cost
11) Margin analysis
12) Group reporting

1 Financial Reporting

In this chapter, we’ll explain the financial reporting requirements and how you can best design your reporting strategy and reporting architecture by leveraging the latest capabilities of SAP S/4HANA and other products from SAP’s product suite.

The digital economy is here. In today’s world, enterprises continue to evolve and transform digitally. Month-end financial reports are no longer a match for a dynamic and fully integrated business that must base its decisions on what’s happening in the present. New regulations, an influx of structured and unstructured data at an unprecedented scale, and disruptive technology and business models are just a few factors putting pressure on finance organizations, which must evolve accordingly to provide a business with the real-time insights it needs to remain competitive.

With SAP S/4HANA, SAP has completely rebuilt the inner workings and database structure of the core finance modules on a simpler, faster, and more integrated platform called SAP HANA. It has introduced new innovations for reporting to provide real-time insights to its customers through SAP Fiori applications and embedded analytics. These changes have simplified the entire data model, including how data is stored and accessed, and they have eliminated reconciliation needs.

The purpose of this chapter is to explain the financial reporting requirements and show how you can best design your reporting strategy and reporting architecture by leveraging the latest capabilities of SAP S/4HANA and other reporting products from SAP’s product suite. To do this, we’ll first explain the financial requirements for financial and management reporting. We’ll then look at the new data architecture introduced with SAP S/4HANA, explain new reporting features, review the leading practices for designing the finance code block, and discuss how you can set up your reporting strategy by leveraging SAP S/4HANA capabilities in an evolutionary manner. This chapter will also cover the broader reporting analytics tools that you may want to leverage as part of your overall reporting architecture.

1.1 Today’s Financial Reporting Requirements

The pace of the digital business environment requires real-time data and analytics. Businesses need more flexible and ad hoc reports, predictive analytics, and timely close, all of which require accurate data, timely data, and someone to analyze the data to provide real-time insight. In many of today’s companies using SAP ERP or even SAP R/3, we’ve observed that what sounds simple is actually hard to manage. The current finance organizations at many of these companies produce only highly summarized numbers long after period-end close, which causes finance organizations to struggle to keep up. It’s often seven days or more after period-end close before a report can be produced. Anything that occurred at the beginning of the prior month is often not visible for four weeks or more. Then, if an executive wants more information about a set of numbers on the report, it may take days, if not longer, to drill down and produce meaningful insights.

As companies look ahead to SAP S/4HANA, they can anticipate several benefits for financial reporting. The general ledger capabilities within SAP S/4HANA are now based on a broader unified database. For instance, the company code, segment, profit center, and other key reporting dimensions are all contained in a single data record, which can easily be extended to include other fields. This functionality increases data quality, eliminates reconciliation measures, and provides a single source of truth for financial reporting.

With SAP S/4...

Table of contents

• Dear Reader
• Notes on Usage
• Table of Contents
•   Foreword
•   Preface
• 1   Financial Reporting
• 2   General Ledger Reporting
• 3   Segment Reporting
• 4   Tax Reporting
• 5   Accounts Payable Reporting
• 6   Accounts Receivable Reporting
• 7   Asset Lifecycle Reporting
• 8   Cash Management Reporting
• 9   Treasury and Risk Management
• 10   Overhead Cost Controlling Reporting
• 11   Product Cost Reporting
• 12   Margin Analysis
• 13   Group Reporting
• 14   Central Finance
• 15   Reporting with SAP Analytics Cloud
• The Author
• Index
• Service Pages
• Legal Notes