With S/4HANA Cloud Advanced Financial Closing, SAP offers a powerful cloud-based solution to simplify and automate financial closings of group companies, which can be used for on-premise or cloud solutions. This is achieved, among other things, through predefined templates that sequentially describe and document the closing process. Based on SAP best practices, the most important tasks for the preparation of financial statements are provided in templates and optimised processes and dependencies on the latest SAP S/4HANA releases are taken into account. SAP Best Practice templates can be used as a starting point to adapt them to your individual needs. Each task in a template includes standardised work instructions, responsible person names including approvers, approval requirements and timelines - all of which enable you to manage the closing processes across your entire organisation.
As the complexity of modern financial close processes continues to grow, organisations are increasingly looking for ways to streamline and automate these processes. Implementing a plan and orchestrating repeatable best-practice financial close processes with sequenced automated tasks and workflows across teams and time zones is one option for how organisations can achieve this goal.
The AFC enables companies to reduce manual effort by automating key activities such as data entry, consolidation, validation checks, etc., thus improving the efficiency of the process. In addition, the integration of systems across different departments helps ensure that all stakeholders have access to up-to-date information about their respective areas of responsibility at all times - regardless of how geographically dispersed they are - enabling them to collaborate better throughout the process. In addition, self-service access facilitates collaboration between users from different areas of a company or external parties, such as auditors, who need certain information related to the finance department quickly without having to wait long or depend on the availability of others.
The AFC provides real-time insight into your financial close process. This allows you to make informed decisions faster than ever before, while maintaining compliance with regulatory requirements at all times. This is a critical requirement when dealing with sensitive corporate finances.
The month-end closing is one of the most complex and time-consuming tasks for companies. It requires a lot of time to plan and execute all the necessary steps, slowing down financial processes. To overcome this challenge, SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Advanced Financial Closing (AFC) provides a best-practice approach, ena
With the Fiori app "Manage closing task lists", the closing structure of companies and enterprises can be mapped, planned and modelled holistically on the basis of SAP standard task list templates. Organisational master data, folders and tasks can be stored, which together with specifications for dependency, additional task parameters and responsible users define the company-specific template. Individual task lists can then be generated from the template.
Task lists are specific manifestations of a completion task plan. The attributes stored in the completion task list are inherited in the task list in order to plan a specific completion. However, the task list is created for a specific completion date. As soon as the task list is released, the tasks contained in it can be executed.
Approvals can be checked and granted in the app "Approve final tasks". Depending on the type of approval selected for tasks, a dual control principle may be required for certain tasks.
The system offers an entry-level monitor for the closing process, with which important KPIs and information are available at a glance. With appropriate widgets and filters, the view can be customised as desired. A direct drill-down into the details and accounting substance is also possible.
Today, it is crucial that companies manage their processes quickly and efficiently. The Closing Task Completion app provides access to key information and KPIs to monitor the completion of closing tasks. These apps make it possible to view powerful reports in real time and keep an eye on the progress of completion cycles. Both manual and automated.
The change log function allows changes to existing task list templates, task lists and tasks to be viewed in order to track them.