Tackling Challenges of Month-end Close by Utilizing Business Planning and Analytics Platforms

⇨ According to the American Productivity & Quality Center, the average company takes 6.4 calendar days to complete the month-end close with many businesses spending time pulling data from their ERP system into Excel.

⇨ While seeking resolutions, many turn to providers of modern business planning and analytics (BP&A) platforms to develop meaningful strategic, analytical, and financial insights to drive critical business decisions in an agile environment.

⇨ By deploying BP&A platforms, SAP users can fully embrace the power of automation and speed up the month-end process by as much as 50% while making a step forward toward consistent growth and goal fulfillment.

Finance teams are increasingly required to achieve more with less. To keep up with an ever-growing list of demands, the need to introduce automation for labor-intensive and repetitive tasks such as month-end close has become business critical.

According to the American Productivity & Quality Center, the average company takes 6.4 calendar days to complete the month-end process. Traditionally, companies complete their month-end by spending a significant amount of time manually pulling data from their SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system into Excel spreadsheets and then manipulating it into a standardized format every month. This is a time-consuming and error-prone process that imposes a risk of delays and security concerns. However, new technology solutions can help companies transform their month-end processes.

Forward-thinking CFOs, Finance Directors, and Accountants are turning to providers of modern business planning and analytics (BP&A) platforms that are run on the cloud and are compatible with SAP. BP&A is an enterprise-wide collaborative effort aimed at developing meaningful strategic, analytical, and financial insights to drive critical business decisions in an agile environment. 

Among its providers is Phocas Software, a cloud-based software company that specializes in providing business and financial planning solutions. Phocas’s BP&A platform includes financial statement software (Phocas Financial Statements) that automates the creation of profit and loss (income statement), balance sheet, and cash flow statements for SAP users. 

By deploying Phocas, SAP users can fully embrace the power of automation and speed up the month-end process by as much as 50%. Furthermore, automated features of Phocas Financial Statements allow users to have a single, governed source of truth for their business, as well as consolidate multiple trading companies and entities in a single click, and drill down to transaction-level detail with ease. The deployment of the software can help companies free up finance teams to spend more time working on value-added activities for the business.

Overall, in the world of expanding data, finding a way to organize it in a unified, accessible, and controllable system is vital for a business to thrive. Therefore, by deploying BP&A platforms like the one offered by Phocas, SAP users can enjoy smooth month-end close processes, making a step forward towards consistent growth and goal fulfillment.