Optimizing the Financial Close at Any Stage of the SAP S/4HANA Journey

SAP organizations are in all different phases of their moves to SAP S/4HANA. SAPinsider’s recent SAP S/4HANA Finance 2024 benchmark research report found that 41% of users are still using SAP ECC for their primary finance and accounting system, while 33% have already deployed SAP S/4HANA.

Companies often say that they are hesitant to change or overhaul any essential functions during their migration journey, preferring to focus solely on digital transformation and delay any potential process improvements until after the go-live date. Yet this may not be the best option.

Organizations should be aware that they have options when it comes to bolstering their essential operations. According to the aforementioned benchmark report, 32% of SAP organizations said that the financial close is one of their biggest pain points when it comes to financial processes, yet only 16% are leveraging automated financial close solutions. An automated financial close solution can provide a single source of truth, while improving both compliance and audit processes during the ERP conversion process – reducing risk and improving conversion efficiency.

Standardizing and Streamlining at Every Step of the Digital Transformation

One of the most important goals companies have for their move to SAP S/4HANA is to streamline their operations. More than half (52%) of companies said that one of their main long-term goals is to consolidate to a more efficient financial ecosystem.

Yet an ERP migration can sometimes cause fragmented, inconsistent, and unreliable data even in the best scenarios. This can become more problematic for organizations with histories of mergers, acquisitions, and multiple ERPs in place.

Many SAP organizations in this situation are turning to Trintech and its Cadency platform to support their digital migration. This platform allows businesses to standardize their reconciliation and financial close workflows by ensuring data integrity and providing standardized & controlled reconciliation templates.

Cadency from Trintech also has pre-built SAP-certified connectors which help streamline the process of integrating older ERP systems with SAP S/4HANA by ensuring data transfers efficiently with minimal involvement from the IT department. Cadency also provides significant automation capabilities for manual tasks like reconciliations and approvals. In addition to reducing the instances of human error, this frees up finance teams to focus on other important activities that add value to the organization, minimizing one of the biggest concerns around ERP migration.

This platform can provide users with critical benefits either before, during, or after SAP S/4HANA migration, as there is no wrong time to add greater efficiency and stronger controls to your financial close. If done before the migration, companies can transfer these strengthened processes and the ensuing clean, consistent data to the new deployment. Amid the migration, implementing Cadency helps ensure that financial close activities continue to run smoothly and your important financial information is controlled and secure. Even after the migration is completed, companies can continue to install and update templates and varied automations to continually optimize their efforts.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

The best time to improve workflows is now. Companies have plenty of reasons for holding off on solutions that can help improve their most essential financial processes – budget constraints, competing priorities, concerns about SAP S/4HANA migration. Yet the reality is that the sooner they implement new platforms, the sooner they can start to reap the benefits of reduced risk, increased efficiencies, and less manual, menial efforts.

Read this case study highlighting Bayer’s success in increasing efficiency of their financial close by implementing Trintech’s Cadency during the SAP S/4HANA migration.

Don’t use a digital transformation as an excuse to fall behind. Leading organizations should avoid listing concerns about the move to SAP S/4HANA as a reason to delay enhancing their finance workflows. Platforms like Trintech’s Cadency can bolster operations at any point within the process, reducing strain and even simplifying the forthcoming digital transformation.

Digital migrations can be intimidating, but you do not have to do them alone. Once companies commit to move to SAP S/4HANA, they turn their attention to maximizing the investment. SAPinsider research found that improving financial close processes and simplifying financial systems were tied for the two top strategies for SAP S/4HANA finance. Yet this is not always simple to achieve. Leading organizations often opt to work with experienced partners like Trintech who can help them maximize their investment by automating and improving the most essential functions within the financial close.