S/4HANA for Finance

Financial Close Transformation – Research Report

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Key Takeaways

⇨ The financial close is often cited as a major pain point consistently by SAP organizations, putting pressure on CFOs to streamline this critical business process.

⇨ 88% of respondents with a negative view of current organizational financial close processes and technologies, also said these systems were reliant on manual methods and legacy tools.

⇨ Survey respondents with a positive view of organization’s current financial close processes and technologies are more likely to run SAP S4/HANA.

As organizations increasingly rely on data to make decisions, the need for efficient and accurate financial closes has never been greater. However, many finance and accounting (F&A) teams still rely on manual financial close activities, leading to errors and delays. This leaves executives with less time for analysis and puts them at a disadvantage when making important business decisions. Financial close automation can help to reduce errors, speed up the process, and free up time for analysis

This report discusses why SAPinsider organizations need to consider transformation initiatives across financial close processes and technologies, focusing on automation to improve efficiency across financial close activities. In today’s business climate, the traditional F&A work streams focused on shortening the close period have given way to a new focus on leveraging financial data to gain a competitive advantage.

From August to October of 2022, SAPinsider surveyed 124 finance community members to learn more about the strategic priorities of SAP organizations regarding financial close transformation The research identified some significant trends in the organizational priorities and challenges around financial close transformation, some of which are:

  • CFOs are increasingly turning to technology to help transform financial close processes, providing context for moving to SAP S/4HANA to consolidate financial activities and/or modernize F&A functions as the top driver.
  • 60% of SAPinsiders plan to address their core drivers by taking actions that include improving the efficiency of the financial close
  • Most survey respondents (85%) view automated and standardized closing processes and alerts as the leading requirement to enable to support actions around improving the efficiency of the financial close.
  • Organizations are prioritizing the need to eliminate extensive manual intervention as the top objective of financial close transformation strategy.

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