by Birgit Starmanns, Solution Marketing, Analytics, SAP
Finance organizations use spreadsheets. Lots of them. And they spend much of their time manually cutting and pasting, replicating information from one format to the next, and adding narrative disclosures, all of which introduce the risk of errors and inconsistencies.
Ventana Research conducted a Fast Close Trends benchmarking study in 2012 that shows, on average, companies are taking longer to close their books. This research points to reasons why it’s happening and offers insight into the best ways to speed it up. The why and how are illustrated in this infographic (by Ventana) on the CFO Knowledge blog .
Solutions for finance support an accelerated financial close, allowing you to manage the entire close process, from the legal entity, to the group close, to disclosure of your results both internally and externally. Your finance team will be able to:
- Publish accurate and timely financial and regulatory statements
- Minimize risk of financial restatements
- Make financial statements faster, more accurate, and less costly to execute
- Meet external and internal stakeholders’ expectations
- Gain access to large volumes of secure and detailed data from financial, cost and material ledgers
SAP solutions for enterprise information management (EIM) also support the financial close providing you with consistent, reliable information, by:
- Ensuring improved governance for financial accounting, entity close, corporate close, financial reporting, and disclosure management
- Compiling data across multiple sources and looking for missing data
- Validating the accuracy and completeness of data
- Reconciling the inconsistencies in data and master data across sources
It’s not just about going home early. Accelerating the financial close allows you to focus on more value-added activities and make better decisions.
View this video to see how finance and EIM solutions from SAP can help you achieve a faster close.
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