Personal Insights
How SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine Complements an SAP Central Finance Deployment
Elizabeth Milne, Accounting and Financial Close Expert, SAP
Molly Boyle, SAP Solutions Expert, BlackLine
SAP S/4HANA for central finance foundation (Central Finance) is a deployment option for SAP S/4HANA Finance, which accelerates implementation without compromising productivity nor disrupting the business. It is an S/4HANA system that receives financial accounting transactions via real-time replication from SAP and/or non-SAP ERP source systems.
Benefits of Central Finance include:
- Transparency – a single, central source of harmonized financial data for local, entity and group reporting
- Efficiency – integration, standardization and automation of business processes such as managing accounts payable, treasury, and other financial operations
- Simplification – one rationalized, and consolidated solution for transaction capturing, reporting, planning and consolidation
- Business Continuity – SAP and non-SAP ERPs are connected without disruption to SAP S/4HANA and can run as a digital business
So how does SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine complement Central Finance?
Central Finance provides powerful data unification and reporting capabilities. This helps decision makers run a better, simpler business without having to wait for consolidated financial statements for a complete picture. Yet in order for the information in Central Finance to provide period end reporting, accounting organizations must close the books.
For most companies, this involves local accounting teams executing and performing a number of tasks, which are typically done at month end. These tasks are usually performed in disparate ERP systems before data is consumed into Central Finance. Typically, these tasks are manual, and they rely heavily on spreadsheets. SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine complements Central Finance by streamlining and automating core close tasks like balance sheet substantiation, manual journal entries, and high-volume transaction matching. This improve the period close and allows for more complete, meaningful data to be pushed into Central Finance on a continuous basis.
Leveraging both Central Finance and SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine together provides maximum transparency, efficiency, simplification and auditability to your financial close process.
A Blog Series to Answer Your Questions
There are a number of common questions about BlackLine and SAP and how our solutions work together. Please check out these blogs to answer them:
- SAP & BlackLine: Improving the End-To-End Financial Close Process, Together
- Understanding the many applications of “Reconciliation” – How SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine Complements SAP S/4HANA
- How SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine Complements an SAP Central Finance Deployment
- The Universal Journal and Journal Entry Functionality in SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine Explained
- SAP ERP solutions have Intercompany Reconciliation functionality (ICR). Why would I need SAP Intercompany Financial Hub by BlackLine?
- Making Sense of Transaction Matching: How SAP Solution Extension by BlackLine Solutions Enhance SAP Innovations
- SAP Intercompany Financial Hub by BlackLine and SAP S/4HANA Intercompany Matching & Reconciliation, How they work together
- Managing Financial Close Tasks: An Ideal Combination of SAP Solutions
- How SAP Solutions Enable Stronger Controls and Compliance for Finance
Check out the SAP S/4HANA Finance Reasons to Move on demand webinar series
https://www.sap.com/move-finance
There are specific deep dive session for SAP Solution Extensions by BlackLine
Register for “Establish Trust Across the Financial Close” to gain access to
Create More Efficient, Transparent, Trusted Accounting Processes: SAP Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine
Bring Governance and Automation to Your Intercompany Processes: SAP Intercompany Financial Hub by BlackLine
Nice Post Elizabeth though I visited late
Just want to ask what if we are moving from ECC to S4 and using Account reconciliation render by Blackline previously in ECC
because in order to import history to new accounts in Blackline need to use Account import but it only support one to one account mapping of old ECC and new S4 and just imagine while migrating from ECC to S4 either some accounts are merged into 1 account or split into several
regards
Raunak Bhatia
Hi Raunak,
The 1:1 scenario is true to an extent. However, there are some other ways to reference the legacy accounts using additional references fields. I encourage you to reach out to your BL contact and request a discussion with a Solution Architect to understand how other customers have addressed this. Naturally, BL has many customers upgrading, migrating and implementing new ERPs and/or transforming their COAs on a regular basis.
Michael
Hi Michael
thanks for replying
I do have raised the issue with BL and expecting reply at earliest.
But in order to understand, even let say if customer is not migrating his ERP from ECC to S4 but dismantle few G/L account and open new account in place of them for example intercompany transaction are recorded in seperate G/L for each country but after Trading partner functionality these account merge into 2 account only. In this case how the history will be retained of all accounts in 2 account if only one to one mapping is there
Let me know in any case
regards
Raunak