Generate an Ad Hoc Report using Advanced Compliance Reporting

This blog post describes how to generate ad hoc reports using SAP S/4HANA Cloud for advanced compliance reporting. Ad hoc reports are non-periodic reports that may be requested by the government authorities or auditors on a non-regular basis. Some ad hoc reports may have a pre-defined, fixed, or recommended format, while others may have to be generated on-demand, based on the auditing requirements.

Let us consider a scenario where an auditor requests for a data dump of the universal journal entries in addition to the data for FI-invoices, sales invoices, and tax items. This type of request is different from standard reports that are requested for an ad hoc time period. Hence, there is not a predefined report in the system that can generate the data requested. In such a scenario, you can prepare an ad hoc report to compile the information that an external auditor needs. This blog post identifies and lists the various steps involved in accomplishing this scenario using advanced compliance reporting.

Prerequisites

You have administrative access to SAP S/4HANA Cloud and have implementation experience on the system. You are also familiar with the implementation of Advanced Compliance Reporting on SAP S/4HANA Cloud.

Authorizations

SAP_BR_ ADMINISTRATOR

SAP_BR_BPC_EXPERT

Implementation

In advanced compliance reports, you can extract ad hoc data by following the implementation guidelines given below:

1. Create a report definition using the Define Compliance Reports app.
   While creating a report definition for your ad hoc data reporting requirements, please ensure that you follow the below points:
   1. • Define the parameters for filtering report data. For example, in the above scenario add relevant parameters for extracting universal journal entries.
      • Define a query to extract data from relevant data sources such as CDS views.
      • Define a document to report the extracted data. Choose the option Add with Query and create the document schema based on the query defined in the previous step. For more information, see Document Definition.
        In your report definition, you can define multiple documents and set them as optional. The optional documents can be removed while generating the report in the Run Compliance Reports app. This ensures that a generic report definition can be used for ad hoc data reporting for multiple auditing requirements.

   Note: The Define Compliance Reports app provides you with an intuitive wizard that takes you through the steps required for creating report definitions. For a complete report definition, you need to assign parameters, queries, schema, document, correspondence definitions, and so on. For more information, see Creating a Report Definition.

2. Create a report category and assign the report definition to the report category. For more information, see Creating a Report Category.
3. Set up your compliance reports using the configuration step Setting Up Your Compliance Reports. You should indicate the report category as ad hoc by selecting the Is-Adhoc checkbox. For more information, see Setting Up Your Compliance Reports.
4. Create reporting tasks in the Run Compliance Reports. As reporting tasks or entry points are not generated automatically for ad hoc reports in the Run Compliance Reports app, you must create your own reporting tasks in the Run Compliance Reports. For more information, see Ad Hoc Reporting.After the task has been created in the Run Compliance Reports app, you can run the report. You may remove the optional documents that are not relevant for specific auditing needs. Running the report may take several minutes. Open it once it’s complete. Under Legal Reporting, you can see which reports are included. You can download these documents, either one at a time, or you can download multiple documents at once. The downloaded documents contain information relevant for audit purposes.

Hence, by following the steps given in this blog post, you can use advanced compliance reporting to generate ad hoc legal documents that can be shared with auditors or government authorities on a non-regular basis. For complete information about advanced compliance reporting, see Advanced Compliance Reporting.