SAP Business ByDesign and Financial Consolidation

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My name is Ingrid Macova. I am a Product Manager for the SAP Business ByDesign. My colleagues and I were asked many times how the financial consolidation process works in the SAP Business ByDesign.

This blog post is relevant for companies that are obliged to perform a financial consolidation. As you surely know within the SAP Business By Design there is no Financial Consolidation solution. The SAP Business By Design system prepares data for consolidation. I have seen three main clusters of customers using the SAP Business ByDesign that are facing to financial consolidation process:

• subsidiaries being part of a larger group when consolidation is in place at HQ


• small enterprises with for example 1-3 companies


• medium to large enterprises with 3-50 companies

The SAP Business ByDesign has always focused on a solid preparation of data for financial consolidation purposes. In the SAP Business ByDesign system data is updated according to the requirements for consolidation. The system supports financial consolidation preparation that includes three main processes:

• Affiliated companies are flagged as partner companies. It is important for understanding how the intercompany business processes populate journal entries and the balances.

Partner Companies

• Period End Closing – part of this process is check of trial balance with partner company information.

Period End Closing

Partner Company information is correctly updated in the affected journal entry line items and affected G/L Account.

• Extracting of financial data by creating a run, checking the log for correctness, locking the result to protect it for deletion and assure later traceability by an auditor and finally download of data for final transfer to a consolidation system.

Extracting of Financial Data

LINK to Preparation for Consolidation

 

The SAP Business ByDesign does not have a consolidation solution itself.

 

Financial consolidation solutions

I would like to highlight three typical scenarios or situation I regularly encounter in my conversations with SAP Business ByDesign customers or prospects about the financial consolidation topic:

1. The SAP Business ByDesign implementation is part of a larger business ecosystem. The group is for example running on SAP S/4 or and SAP S/4 Cloud the typical consolidations will be SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation) or SAP S/4 Group reporting.
   Roughly 1/3 of the SAP By Design customers fall into this category.


2. The SAP Business ByDesign implementation is part of a larger business ecosystem. The group has already decided and implemented another consolidation solution (non-SAP). Also in this case the SAP Business ByDesign system feeds after local closing activities are finished regularly into the consolidation system.


3. The customers runs/intends to run all companies in SAP Business ByDesign and requires a basic and fairly simple to setup consolidation solution that meets financial consolidation requirements.

For customers and prospects in this category 3, the SAP BPC or SAP Group Reporting are in many cases too high end or too sophisticated. We were recently evaluating within the SAP partner's community for solutions based on following criteria that could be beneficial for our existing and future customers:
a) SAP technology
b) 100% cloud based
c) commercially and complexity wise viable for the customer that fall into category 3.

 

Partner Solution(s)

Clarivos – Package based on SAC

We would like to draw our implementation partners attention to an attractive consolidation solution provided by the SAP partner Clarivos. The financial consolidation package is:

1. based on SAP Analytics Cloud


2. 100% cloud based


3. build on SAP ByDesign optimized models in SAC and uses reports in SAP ByDesign with data access via ODATA


4. it is complemented by an implementation and go-live practice

For further details I recommend partners to check out offering, the boundary conditions and directly engage with Clarivos. Clarivos has prepared a dedicated page to inform about the solution and how to engage.

LINK: https://www.clarivos.com/planning-consolidation

 

Sapphire - Opal Wave's Cloud Consolidator

Here is another interesting consolidation solution that we would like to introduce to you. This solution is provided by the SAP partner Sapphire. The financial consolidation is:

1. based on SAP Analytics Cloud


2. 100% cloud based


3. The consolidation application source data can easily be integrated into your SAP Business ByDesign system with data access via ODATA - purpose-built, templated solution


4. Implementation and go-live practice provided

LINK: https://www.sapphiresystems.com/what-we-do/solutions/cloud-consolidation