How to achieve a high-quality Fast Close in SAP?
A fast and high-quality period-end close is the capability of a company to complete its accounting cycle and close its books accurately and on time.
The best companies accomplish their monthly financial close close in 2 days; the slower ones take more than 15 days. You want to be among the best companies for a number of reasons.
The key challenge of the Fast Close is managing (execution and monitoring) and maintaining a large number of activities across the organization and in some cases across multiple SAP systems within a restricted timeframe. For example, a company with 150 company codes and using more than 4 SAP modules including FICO has to manage more than 33,000 activities. Most companies try to manage the close with the use of Excel spreadsheets but reality shows nobody is on the same page and dealing with the same financial business processes. How can you guarantee accuracy and timing? You probably can't.
Are there alternatives for your financial business processes? Is a fast close possible for this number of worldwide activities?
The answer is a resounding "Yes". By using technology that supports the process of management and maintenance in a flexible, intuitive and accurate way a fast close is at your fingertips.
Why pursue a fast close? There are many reasons to aim for a fast and accurate financial close at the same time:
- Timely availability of accurate management information to support decision making;
- "What you measure is what you get", information should be generated through the same - process to overcome the challenge of "garbage in is garbage out";
- Effective communication to all internal and external stakeholders involved. The financial market will not wait for you to speed up the financial close process;
- Effective use of resources. Use automation to save time and money.
How to achieve a fast and accurate period-end close
Use a single application across your organization that can manage operational and transactional tasks, batch jobs and evidence storage at the same time. The application should support the process owner in optimizing the closing process. The tool should be easy to understand and easy to maintain because today's closing reality is not a fixed situation. Organizations change and people move over time.
Mapping flexibility, the tool needs to reflect your current organization and its financial business processes. Moreover, it should also deal with upcoming changes in an effective manner. Some organizations use shared service centers, others don't and still others are migrating from one structure to another. Mapping also allows freedom on a local level to offer country organizations the ability to add their own activities, for example for tax reasons.
A closing process or project champion should support and improve the actual closing process. First step is to harmonize the closing process and secondly embed-IT in a single application for transparency and management. The third step is to automate recurring activities. This will increase your organization's efficiency and valuable human resources become available for more added value activities.
Controlling your period-end close is one of the most important tasks in managing risk in your organization.
View our Financial Close solution Open PDf here
