Update SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting

Home / News & Blogs / SAP / Update SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting

SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting – latest update offers major improvements.

What is SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting?

Last summer, we already wrote an article about Group Reporting: Group Reporting is SAP’s newest consolidation solution, running on the S/4HANA platform and is available as cloud and ‘on-premise (running on your local server)’ version. Group Reporting is directly working on the financial data in the S/4HANA Finance system and enables live consolidation and reporting, without the need to load the data to another system.

Now, it is time for an update on the developments in the last six months. In this article we discuss the most recent and interesting changes in the last (on-premise) version: 1909.

Release 1909?

For Group Reporting, SAP releases yearly major updates for the on-premise version of the software. Last September, the 1909 version was released, containing major improvements. In the table below, an overview is shown of the improvements of both the 1909 and the preceding 1809 version. It is clearly visible that the developments are significant. In the coming paragraphs, we will discuss some of the most interesting changes:

Advanced IC matching and reconciliation

The intercompany matching and reconciliation has always been, and still is, a time-consuming phase in financial reporting cycles. In Group Reportings 1909 release, considerable improvements have been made in the efficiency for these activities. In the new apps, the following functionality can be found:

  • Real-time matching and reconciliation
  • Automated (IC-) processes
  • Insight in reconciliation using built-in overviews
  • Drill-through up to transaction-level documents
  • Follow-up using automated posting- and matching of documents

Data mapping

In the cloud version of Group Reporting (and later on also the on-premise version), data mappings are available. Using these mappings, non-SAP sources can be mapped to the S/4 Finance tables and data be loaded. Both the data as well as the mapping itself can be loaded into the system, allowing local entities to take responsibility for mapping their local chart-of-accounts (CoA) to the group chart-of-accounts:

  • The source file to be loaded must be a CSV file. The format is industry-standard and is easy to generate for many source-systems.
  • The mapping of the local chart-of-accounts (CoA) to the group chart-of-accounts can be maintained in Excel and loaded into the system.

The import of data from external sources and mapping of dimensions has been standard functionality for many years in most consolidation systems. In Group Reporting, due to the internal S/4 Finance focus, the mapping was still missing. Since version 1909, this functionality-gap was closed by adding the mapping option. This greatly increases the possibilities of using the system for many organizations that have entities on non-SAP source systems.

Matrix consolidation

Traditionally, most organizations consolidate their financial data using a (statutory) group-structure of entities. This consolidation functionality is part of many consolidation-systems. By performing this consolidation, they comply to the statutory reporting requirements. However, more and more organizations would also like to consolidate the same data using additional dimensions, like cost-centres. This requires a matrix consolidation, which is more complex and often not supported by many software solutions. In the latest version, Group Reporting can now perform such a consolidation.

Conclusion

SAP Group Reporting (SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting) has made a big step in its development. This increases the potential of the tool for many organizations. The data mapping makes it much easier to map financial data from source-systems to a group chart-of-accounts for many organizations. As always, we will be following all developments and keep you up-to-date. For more information about SAP Group Reporting or other CPM/EPM software solutions: feel free to contact us. We are happy to help.