SAP Group Reporting: a new way of compiling consolidated financial statements

Challenge

In a context in which companies are required to complete the consolidation process as quickly as possible, SAP Group Reporting becomes the new spearhead of SAP for the preparation of consolidated financial statements. The Customer, an important Italian Group in the integrated mobility sector, has chosen to adopt the new SAP tool to replace the previous technological tools of the Office suite to consolidate the final and forecast data.

Solution

The Client’s objective was to govern the consolidation process in a structured way by equipping himself with the application that could best support the group also in its long-term vision. For this reason, the choice fell on Group Reporting, the new consolidation tool developed by SAP. Group Reporting is natively integrated into the SAP S/4HANA accounting system from which it inherits personal data, data and, more technically, a HANA Database that guarantees high performance in terms of data processing times.

With Group Reporting, the Group has managed to bring together the preparation of the consolidated financial statements in the final and forecast views in a single tool and repository, integrating the needs of the consolidated, accounting and management control offices. The Group Reporting therefore accepts accounting data present in the Universal Journal table updated in real time and incorporates the management data residing in the SAP Business Planning and Consolidation tool.

The need to standardize the reporting needs of the Group, making the Disclosure process faster and providing the Customer with a more functional management tool than the classic Excel sheet, has found excellent results with Group Reporting: in fact, different versions comparable to each other also thanks to the use of a single group chart of accounts and reports that compare the results of the different views have been foreseen.