Five SAP Reporting Best Practices for a Faster Month-End Close

SAP-powered finance teams juggle tight budgets, limited resources, and market uncertainty. They also face an inevitable reality: month-end close takes days or weeks when you’re waiting on IT or consultants to pull reports from SAP’s complex infrastructure. What if you could streamline the process, empower your team, and cut closing time dramatically?

Here are five reporting best practices for a faster month-end close.

1. Cut Through SAP Complexity

For every finance team, month-end close looms large. Although it’s a recurring process, closing the books requires significant time. According to the SAP edition of insightsoftware and Hanover Research’s latest Finance Team Trends Report, nearly two-thirds (62%) of organizations allocate at least 30 hours monthly to top-level reporting tasks. Specifically, tax return preparation (59% spending over 30 hours), financial statement creation (62% spending over 30 hours), and financial system maintenance (60% spending over 30 hours) are particularly time-consuming. This substantial time investment is often attributed to the challenges of managing and reconciling data from multiple sources to ensure reporting accuracy. 

SAP is a comprehensive ERP that provides reporting capabilities to cover many of these tasks, but teams struggle with its complex ecosystem. For example, SAP teams frequently need to query SAP data to complete routine reports and answer ad-hoc questions.  

To accelerate month-end close, seek out technology that cuts through SAP’s complexity to simplify reporting and offer flexible layouts. Your team can benefit from features like pre-built Excel formulas to create your own live, refreshable and drillable reports when using SAP Business Suite (ECC) and S/4HANA. Additionally, take steps to standardize and reuse report templates. Standardizing SAP-connected templates for recurring reports like P&L, balance sheet, and variance analysis cuts prep time while reducing reconciliation work. 

2. Adopt a Continuous Close Mindset

The end of the month looms heavily on finance teams. Rather than packing in every step at the end of the month, consider performing ongoing reconciliations and variance checks throughout the month. This spreads out the workload and means fewer surprises when the period closes.

To further streamline, run essential processes in parallel. Rather than taking on processes one after the other, make the most of your SAP ERP by running key processes like accounts payable, accounts receivable, and general ledger tasks in parallel. This reduces bottlenecks while reducing the time it takes to close every month.

3. Embrace Process Automation

Even with the help of SAP’s native reporting tools, SAP teams still conduct a variety of crucial month-end tasks manually. Our research shows that tasks such as account reconciliation (31%), ad-hoc custom reports (31%), or audit preparation/support (30%) are still conducted manually. The lack of automation makes these key processes even more time-consuming while introducing the potential for human error.

The same research shows that re-creating reports and transferring information between systems takes up a massive amount of time. At least three-quarters (74%) of SAP users dedicate a minimum of five to six hours each week to re-creating financial reports, equating to up to 24 hours a month or nearly 300 hours per year. This inefficiency highlights the need to streamline processes and improve data management. With so much manual work, finance teams often feel stress when prepping data and reports.

By automating repetitive, manual tasks such as report generation and data integration, finance teams can significantly reduce operational costs, improve data accuracy, and free up valuable time for strategic analysis. With more time, your team can dive deep into your data, including researching trends that impact your organization the most. When looking to automate your month-end close processes, seek out a solution with built-in features to cover tasks like no-code custom report generation, account reconciliation, and audit support.

4. Reduce IT Dependency

To fulfill month-end close tasks, finance and IT teams find they often work closely together. On top of maintaining an organization’s tech infrastructure, IT is often tasked with generating financial reports that require advanced technical knowledge. Ultimately, IT spends too much time supporting finance teams through month-end close with custom development in SAP. Neither team is happy about it. Our research reveals 76% of SAP-based finance teams feel over-reliant upon IT.

Because of this overdependence, report requests can sit with IT for days or weeks as IT works on other critical tasks. To reduce the burden, finance teams should look for integrated reporting tools that allow them to independently generate their own reports without technical knowledge. This frees up both IT and finance from the deadline crunch. And finance professionals can focus on making better sense of the data.

5. Integrate Planning and Reporting Cycles

The budgeting and planning cycle is an essential but time-consuming task for finance departments. The processes involved in these cycles often involve extensive data gathering, analysis, and coordination among departments. According to our research, 63% of budgeting cycles are five days or longer, and over half (51%) only budget every quarter or less frequently or SAP finance teams.

Effective budgeting and planning are critical for driving business performance, but traditional methods are often hindered by manual processes, data inaccuracies, and rigid timelines. SAP-driven finance users grapple with the challenge of creating accurate forecasts, adapting to rapidly changing market conditions, and fostering collaboration across the organization.

To address these challenges, conduct budgeting and planning cycles more frequently, if possible, alongside close processes. Rolling forecasts and continuous planning are essential components of this approach, allowing organizations to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and make more informed decisions instead of waiting months or a year for an up-to-date budget.

Financial Optimization for SAP from insightsoftware provides finance teams with an end-to-end solution to improve finance processes. With certifications for ECC and S/4HANA, this solution combines real-time, flexible financial reporting with intuitive SAP data entry and transaction posting directly from Microsoft Excel.

With Financial Optimization for SAP, you can:

• Streamline processes for a faster, error-free work environment. The solution bridges the gap between SAP and Excel with refreshable reports that keep your team informed.
• Drive efficiency in reporting by automating manual processes for shorter month-end cycles. With the ability to create ad hoc reports and drill down, you can quickly and get as granular as you need when you analyze financial data.
• Reduce IT dependency with our Excel-based solution and user-friendly tools. You can achieve true self-service by generating custom reports without technical knowledge. And for your recurring month-end reports, Financial Optimization for SAP comes with a library of pre-built reports and automated data uploads to save you—and your IT team—time at the end of the month.

Ready to learn more? Catch our webinar on how SAP finance teams can speed up month-end close.

The post Five SAP Reporting Best Practices for a Faster Month-End Close appeared first on insightsoftware.