A consistent and high-quality data basis for the individual financial statements is essential for successful consolidated financial statements. As a rule, not all companies within a group use a uniform ERP system, but different software solutions. This leads to a considerable amount of effort to prepare the data from the various source systems consistently so that it can be used by the group accountants without additional follow-up work. The central question of data provision is how such a data basis can be created effectively and with little effort.

SAP’s strategic consolidation solution, S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting (GR), does not have an integrated data collection option that is reminiscent of a classic reporting package for an individual company. SAP offers an additional application called Group Reporting Data Collection (GRDC) for this purpose. In the community, this is often referred to as the Data Collection App. This is a pure cloud application that is integrated into the Fiori interface and provides web-based data collection and simple mapping rules.

Especially for customers who are using BW/4HANA and want to wait strategically before switching to the cloud, another MS Excel-integrated data provision scenario opens up at this point thanks to the integration of Group Reporting and SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (BPC).

BPC is a fully-fledged planning and consolidation tool that makes it possible to create Excel-based data entry masks that store the figures in the underlying Business Warehouse (BW).

The BPC is set up as a central data provision platform for Group reporting and is used to consolidate, harmonize and validate all reporting data from the individual companies. The user is individually guided through the data provision activities via a guided process. Automated controls, the use of a progress status and a dual control principle (owner / reviewer) ensure the appropriate quality of the data.

The process is divided into several sub-steps and enables the integration and direct provision of notification data from the source systems via the Business Warehouse.

Extraction and harmonization of source data in BW

The close integration of the Business Warehouse (BW) with BPC makes it possible to extract and standardize data from the source systems. This involves automatic transfers such as G/L account to group account or company code to company. In addition, initial validations can already be carried out here to identify missing partner indicators or transaction types and correct them in the source system. This step already leads to a drastic improvement in data quality and transparency of data reporting.

Data provision and validation in the BPC

Within the BPC, those responsible in the individual companies are guided through Excel-based reporting packages for data collection. These packages make it possible to record, validate and enrich the reporting data with missing subassignments such as partners, transaction types or functional areas. Extensive commenting functions also make it possible to collect and merge all notes.

Once data entry is complete, the individual companies can carry out an independent and decentralized intercompany reconciliation in order to reconcile open differences in the partner account assignments before consolidation.

Import into Group Reporting

As soon as the data provision of all companies has been completed, the data can be imported into S/4HANA Finance for Group Reporting via an API provided by Group Reporting or a flat file.

SAP has currently set the maintenance horizon for the current BPC under BW/4HANA to 2040.

You can find more information here…