SAP S/4 HANA Cloud: What’s There for the Finance Team?

The face of financial planning is taking a drastic turn where organizations across industries are fast realizing that traditional financial-based tools can no longer support the dynamic needs of business, evaluate financial performance and impact, forecast liquidity, perform cost management and profitability analysis, and do so much more. Today’s constantly evolving environment demands a finance team that can act fast, manage compliance and enterprise risk, helps businesses get ahead of challenges, and better prepare for future uncertainty.

The way forward

SAP S/4HANA Cloud empowers finance leaders to act promptly and predict more accurately. This enterprise-ready Cloud ERP helps organizations elevate the finance function to a new role and unifies transactions, analytics, and planning.

The role of finance is shifting, and demands for a business partner are increasing so as a financial leader, you have got your hands full. The business needs you to know what investments to make and which ones to surpass and decide which opportunity should be given the utmost priority. You are the one making sound financial decisions, and plans and guiding the strategies that grow businesses.

But, is it possible to lay analysis and play a strategic role with the same old financial systems you’ve been using for years? It’s time to innovate and kickstart your digital transformation with SAP S/4HANA.

Just imagine the new world of work. What is that like?

• To have AI-driven financial insights and recommendations at the point of decision
• To know financial results and company position in a matter of time
• To have a holistic view of customer financial management from order to cash
• To be able to quickly identify issues that present business and audit risks
• To be able to continuously forecast with real-time and unified financial data
• To close the books in real-time with a high degree of automation and much less effort

For your business to move forward and confidently make game-changing decisions, finance must be willing to transform and always be on the move.

• So instead of choosing and relying on spreadsheets and legacy software, you have intelligent and highly automated finance processes.
• Empowered with AI capabilities with machine learning, you can take all challenges head-on that powers business growth.
• Instead of risking and fearing enterprise risk or cyber security vulnerabilities, you can manage compliance, risks, and controls in business operations to meet regulatory requirements.

Finance leaders can do much more with SAP S/4HANA. They can gain a holistic view of business financial performance and seamlessly conduct legacy trends and variance analyses using prebuilt metrics.

Let’s discuss more how CFOs, heads of FP&A, and corporate controllers across industries are moving to SAP S/4HANA right now.

Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)

CFOs agree that they are increasingly being involved in boardroom discussions supporting business strategy. But they and their FP&A teams are often stuck with legacy systems and manual processes making it arduous to deliver the insights their leadership needs. Now, it is easy to create decision-oriented plans and improve the speed and accuracy of planning and analysis with financial management software. SAP S/4HANA Cloud enables finance leaders and planners to tell the story behind the numbers with in-built business intelligence and dashboards and respond quickly when changes occur.

Risk Management

Risk management is yet another top priority for CFOs and finance planners. However, the intensity and intricacy of fraud schemes continue to overside anti-fraud measures. But where do you begin? Global data volumes continue to grow and to identify red flags you can’t do it all alone with traditional auditing techniques or legacy software.

Finance and audit teams need a more robust and enterprise-ready platform to identify fraud patterns that may usually get undetected. Detecting fraud risk factors and areas susceptible to fraud schemes may seem time-consuming or even inconceivable. It’s not. SAP S/4HANA facilitates ad hoc analyses in just a few clicks. AI-driven ERP such as HANA can help corporate leadership determine what a company’s risk is in a given scenario and mitigate your operational risks from fraud and other non-compliance activities.

Profitability and Cost Management

Make more informed decisions as you understand your most profitable lines of business and, the biggest costs. Easily conduct what-if profitability and cost analysis, run validation reports, combine financial data with operational metrics, calculate complex resource allocations and so much more with SAP S/4HANA Cloud. SAP S/4HANA empowers your business to know which sales division is generating more profits. What are your top revenue drivers? Who are your top opportune customers? S/4HANA dashboard provides a clear picture of key financial drivers such as area of opportunity, net sales, and profit margins.

Cash Management

Reduce the time and effort required to obtain cash information and manage fragmented cash balances easily. Easily sort fragmented data, glean insights, and forecast in real time. Gain insights into available cash, overhead costs, and the causes of variances, and automate manual and redundant tasks, while monitoring all investments and managing compliance, risks, and controls in business operations.

Further, it empowers leaders to understand what cash flows look like and also allows them to drill down into the metrics that the organization needs. You can run bank relationship management, cash positioning and operations, liquidity management, and much more. It also empowers you to know cash balance by subsidiary, country, banking partner, or geography. You can forecast liquidity, analyze your cash position, transfer, and more.

Bottom Line

Time and speed matter where today’s CFOs are making million-dollar decisions now and then.
Organizations that unlock and lead a new paradigm of breakthrough speed by making faster and more informed decisions have an opportunity to generate top-line growth and bottom-line profitability for organizations.

Organizations that transition to SAP S/4HANA will gain a foundation for emerging capabilities – from real-time analytics to the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML). They are able to save man-hours in reporting and analysis, save dollars by avoiding costs, identify fraud and risk faster, analyze profitability and growth, forecast future revenue opportunities, see historical cash flows, and make strategic business decisions faster.

Ready to get started?

Need a partner to discuss and guide you toward taking the next step on your journey? The Uneecops team will help you with the transformational outcomes achievable through SAP S/4HANA and drive change across your finance function. Allow us to introduce you to the game-changing power of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.