SAP Group Reporting: A New Era for Consolidated Financial Reporting

When planning SAP S/4HANA implementation projects, many companies initially neglect the topic of consolidation. We believe this to be a wasted opportunity as it’s advisable to consider this central process from the get-go and plan it into the S/4HANA migration roadmap. Ultimately, action will need to be taken here as part of an implementation project anyway, since the ERP core will be running on a new system after the SAP S/4HANA go-live which generally requires an interim consolidation solution to be in place. With SAP S/4HANA for Group Reporting (SAP Group Reporting), companies capitalize on SAP’s strategic, forward-looking solution, optimally positioning them to tackle the increasingly challenging demands of business in the digital age.

Real Time Consolidated Financial Reporting Directly in the ERP system

Currently, our customers use a host of heterogeneous consolidation tools, including the most popular ones from SAP, such as SAP BPC, SAP SEM-BCS and SAP EC-CS. But their further development, maintenance and support is shortly to end, and SAP has already announced a while ago that it will be positioning SAP Group Reporting as its strategic consolidation solution of the future. It will replace all of SAP’s other legacy solutions and be the only one to continue to be developed on a regular basis beyond 2027. Consequently, companies that switch to SAP Group Reporting are also securing maintenance and support for their consolidation platform over the long term.

In view of the comprehensive integration of SAP Group Reporting into the SAP S/4HANA ecosystem, we believe this to be both a prudent and strategically provident step. The new solution stands for a new era of consolidation: Whereas consolidated financial statements used to be prepared in processes running on dedicated systems, this can now be done directly, in real time, in the operational ERP with immediate access to all necessary voucher data. With data no longer needing to be exported to a separate consolidation solution, system breaks and the associated lost time and degraded data quality are history. Instead, companies establish a centralized financial system with single point of truth, eliminating the need for redundant data storage.

SAP Group Reporting Provides for Transparency

From a functional perspective, SAP Group Reporting offers automated rule- and event-based consolidation of investments and intercompany (IC) elimination as well as management consolidation (matrix consolidation). In addition, customers enjoy the benefits of a fully integrated solution which had usually hitherto eluded them due to their fragmented system landscapes. These include harmonized master data, drill-through functions, integrated reporting including ad-hoc analytics and evaluations, and IC reconciliation down to the transaction level.

With SAP S/4HANA’s permanent IC reconciliation features, preparing consolidated financial statements in SAP Group Reporting becomes a seamless extension to preparing the statements of the individual group companies. This continuous accounting lets companies initiate consolidation runs at any time and prepare any financial reports at the push of a button – group-wide transparency is therefore given at all times. The new solution is therefore not only a leap forward for companies wishing to modernize their IT landscape, but also opens up enormous potential for group management. 

Support in all topics connected with SAP-based consolidation

SAP Group Reporting offers a wide range of options for preparing consolidated financial statements. As a proven expert in intelligent end-to-end processes, valantic supports companies in all topics connected with SAP-based consolidation. Our specialist consultants introduce the various options in detail, support decision-making and design and implement the entire consolidation process.