In today’s fast-paced business landscape, organizations need a robust, yet flexible financial management system to help them streamline their core financial processes, maximize accounting management functions, and gain better insight into their SAP business operations.
The solution? SAP Accounting software.
From General Ledger Accounting to Accounts Payable/Receivable, Asset Accounting, Financial Reporting, and more, the SAP Accounting system helps companies unlock their potential for improved efficiency and informed decision-making and enables them to maintain compliance with financial reporting requirements over time.
This article will discuss the key components and capabilities of the SAP Accounting system, as well as where our team of expert SAP consultants can come in to help keep your project on track and make the most of your SAP investment in the long run.
Read on to learn more!
What is SAP Accounting Software?
The SAP Accounting System is a fully-integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that provides comprehensive financial management capabilities for organizations of all sizes and industries. It facilitates various accounting functions, including general ledger accounting, accounts payable/receivable, asset accounting, financial reporting, controlling, and more.
With SAP Accounting modules, users are enabled to streamline their core finance and accounting processes, leverage real-time insights for more informed decisions, and support more efficient financial data management and reporting across teams.
Key Components of Accounting in SAP
When it comes to managing your data more reliably and making better decisions across your organization, efficient accounting and financial close solutions can make all the difference. Luckily for you, SAP provides an integrated system that connects all the necessary SAP financial system processes in the same place.
Here are the main components of the SAP Accounting system and their key capabilities…
1) Central Finance
The SAP Central Finance component provides the tools needed for users to connect their SAP systems and non-SAP systems together in the same place, making it easier to execute transactions, build functional reports, and leverage customized deployment features to accelerate user adoption and improve return on investment (ROI).
This component also enables a phased implementation of SAP S/4HANA to help companies centralize their financial data management and reporting functions to avoid system disruption and scale SAP business processes to remain competitive in the industry.
2) Group Reporting
The Group Reporting component offers a single source of truth for all group and operational data and specialized drill-down features that simplify reporting functions to achieve better performance monitoring and identify areas of improvement before they become major issues.
And, with integrations that connect it to S/4HANA, the Group Reporting function makes it easier to collaborate on inter-company reconciliation processes and facilitate more innovative reporting functionality across the board.
3) Financial Close
With pre-built closing templates and automated closing routines, the Financial Close component allows companies to increase the speed and efficiency of their financial close processes, reuse close templates, and execute closing transaction jobs more effectively across the entire SAP system.
The SAP Financial Close function also provides functional self-service access to closing transactions to achieve real-time insight into core financial closing processes and ensure requirements for regulatory disclosure mandates are met, no matter what.
4) Real Estate Management
SAP’s Real Estate Management component offers location, space, and contract management capabilities that simplify real estate objects, provide a centralized data source for a comprehensive real estate portfolio, and manage lease-in/out, customer, and vendor contracts.
With this component, SAP users are enabled to centralize their financial business operations and integrate asset management, real estate controlling, and planning functions across teams. This way, users can plan, control, and optimize new developments and maintain the property they already own with greater accuracy and efficiency.
5) Account Substantiation
The Account Substantiation component allows companies to unify their people, processes, and technology in one place, making it easier to support continuous accounting processes, automate labor-intensive tasks, and improve compliance with regulatory requirements.
This way, companies can ensure their workflows are controlled efficiently and their employees have the tools needed to support and optimize ongoing business processes and strategies.
And, with core integrations between the SAP ERP and S/4HANA systems, users have the ability to bridge system complexities with ease, streamline reconciliation processes, and leverage automation features to speed up financial closings.
6) Inter-Company Management
The centralized inter-company processing features in the Inter-Company Management component make it easier for businesses to initiate the creation of transactions across teams and facilitate inter-company trading relationships for more efficient management processes.
This component also provides automated matching tools and integration capabilities to connect and streamline settlement balance information in one place, improve data integrity and visibility across the organization, and leverage bilateral netting features to reduce the amount of transactions required for accurate settlement.
Core Features Included in SAP Accounting
SAP Accounting modules help companies automate their most important financial management and accounting functions, including creating accurate balance sheets, managing assets and cost controls, and maintaining profit and loss statements across the board.
Let’s take a closer look at a few of the most important features of the SAP Accounting system…
SAP General Ledger Accounting
The SAP Accounting solution provides features that make it easier for companies to manage general ledger entries and leverage real-time assessment tools to analyze different cost accounting areas across the organization.
Users can leverage SAP General Ledger accounts to generate more accurate financial statements, improve internal and external reporting functions, and manage organizational accounts more efficiently and effectively.
SAP Bank Accounting
The SAP Bank Accounting module allows users to handle all of their most important financial processes, including cash balance management, ingoing/outgoing payments, bank master data management, and other accounting tasks, in one comprehensive solution.
And, as a sub-module within SAP Financial Accounting software, financial managers and other accounting personnel can initiate, oversee, manage, and optimize accounting transactions with greater accuracy and efficiency across the board.
SAP Accounts Payable/Receivable
With the Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable features included in SAP Accounting software, users are enabled to record data related to customer accounts that are owed to the company and expense accounts for vendors that the company owes.
This feature makes it easier for companies to keep up with their inbound and outbound account balances, create more accurate balance sheets, and ensure reliable account statements for the company itself and its customers.
SAP Asset Accounting
The SAP Asset Accounting module provides functional tools that simplify management processes for a company’s fixed assets. This module also acts as a subsidiary ledger to SAP General Ledger functions, making it easier to connect financial transactions across business units and improve SAP Accounting functions across the board.
With better data visibility and data-driven decisions, financial managers and other team members are enabled to supervise assets more efficiently and oversee asset management processes for long-term, company-owned assets, including property, plant, and equipment (PPE) assets.
SAP Funds Management
SAP Funds Management capabilities support all tasks related to planning, creating, monitoring, and optimizing company budgets, including revenue calculations, expenditure management, and incoming and outgoing payments.
The Funds Management module enables SAP users to better understand the funds available to complete specific projects or tasks, where the funds come from, and how they are intended to be used, making it easier to maintain budgets and minimize overruns over time.
How Can We Help?
Whether you’re implementing SAP Accounting software for the first time or just leveraging integrations to improve financial data management and reporting functions across your organization, Surety Systems is here to help.
Our team of senior-level SAP consultants has the technical skills and functional expertise needed to help you manage all your finance and accounting processes in one SAP business solution and maximize efficiency across the board.
Getting Started with Us
Interested in learning where our team of expert SAP consultants can fit in your organization?
Ready to start optimizing your financial management processes with the SAP Financial Accounting module, but don’t know where to begin?
Contact us today for more information about our SAP consulting services!
