How to streamline and accelerate your financial close

The financial closing cycle is one of the key challenges accounting and finance teams face today. This is what a recent study by the worldwide Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) among nearly 2.000 Finance Leaders reports. More than half of the respondents to that survey believes streamlining and accelerating the financial close process will help improve their team’s productivity.

Watch the recording of our webinar with demo and learn how to streamline and accelerate your financial closing process

However, making improvements to the financial closing cycle has proven a hard and challenging task. The financial close is not one process, but consists of many interrelated and often interdependent processes, each with its own stages. This means that for example one bottleneck occurring within your financial close cycle can have a significant impact on the other processes that follow. For example, making late adjustments without notifying the other people involved in the financial closing process will bring along incorrect results. In addition, both process inefficiencies and the lack of process support by your ERP system can cause constraints in the financial closing cycle.

First aid for optimising your financial close

Watch the recording of our webinar with demo How to streamline and accelerate your financial close, which took place on 25 May 2016 and learn how you can improve your financial closing cycle. Together with the financial experts from our business partner FAS AG (who are an independent finance consultancy company, providing support with all finance aspects, transactional activities and financial reporting), we explain the concepts on how to make your closing process more efficient and show you with a hands-on system-demo how the SAP Financial Closing Cockpit supports this process in your ERP-system.

How SAP reduces your financial close costs

The SAP Financial Closing Cockpit is a comprehensive SAP ERP solution for streamlining and speeding up your financial closing cycle while meeting external regulatory requirements and financial reporting standards. Its automation and advanced collaboration features take over many complex, time-consuming tasks (such as accounting entries, accruals, intercompany reconciliations, consolidations and internal controls monitoring) that must be executed on time and in the correct sequence to meet reporting deadlines. Thanks to this and to the full integration with SAP Financials (SAP FI), the SAP Financial Closing Cockpit reduces financial closing cycle costs and resource demands.