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SAP Group Reporting Preparation Ledger (GRPL) is a new capability within SAP S/4 and SAP Group Reporting where all postings in Accounting Ledger (which is a Group Reporting Preparation Ledger Posting) are posted with Group Reporting attributes. Additional attributes fields in the Universal Journal are used to tag accounting entries with these consolidation attributes, for example, consolidation unit, partner unit, FS item (consolidation chart-of-accounts), subitem, etc., all derived via substitution during accounting posting. This functionality was first released in S/4 Cloud Release 2202 and S/4 OP Release 2021 FPS1, with enhancements in each subsequent release.

While SAP Group Reporting is now a proven consolidation and reporting solution, adoption of SAP Group Reporting lags adoption of SAP S/4 ERP (and SAP S/4 finance). Many customers continue to use a 3rd party consolidation system. In many finance organizations the Corporate Controller group and external reporting finance personnel do not use SAP finance and may not ever log in to SAP finance. Their world and functional area are completely within these 3rd party reporting systems, custom applications and databases built to meet their requirements. They may not even understand SAP master data structures such as profit center, cost center and WBS elements.

For SAP S/4 customers who run on a single instance or run the bulk of their business on SAP S/4 there is a unique use case for SAP GRPL. GRPL can be used to tag the SAP Universal Journal and detail account records with the financial elements they use in their 3rd party consolidation system. Every 3rd party consolidation system has a similar concept and construct to consolidation unit (entity) and FS item (chart-of-accounts). By leveraging SAP GRPL there is tremendous value to finance organizations and IT even if they continue to use the 3rd party consolidation solution in the short term.

Value to Finance includes:

  • The ability to drill back to detail transaction data in SAP based on inquiries from their consolidation system (note: SAP configured reports or analytics required)

  • The ability to perform analytics and reporting against SAP data using constructs and terminology they are familiar with

  • The ability to see a “snap-shot” of consolidation data in an S/4 report or analytic BEFORE pushing to the consolidation system, or at any point in the close process


Value to IT includes:

  • Simplifying the extract, transform, load (ETL) process to extract data from SAP S/4 to feed their 3rd party consolidation system

  • Ability to generate reports and queries in S/4 to validate data transformation and data feeds to the 3rd party system


The value is very significant and can likely justify licensing and implementing GRPL even if there are no plans to convert to SAP Group Reporting (GR) as the consolidation system. (Note: SAP GRPL requires licensing of SAP Group Reporting). There is the added benefit that customers may develop GR models and versions for new scenarios (for example, a new management reporting view), instead of immediately reverting to the 3rd party consolidation system. Longer term exposure to GR will hopefully lead to full adoption of GR and replacement of the 3rd party consolidation system, as the finance team learns and sees the value of “real-time” consolidation, gets comfortable with the breadth of the functionality in GR and see the value of elimination of external ETL. The ability for finance to use SAP data will expose the finance team to SAP S/4 finance constructs and over time have them become more familiar with SAP S/4 finance terminology.

For more information on SAP GRPL there is documentation in Help.SAP.com, as well as a white paper on the details of the mapping capabilities (links below).

Additional information can be found in Help.SAP.com at https://help.sap.com/docs/SAP_S4HANA_ON-PREMISE/4ebf1502064b406c964b0911adfb3f01/115b33fe75cc49dbb14...

And in a detailed document posted on SAP.com at https://www.sap.com/documents/2023/03/feef4696-657e-0010-bca6-c68f7e60039b.html

 
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