Financial Management Series Blog #1: Series Kick-Off

[KatharinaR]

Welcome to the 2023 Financial Management blog series that will deliver the latest insights into how SAP can help finance teams around the world manage challenges in their record-to-report (R2R) and financial planning and analysis (FP&A) processes!

This is the first of many blogs that will be focused on the finance topics that keep your teams busy all year – you can bookmark this blog and come back to it for links to all the blogs in the series.

While many people think of financial management as a relatively stable administrative function (some might say stagnant!), finance teams over the past years have undergone significant changes:

• creating financial reports in completely virtual team setups


• dealing with waves of mass retirements and “quiet quitting” team downsizing


• meeting evolving, additional, sustainability and non-financial reporting requirements.

Throughout these trials, there are many affected dimensions of core finance - three of which are people, process, and technology. Teams that want to be successful in transforming their finance functions need to analyze each of these areas for change and improvement:

• Do my people have the right skills for the tasks they are doing? Could they be better utilized doing other tasks?


• Are my processes documented? Are they effective and efficient?


• Am I leveraging technology to automate tasks where possible?

Financial management processes with SAP are part of S/4HANA Cloud – through modular, integrated solutions that help finance teams address key requirements.

 

SAPs Financial Management platform

As Bill Gates so eloquently put it, “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Together, let’s explore how SAP’s approach to financial management can bring more efficiency to your people, processes and technology.

Our team will be writing on a variety of financial-management topics – addressing all of your finance team’s top priorities and areas of interest. As all the blogs are published, we will update this blog as an index for easy reference.

Thanks for reading, and we look forward to starting an ongoing conversation with you on these topics!

 

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The series (the list will continue to grow over the coming weeks!):

#2 R2R Automation

#3 Architecture

#4 Intercompany Matching and Reconciliation

#5 A User Experience that Empowers Finance Professionals