Finance Teams Struggle with Predictive Analytics and Real-Time Insights, SAP Study Reveals

91% of CFOs say finance teams need to provide more forward-looking, predictive analytics and <12% say finance teams can respond in real-time to information requests according to an SAP Performance Benchmarking study.

In today’s digital business, speed and data are the keys to staying competitive. Let’s take financial close for instance, according to SAP Value Engineering top quartile performing companies achieve financial close to 26% fewer days than their peers.

This is crucial in many ways because following below reasons:

Stakeholders need visibility into financial statements. These deadlines are not negotiable for public companies and hence can affect share value and confidence of the investor
If the time taken to close books are delayed it exposes inefficiencies in the finance process due to a non-standardized, and manual process
Management lack insight into profitability if there is a delay in closing the books. This, in turn, postpones important business decisions in an environment that require real-time analytics.

An early adopter of S/4 HANA Finance software, an Insurance Group from Zurich reported1000 times faster reporting from 15 minutes to 1 second. How is that a game-changer you may ask?

When 15 minutes is added to each step in the close process the result is not in minutes and hours but in days. The Universal Journal (ACDOCA) significantly modifies how transactional data is stored for financial reporting and this makes it feasible to get all the dimensions required for internal and external reporting.

The universal journal combines reporting dimensions from separate applications: General Ledger, Profitability Analysis, Controlling, Asset Accounting and Material Ledger to provide a unified structure for reporting that includes all relevant analytics.

There is complete flexibility in reporting without pre-defined aggregates and no data replication with real-time access to the universal journal. In the single source of truth concept in the universal journal, instead of looking at data sets in multiple applications we are looking at different aggregations of the same data set.