Increased Efficiency in Reporting Data Entry and Account Reconciliation for Month, Quarter, and Year-End Closing
In every closing phase, groups face the challenge of reconciling accounts between the charts of accounts belonging to the group and its subsidiaries. The most frequent problem here is that different charts of accounts, transaction types, trading partners and so on lead to incorrect postings or inconsistencies. As a result of this, manual corrections are often necessary, incurring considerable effort in terms of time and costs. To stem possible error sources and to support the reconciliation process, companies usually use Microsoft® Excel templates. However, a serious disadvantage of this solution approach is that – because the SAP® SEM-BCS chart of accounts is not integrated in Excel – changes result in duplicate maintenance work and the changed Excel files have to be distributed throughout the group.
Entry with cundus accountMapping
cundus accountMapping is seamlessly integrated with SAP® SEM-BCS and other consolidation systems. It supports the reconciliation of charts of accounts between the group’s head office and its subsidiaries with workflow controlling and automated mappings. To a large extent, this results in accelerated creation and publishing of the consolidated financial statements. On average, with cundus accountMapping you can expect a time saving of one day for each subsidiary, which leads to enormous cost savings for groups with many individual companies. By using cundus accountMapping you obtain complete documentation, which is suitable for external auditors, of the transmissions of all local data to the group consolidation chart of accounts.
- Data acquisition process with cundus accountMapping
Key features of cundus accountMapping
- On average, a time saving of one day per subsidiary and data entry
- Seamless BCS integration with access to all master data, centrally maintained in BCS
- Audit-compliant through change history
- Central application management with de-centralized entry in the subsidiaries
- High application availability
- Central status tracking and monitoring
- Very fast application implementation
- Low training requirement through intuitive user interface with workflow
- Detailed logging
- Connection of various upstream systems from the subsidiaries
Advantages at Group Level
The use of cundus accountMapping has many advantages for controlling the entry and reconciliation process.
Comprehensive logging and change history for all work steps guarantees a high degree of transparency. As a result, the reporting data is audit-compliant and changes are visible for external auditors. This means that all content such as mappings, reclassifications, and enrichments remain verifiable after a period has been closed.
Furthermore, the entire reconciliation process can be monitored by a status monitor. The group’s accounting department can intervene in the event of problems with the entry process, for example to temporarily lock accounts and transaction types.
Advantages for Subsidiaries
The use of cundus accountMapping reduces and also optimizes the entry of reporting data in the local companies. To save time in the entry process, mappings, reclassifications, and enrichments from previous periods, other versions, and companies can be transferred. Tight integration with BCS enables subsidiaries to perform mappings based on the BCS account assignment categories. This contributes considerably to ensuring the quality of the data, which ultimately results in additional time savings through reduced corrective measures.
Furthermore, from the subsidiaries’ perspective, it is possible to load reporting data files with different structures from several upstream systems in the import process. The advantage of this is that no modifications have to be made in the subsidiaries’ source systems for creating reporting data. cundus accountMapping’s import function allows different import structures to be defined independently. Structures can be defined for each unit and version. Among other things, this has the advantage that new subsidiaries can be integrated more quickly without them having to change their systems.
One the data has been loaded, the imported data is automatically and syntactically validated to curtail possible errors or inconsistencies. Only then are the mapping, the reclassification, and the enrichment of the accounts initiated. Here, too, cundus accountMapping shows its advantages in terms of flexibility and time saving for the local companies. On the one hand, the account allocation, reclassification and enrichment can be freely selected; on the other, it is also possible to transfer the allocations from other periods, units, or versions. Before an export file is created for the BCS, the enriched data in cundus accountMapping is verified based on the associated BCS validations. In turn, these measures contribute considerably to the reduction of possible errors.
Benefits for the IT Department
No additional server has to be purchased or administrated to implement cundus accountMap-ping. The application merely requires an SAP® NetWeaver portal as its basis. Even when the application is accessed, no requirements are placed on the clients in terms of hardware or soft-ware. Users can carry out the entire entry and control process using a Web browser.
Little maintenance effort is required due to central application administration. SAP® SEM-BCS user profiles already exist from user maintenance, for example, and are managed with the usual transactions. Problem handling or support services can be performed easily by the IT user department as central access to each individual company is possible.
BCS-Integration
- cundus accountMapping Architecture
The direct connection of cundus accountMapping with SAP® SEM-BCS or other consolidation systems means that the accounts, account assignment categories, and additional master data such as transaction types, business units, authorizations and so on are transferred from these systems. This increases data quality on the one hand, and reduces maintenance effort on the other, as changes to the previously named content only have to be made in the central consolidation system. Furthermore, cundus accountMapping can be used in parallel for different BCS versions, periods, and units.
