SAP BPC, introduction:

The Planning and consolidation play a fundamental role in the financial management of a company. Imagine having the power to chart precise financial paths and make informed strategic decisions. Planning, by bringing to life detailed budgets and forecasts, acts as a beacon that guides business operations and strategies. On the other hand, consolidation becomes the master in combining financial data from different areas of the organization, thus painting a true picture of the overall financial health.

Planning involves creating detailed budgets and forecasts that guide both operational and strategic activities. This enables the company to set realistic financial goals and make decisions supported by solid information. For its part, consolidation consists of collecting and unifying financial data from various entities or divisions of the company into coherent consolidated financial statements. This process provides an accurate view of the overall financial health of the organization. and is essential for informing investors, regulators and stakeholders about its overall performance.

Planning and consolidation work together to enable companies to manage their resources effectively, optimize their performance, and meet financial reporting requirements.

But, What is the role of SAP BPC in this exciting journey and how is it applied in large companies?

SAP BPC is a SAP tool that large companies implement in their systems due to its ability to plan and consolidate accounts, as its name suggests, “Business Planning and Consolidation”. One of the most notable aspects is its ability to process and load data faster than its competitors, making it an agile and easy-to-use tool. In addition, its platform, which differs from the standard SAP platform, is very user-friendly and intuitive.

What does budgeting entail?

Budgeting gives us the ability to plan future income, expenses and capital expenditures, unlike SAP ERP, which works mainly with transactions already accounted for in the past. The main function of budgeting is budget control, which allows us to evaluate whether we are meeting the objectives planned for the future, compared to previous years. These plans are usually based on historical data.

SAP BPC offers several options to carry out this planning, listed below:

– Budgeting: One-year planning, allowing users to create a detailed budget.

– Rolling Forecasting: Short-term planning, no more than one year of forecast.

– Strategic plan: Long-term planning, spanning 3 to 5 years.

SAP BPC offers large consulting firms the ability to carry out large-scale financial consolidation. Taking the Ibex35 companies as an example, these organizations, although they operate as a single commercial entity, are internally composed of numerous companies that constantly exchange goods and services. Due to this, the exchange between companies in the same group is treated differently from sales or purchases to external customers. To present the financial statements of Payments and Expenses or the Annual Balance Sheet, it is necessary to carry out a prior financial consolidation to separate and distinguish intercompany sales from normal sales.

Business Process

Both financial planning and consolidation require the use of Business Process Flows (BPF), a SAP BPC feature that ensures a specific order in the process flow. SAP consultants must understand business processes to establish GMPs. This stage is fundamental, since it organizes each process sequentially. Additionally, in this sequential process, a Key User must approve each step completed by the user, or even stop the process if any errors are detected so that the user can correct them.

Where can we see financial planning and consolidation reports?

SAP has a visualization program integrated into Excel called Analysis for Office, commonly known as AFO. This visualization program, connected to SAP databases, allows us to perform queries known as “Query”. In these queries, we can filter by different fields such as Company, date, process or version. Depending on the filters applied, the data will change according to what the user requests.