Newsbyte: SAP Helps Finance Leaders Run Best-in-Class Close and Reporting Processes

WALLDORF, Germany, May 22, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced new innovations to its line-of-business finance offerings that aim to improve processes used to conduct the financial close and external reporting. Enhancements to the SAP® Disclosure Management application and SAP® Financial Closing cockpit are intended to deliver increased process efficiency, greater accuracy as well as savings in cost and time.

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Increased scrutiny from stakeholders, including regulatory organizations and shareholders, has put more pressure on companies to produce fast and efficient financial closings, with accurate and reliable statements and reports. Many companies still rely on manual processes to conduct the financial close and collect, consolidate, edit and generate statements and reports. These manual processes increase the risk of inconsistencies.

According to Mike Willis, partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, "The ability to fully realize reporting benefits depends on how comprehensively professionals consider the tool's implications for their process and control enhancements."

New enhancements to SAP Disclosure Management address critical capabilities such as EDGAR HTML, which U.S. companies must file with the SEC. The application helps companies reduce the time, risk and cost of regulatory disclosures by managing the production, filing and publication of financial statements and reports. It also enables finance departments to manage XBRL submissions, to help ensure a comprehensive audit trail and ensuring the consistency of data across reports.

The latest release of SAP Financial Closing cockpit aims to deliver stronger governance, increased efficiency, better insight and faster execution of the financial close process. SAP Financial Closing is a graphical application that helps accelerate the entity financial closing cycle by standardizing and automating the process. It also gives finance professionals greater ability to monitor, control and analyze the financial closing cycle. Additionally, it aims to help companies record closing tasks for full audit support.

"SAP gives CFOs the visibility to lead with a 360-degree view of their organizations so they can drive financial excellence," said Martin Naraschewski, vice president, Finance Solutions, SAP. "Increasingly stringent compliance regulations and the expanding adoption of financial reporting standards are driving greater financial accountability and internal controls. SAP provides finance professional better insight so that they can develop strategies for increasing total shareholder value, maintaining external and internal confidence by improving finance efficiency."

The new enhancements to SAP Disclosure Management are generally available. The latest version of SAP Financial Closing cockpit is currently available via the SAP® Ramp-Up program with general availability expected in October 2012.

Examine how current manual report assembly and review processes can be enhanced through effective implementation of disclosure management applications by reading the whitepaper "Disclosure Management: Streamlining the Last Mile."

For more information on SAP solutions for finance and to learn how SAP helps CFOs and finance professionals transform their businesses, visit www.sapcfo.com and the SAP Newsroom. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

Media Contacts:
Susan Miller, SAP, +1 (610) 661-9225, [email protected], EDT
Jeff Shadid, Burson-Marsteller, +1 (214) 224-8419, [email protected], CDT

SOURCE SAP AG