SAP Business Planning and Consolidation Reviews

My main use case for SAP Business Planning and Consolidation is for the consolidation of financial statements on a monthly basis and review and publishing of the results, as I used it for my previous organization, Quest Corp Limited, which had a subsidiary of 37 entities, all Indian entities.

A specific example of how I used SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for consolidation or publishing results is when we were using XCCS, which is based on SAP financial control planning and consolidation, to help us consolidate all the subsidiaries into one single system, enabling us to check the results, verify the numbers, and drill down into possible levels of breakdowns of the numbers.

In SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, we always have T-Codes for the GLs, which are added to the higher levels of the grouping, so when we use it, we can drill down into the T-Code levels of breaking up the numbers, identifying which entity the number belongs to and what caused the impact at the group level.

SAP Business Planning and Consolidation has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to move away from using Excel for consolidation, as the books of accounts from multiple entities were in different accounting software, making it very difficult to consolidate and map everything into one chart of accounts for consolidation, with manual intervention for the IC eliminations and drill down into further numbers not being possible.

Since we implemented SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, our chart of accounts is consistent, we better understand the businesses, and we make everything as comparable and consistent.

After switching to SAP Business Planning and Consolidation, we have achieved specific outcomes such as reduced manual intervention, which led to reduced errors, time saved, and increased confidence in the numbers that we presented.

The best features SAP Business Planning and Consolidation offers include the ability to see all the entities adding up to these numbers at a click of a button, which avoids manual intervention, with all eliminations automated and each intercompany GL connected, ensuring posting in both sets of books of accounts, resulting in a completed balance sheet with no variances.

Out of those features, the IC eliminations and the simultaneous accounting in both books of accounts, along with the drill down of the numbers to the possible T-Code level and the consolidation of all the subsidiaries, has had the biggest impact for me.

SAP Business Planning and Consolidation can be improved by implementing further checks on the T-Codes to make them much more user-friendly.

I have used SAP Business Planning and Consolidation for four years.

We use a consultant, Archi Private Limited, who takes care of our private cloud deployment.

Regarding SAP Business Planning and Consolidation's AI capabilities, I believe its governance and security are compliant with local laws, and I do not see any issues.

In terms of accuracy and reliability of output, the results from SAP Business Planning and Consolidation are reliable and accurate as there is no manual intervention, everything is properly mapped and linked to the respective subsidiaries, and we can see a drill down into each level of the subsidiaries or entities.

My advice for others looking into using SAP Business Planning and Consolidation is that it is good for large scale operations, and it is reliable and accurate.

I would rate SAP Business Planning and Consolidation a nine out of ten.

In my opinion, what makes this product so valuable is a simple thing; how powerful and flexible it is for carrying out the consolidation process.

Up to the implementation of the application, it used to take weeks to the consolidation team to carry out the entire, monthly, financial consolidation, now it takes them just one or two days to perform the entire process.

The tool is highly customizable and, apart from the consolidation and elimination process itself, it gives you a wide range of possibilities to build reports and format them in whatever way you like.

It has hugely reduced  the amount of time dedicated to perform the financial consolidation of the group. The group is composed by 100 companies, and this process is key to maintain the wellbeing of it. 

Technically, as the database of the product that we use is SAP HANA, the performance is quite good, even though we're dealing with quite a few million of records.

There are no tutorials or wizards inside the tool, and I think they would be very useful sometimes. Having said that, I suspect that it is one of the SAP's strategies, because they get a lot of money from SAP training and don't want people learning who to work with their products on their own.

There is another thing as well which could be improved. In my view, it is necessary to introduce another way to create reports apart from MS Excel, and it must be a way that can be exploited through mobile devices as well.

We've had no issues deploying it.

It's a robust solution with no issues.

It's scaled for our needs.

I think it is now robust and fast, especially if you have HANA as database. It wasn't as robust in previous versions, mainly in versions < 10.0.

Another good thing is that financial users are quite accustomed to the naming it uses, and being able to use MS Excel as the platform to build the reports, is, in my opinion, a great idea for those kind of users.