SAP FC - Financial Consolidation (BO-FC)
SAP Financial Consolidation (also known by the abbreviations SAP FC, SAP BOFC or SAP BFC) is part of SAP's consolidation suite, SAP Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) Solutions, along with SAP ECCS, SEM-BCS and SAP BPC. This product originated in the 1990s from the French company Cartesis and was implemented worldwide under the name Cartesis ES Magnitude. With the takeover by the BusinessObjects group, which in turn was acquired by SAP in 2007, the software became part of their product range. Since then, it has been continuously developed to provide customers with a close accelerating, fully integrated solution from one data model for actual reporting and planning, consolidation and reporting.
Consolidation at the click of a mouse
All over the world, groups of various sizes use the advantages of automatic financial statement preparation for their external accounting as well as their internal management reporting. Instead of starting each consolidation step individually, most process steps in SAP FC, including currency translation, IC elimination and consolidation of investments, are executed with a single mouse click.
The software is installed separately on a server and can be set up directly on SAP HANA. This enables - in addition to BOFC's own reporting - all HANA-enabled SAP front-end tools to provide real-time reporting of consolidated data. Alternatively, SAP FC can be run on an MS SQL or ORACLE database. In this case, SAP Financial Information Management (FIM) is used for integration with SAP Business Warehouse.
Your advantage
Transparency throughout the entire closing process: Audit track across all reported financial data, additional entries and consolidation issues.
Booking rules: The rule-based construction kit integrated into the software enables extremely flexible processing logic for various posting issues.
Simulations: Simulations of various kinds (price changes, consolidation group or even the processing logic itself) can be implemented quickly without hindering the actual closing process.
Ease of use: Master data management, user management, and processing logics within data reporting and consolidation can be easily learned and adapted by non-IT users.
Support in case of misstatement: validations of the reported data and accounting documents are incl. Formula syntax and control description are clearly presented and enable the user to make quick corrections by jumping directly to the respective input mask.
Fast implementation: SAP provides up-to-date IFRS- and US Gaap-compliant starter kits (including special kits for the banking and insurance industries), which are adapted by the installing companies to their own needs.
Support of the xBRL reporting format
Upstream, accelerated IC reconciliation: Decentralized, upstream automatic intercompany reconciliation by means of simultaneous currency translation with extensive commenting options and time stamps, so that the various group partners are informed to the maximum extent possible about the IC-relevant accounting issues of their partners and differences can be resolved more quickly. Streamlined, clear reporting of IC issues.
Monitoring of the closing process: At a glance, the status for individual companies incl. the closing process can be checked. the number of errors still to be processed can be queried
Legal and management reporting + forecast and planning: In addition to actual reporting, the solution also supports planning processes across multiple periods and fiscal years.
Summary
SAP FC is particularly suitable for customers who in the future will rely directly on SAP HANA for data storage, processing and reporting.
Here, the software offers a fully integrated, fast-paced and yet maximally flexible consolidation solution that should leave no customer wish unfulfilled. Even customers with an underlying SAP BW who want to report their consolidated data via this should not close their minds to the advantages of SAP FC from the outset. However, since the consolidated data must first be transferred to SAP BW using SAP FIM, there is double data storage here, which can lead to time-related differences. In addition, unlike SAP SEM-BCS, a separate license is required.
Last but not least, SAP FC is also aimed at all companies that have not yet relied on the SAP Business Warehouse or SAP 4HANA, as it does not require a BW system due to its attachment to alternative databases and its own reporting.