Financial Closing Cockpit (FCC) | The Closing and its Challenges

Financial Closing Cockpit (FCC)

The term ‘fast close’ has never been as talked about as it has in recent years. The conclusion that quicker closing times lead to greater speed, accuracy and compliance, bringing significant cost reductions, has led many managers to put ‘fast closing’ at the top of their agendas.

Some time ago, SAP developed an application called the Financial Closing Cockpit (FCC) to streamline the closing process. The need to accelerate period-end closing is driven by a number of external factors: greater volatility in markets, commodities and equities; a greater focus on risk; an exponential increase in legal regulations; managing stakeholder expectations; and margin pressure. Companies therefore expect more from their financial departments. CFOs are asked to better deliver on financial objectives, which also involves providing better quality information, which is essential for management decisions. And we want this information to be accurate and reliable, clear and agile, but also available as quickly as possible.

The Business Advantages

You may believe that your company does its period-end closing quickly, consistently and accurately. But what you may not know is how many unnecessary resources you use to achieve this. And all too often the option is to add even more features to accelerate closing speed. Yet, over 70% of financial managers do not believe in the accuracy of the reported figures.

The SAP Financial Closing Cockpit solution, together with Central Process Scheduling, by Redwood, enables significant automation of closing processes, thereby eliminating manual tasks and increasing efficiency levels.

The former allows perfect planning of the closing process, including monitoring and execution. A solution like SAP FCC brings benefits for three areas:

Compliance and good governance:

o centralised definition of the closing plan

o serialised for multiple organisational units and closing cycles

o complete audit trail, logging of results and documentation

Closing efficiency:

o automated closing tasks, even in remote systems

o Appowerful and user-friendly application for manual tasks

o collaborative, through approval workflows

Transparency and insight:

o real-time insight into the closing status

o monitoring by the parent company and subsidiaries

o identification and analysis of process improvements

Our Experience

The Milestone teams comprise a group of consultants exclusively dedicated to finance. This expertise is particularly important as various financial solutions naturally contribute to the closing process.

Implementation of SAP FCC aims at organising and sequencing all closing tasks related to a company or the various companies of a Group under a single control tool. To this end, a closing template is defined, which will allow for automated posting of the monthly closing processes in SAP FCC. This will enable closing tasks to be carried out directly in SAP FCC by each of the task managers.

A SAP FCC project usually also includes management of task dependencies and implementation of the strategies for alerts that could be automatically triggered when the status of the various tasks changes. Tasks that can be carried out simultaneously, because they are common to several companies, can also be identified.