7 easy ways to drive ROI with SAP Advanced Financial Closing

What is SAP Advanced Financial Closing?

SAP Advanced Financial Closing is a solution that makes it easier for finance teams to plan, orchestrate, and monitor the financial close process across SAP and non-SAP environments. With powerful finance process automation capabilities, it helps you improve governance and compliance, drive efficiency, and gain transparency.

How SAP Advanced Financial Closing improves the financial close process

The financial close is one of the most critical processes in finance because it reflects everything completed during the reporting period. But when finance teams are working across disparate teams, systems, and workflows, it’s a cumbersome undertaking that can take more than ten days to complete. The amount of time a financial close takes can make or break a finance leader’s ability to drive prompt, data-driven decisions around planning, audits, and other business functions. Closing delays can have a negative impact on reporting timeliness, audit readiness, and confidence in financial data.

Many of today’s finance teams still rely on outdated close process tools and tactics, such as spreadsheets, manual coordination, disconnected systems, and repetitive status follow-ups. This leads to inefficiencies in managing time, money, human capital, and innovation.

Fast-track the financial close with SAP

Accelerated financial close is possible with SAP Advanced Financial Closing. This cloud-based solution helps bring structure, visibility, and orchestration to the closing process. In as little as 12 minutes, you can activate your tenant and start realizing ROI with a streamlined close cycle, real-time insights, and audit-ready reports.

This modern solution helps your finance team:

• Improve transparency and insights with monitoring of closing progress across your subsidiaries and headquarters.
• Boost efficiency and speed by streamlining manual tasks and accelerating each close with notifications, optimized finance workflows, and automated escalations.
• Safeguard your close with strong controls and improve governance and compliance with a clear audit trail.

Finance teams that use SAP Advanced Financial Closing enjoy faster close cycles, greater visibility into close progress, reduced manual effort, improved audit readiness, and more timely financial information.

7 easy wins to maximize your investment in SAP Advanced Financial Closing

Getting started with SAP Advanced Financial Closing doesn’t have to be an all-at-once finance process transformation project. You can kick off with a few small, practical actions to start driving value quickly and build momentum for broader use of the solution down the road.

Here are seven easy ways to jumpstart your progress:

1. Tap into value you already own.
2. Complete the learning course.
3. Identify bottlenecks in your current financial close process.
4. Create your first closing task list for a monthly close cycle.
5. Browse or create templates in SAP Advanced Financial Closing.
6. Generate a closing task list and improve it with every close cycle.
7. Explore and share free SAP resources to accelerate adoption.

Keep reading to dive deeper into each of these quick and easy wins.

Easy win 1: Tap into value you already own

You already have access to SAP Advanced Financial Closing. Now it’s time to start getting value out of your investment.

Kick-start your journey with this checklist:

1. Check out the Onboarding Resource Center to watch a five-minute onboarding video, access live and on-demand webcasts, and explore more resources to plan your implementation and prepare to go live.
2. Read a step-by-step onboarding guide at your own pace.
3. Learn how to automate the setup of SAP Advanced Financial Closing in just 12 minutes.

Easy win 2: Complete the learning course

As an SAP Advanced Financial Closing customer, you have access to the Foundational Success Plan, which includes a course called Close Orchestration with SAP Advanced Financial Closing. Your finance team can take this three-hour course at their own pace to optimize and strengthen their control over financial closing procedures. During the course, they’ll learn how to use SAP Advanced Financial Closing to plan, supervise, and evaluate the financial close process to ensure compliance and boost efficiency.

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Easy win 3: Identify bottlenecks in your financial close process

Schedule an honest conversation with your finance team about your current close cycle. Discuss the biggest bottlenecks in the process and potential areas for improvement. Keep reading to learn about the common causes of financial close delays so you can steer clear of these holdups.

What are the most common causes of financial close delays?

Setbacks are often caused by:

• Delayed approvals
• Unclear ownership
• Status chasing
• Manual follow-ups
• Disparate systems
• Lulls between tasks

Once you’ve pinpointed the issues, talk about ways you could overcome these obstacles with SAP Advanced Financial Closing. This will allow you to be more strategic with your use of the solution, whether you’re striving for better orchestration, clearer task ownership, improved status visibility, more consistent handoffs, or other improvements.

Easy win 4: Decide which close cycle to focus on first

Pick one team to create one closing task list for one monthly cycle. By starting with one closing task list, you’ll be able to refine the process over several cycles before scaling further with SAP Advanced Financial Closing. Refer to the free learning course mentioned earlier to get step-by-step videos for additional guidance.

Because every company is different, we recommend starting with this general four-step process to create a close checklist:

1. Start with one close cycle. Choose a monthly closing first instead of trying to model every scenario at once.
2. Identify recurring activities. Consider the typical close steps your team performs each period. Focus on the recurring tasks that happen every month or quarter.
3. Define task owners and due dates. Specify who is responsible for each task and when it needs to be completed.
4. Set task sequence and dependencies. Determine which tasks must be completed before others can begin.

What information do you need to create a closing task list?

To create a closing task list, you’ll need the following details:

• Tasks
• Owners
• Due dates
• Dependencies
• Close frequency

While compiling all the necessary information for a closing task list requires upfront time and effort, you’ll only need to do this once to establish an easier financial close for future cycles.

Easy win 5: Browse or create templates in SAP Advanced Financial Closing

Once you’ve completed all the upfront work of organizing tasks, task owners, due dates, and dependencies, you can start filling out templates. The pre-delivered templates in SAP Advanced Financial Closing are based on finance best practices, so you can use them as is or customize them for your unique needs.

Watch this video to learn how to create a task list template in SAP Advanced Financial Closing.

Manual closing process vs. SAP Advanced Financial Closing templates

Easy win 6: Generate a closing task list and improve it with every close cycle

Build your closing task list structure once, then reuse it and refine it along the way. This is one of the most practical and valuable advantages of SAP Advanced Financial Closing.

What is a financial closing task list and why is it important?

A financial closing task list gives finance teams a structured way to organize recurring close activities. Instead of relying on manual tactics like email chains, spreadsheets, and online chats, teams can document, manage, and close tasks in a more structured framework.

A financial closing task list is important because it:

• Defines the tasks required for the close.
• Assigns ownership.
• Establishes sequencing and dependencies.
• Supports deadlines and monitoring.
• Creates repeatability for monthly, quarterly, and yearly close cycles.

How to create a closing task list in SAP Advanced Financial Closing

Here’s a high-level overview for how to create a closing task list in just three steps:

Step 1: Create the template in SAP Advanced Financial Closing

Build the task list as a reusable template that can support future close cycles. You can even mass-upload tasks from existing Excel spreadsheets. Plus, you can see which tasks should be kept manual and which ones can be automated to further accelerate your close.

Step 2: Review, test, and refine

Run the first cycle, identify gaps, and adjust the template as needed. The goal isn’t perfection from day one—it’s repeatability and improvement over time.

Step 3: Standardize the monthly close before expanding

Use your initial version to prove value and build confidence in the task list. Once you’ve established the process, your team can expand to broader close activities or apply it to other teams, regions, currencies, and more entities.

Easy win 7: Explore and share free SAP resources to accelerate adoption

Bookmark the free resources provided in the table below and share them with your team to boost adoption.

For more support, check out these additional resources:

• Get step-by-step guidance on creating templates, tasks lists, and more with this user guide.
• See what’s new for SAP Advanced Financial Closing and learn about recent innovations and features.

What business benefits can organizations expect from SAP Advanced Financial Closing?

When your company implements SAP Advanced Financial Closing, you’ll overcome some of your greatest business challenges and drive valuable benefits.

Start small, scale later: Adopt SAP Advanced Financial Closing at your own pace

You don’t have to launch a full finance process transformation effort to adopt SAP Advanced Financial Closing. Whether you're embarking on a full finance transformation or migrating to S/4 HANA, you can start small wherever you are in the process. For example, you can implement this solution across a few entities first before rolling them out across more entities. Additionally, you can start with manual tasks in the beginning and then automate more tasks as SAP Advanced Financial Closing improves from cycle to cycle.

The sooner you begin, the sooner you’ll start reaping the benefits—including a faster, more efficient close, more transparent finance workflows, and real-time insights for data-driven forecasting and decision-making.

While there’s some upfront work involved in getting started with SAP Advanced Financial Closing, it’s well worth the time and effort. Once you have a structure in place, the process becomes much easier to reuse and improve.

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