Many finance and accounting users rely on Microsoft Excel to extend SAP’s analytical reporting capabilities, often exporting data from their SAP systems into Excel for slicing and dicing as well as presentation. However, this Excel data isn’t live and quickly becomes inaccurate, requiring frequent manual refreshes that cause users to spend more time on data exports and reformatting than on analysis. Even these time-consuming refreshes are no longer enough, though, with access to real-time data an increasing requirement for modern organizations.
Empowering Business Users
The ability to quickly, easily, and independently create timely, trustworthy, and visually appealing reports using live data can help your business users thrive. It can also be a challenge to provide this capability.
Reporting tools such as the Wands for SAP solutions suite from Excel4apps integrate Excel with SAP systems to empower users with self-service access to real-time SAP data from an Excel-based front end. These tools ease the need for IT support by letting users work within a familiar environment and make the reporting cycle faster by eliminating manual export and re-key processes.
Wands for SAP solutions integrates with existing SAP security settings and roles so that duplicating security outside of the SAP system isn’t required to ensure proper user access to data. These solutions also tend to implement quickly, without consulting expertise, and their Excel front end minimizes training needs to deliver a strong return on investment and low total cost of ownership.
Reporting for Financial Users
Fast, accurate reports are particularly important to finance and accounting users, as timely completion of month-end financial statements and submission of business results are critical processes, especially for publicly traded companies. Leaving finance users dependent on IT support and repetitive exports of static data into Excel is both inefficient and error prone.
As an alternative, software such as GL Wand from Excel4apps lets finance users seamlessly navigate from familiar Excel to live SAP ERP data (see Figure 1). Tactical solutions such as the Wands for SAP solutions suite complement an organization’s existing reporting platforms and free IT resources to focus on more resource-intensive projects such as SAP HANA implementations.
Capitalizing on SAP HANA
SAP HANA offers the potential for deep analytics using Excel-based tools for reporting. Wands for SAP solutions, for instance, has certified integration with applications on SAP HANA and can capitalize on performance improvements from SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA). With Excel-based tools, organizations can further leverage SAP HANA’s high transaction rates and complex query processing while achieving immediate ROI and enthusiastic user acceptance.
Learn More
To learn more and download a copy of Gartner’s “Using Financial Analytic Applications to Build an Accessible Enterprise Reporting Infrastructure” report, visit www.excel4apps.com/gartner.