How to Maximize Your Move to SAP S/4HANA Finance

The one constant in today’s business world is relentless change. Survival is determined by an organization’s ability to adapt and evolve, and success is granted to those who define competitive advantage by creating a culture of continuous improvement.

But with this in place, the opportunities can seem endless, and how or what to change is much harder than the mere determination to do it.

Good companies evolve their offerings based on what their customers want and need now. Great companies, on the other hand, know what their customers will need tomorrow, and are already in the process of making it happen.

BlackLine and SAP are two of those “great companies”.

BlackLine co-innovates with SAP as an SAP-Endorsed Business Solution, so SAP customers benefit from lower risk, faster delivery, and a powerfully managed roadmap from our joint team.

SAP S/4HANA Finance is SAP’s biggest innovation and upgrade since SAP R/3.

It’s architected to take advantage of advanced in-memory technology and remove the traditional boundaries between transactional, analytical, and planning systems. Additionally, it provides instant insights with on-the-fly analysis across dimensions and data.

Moving to SAP S/4HANA provides an exciting opportunity for finance and accounting organizations to completely rethink their processes within the continuous improvement model — and this is where BlackLine is proven to help.

This upgrade is a critical milestone of the continuous improvement journey for SAP customers. The new levels of insights and metrics equip organizations to be truly data-driven, continually identifying new ways to improve.

BlackLine helps enterprises migrate with confidence by enabling accounting teams to model the impact of accounting structure changes, different dimensionality, and new journal entry processes using sandboxes. This ensures strong automated account balance reconciliation and intuitive journal entry processes for ongoing accounting productivity.

BlackLine and SAP customer Vivint says, “With our SAP S/4HANA upgrade we reinvented everything, from removing three dimensions from our accounts to changing our numbering structure. BlackLine enabled us to test the impact of change, and acted as our trusted consistent place to run our financial close.”

BlackLine helps organizations understand how the upgrade will affect the financial close. Financial close task management and orchestration ensure a confident and timely close process before, during, and after the migration that reduces risk across the enterprise SAP and non-SAP ERP landscape.

BlackLine also provides a powerful cloud store for your historical accounting data, reducing the effort of migrating and mapping it into SAP S/4HANA and its new defined accounting structures. This creates a trusted, on-demand record of previous close periods while freeing you to focus on the future.

Together, BlackLine’s suite of products provides consistency, trust, and confidence in the financial close before, during, and after the move to SAP S/4HANA. That way, accounting can get the most out of their upgrade by transforming legacy processes and structures, and without introducing unnecessary risk.

Learn more about how to successfully jumpstart your SAP transformation and move to SAP S/4HANA with BlackLine.