Month End Closing is a vital activity performed to ensure complete and accurate financial reporting for local entities as well as consolidated for Siemens AG overall. This activity involves correcting data validations within Esprit and thorough analysis of various accounts and financial statements for timely completion of Financial Reporting.

If you do not have a well-established and defined process to assist you with this, then you might be finding yourself performing more repetitive tasks for an error you may have already seen before. Luckily, Siemens CF R are removing this hurdle thanks to the collaboration with Accounting & Closing team at Siemens GBS.

CF R and GBS collaborated in creating an ESPRIT validation check report utilizing SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) which pulls data directly from SAP. This SAC validation report can be executed prior to the month-end closing to detect and correct potential validations in SAP before ESPRIT closing. Furthermore, the SAC validation report can be updated for additional ESPRIT validations which are not in the standard Spiridon (CIP2SAP) validation report. This transformative action helps correct validations timelier and evidentially can be used by the business units in decreasing the overall time in correcting validations.

In addition, GBS and CF R established a monthly review process to identify the root cause of all ESPRIT validations which enabled CF R to enhance the SAC ESPRIT validation report further over time. This act of highlighting each and every validation assists all customers with being able to identify the root cause in SAP and take correction action to prevent re-occurrence of the same or similar errors.

Assisting at the front lines of this process is Jessie Dickens, Financial Analyst, “We first started off as having 30-40 plus errors every month and now we have been able to decrease that number down to about 20. This is saving a lot of time as having less errors really makes a big difference when going through month end.”

This monthly validation insight reporting truly changes the game as it starts to assist all parties involved with knowing multiple solutions that could be occurring and ultimately saving time in allowing the month end process to run a lot smoother.

Managing all financial analysts, is Derek Lall who stated, “This process has been very helpful as we have been seeing a reduction of errors and time spent on these validations. The rules that are put in place in Esprit are set up in a way, which is consistent across all of our AREs. I think this is a significant improvement and a great win for the Esprit validation process and collaboration between GBS US and our CF R business contacts. ”

When asked about the partnership between CF R and GBS, Tim Huynh, Manager of Corporate Reporting, CF R Canada said

Gone are the days of having to work right up to the deadline for month end, now all parties are able to not only increase productivity, but also focus on analyzing data instead of only reporting it. Due to the great efforts and collaboration implemented by GBS and CF R, CF R is now looking to potentially highlight this solution as a best practice to decrease validations.

For more information about Accounting & Closing, please contact Derek Lall derek.lall@siemens.com