As public companies have worked over the past two years to comply with new ASC 842 and IFRS 16 leasing standards, they have taken a variety of paths to achieve the initial compliance requirements. Depending on each company’s specific requirements and the extent of their lease portfolios, their journey to compliance may have been comprehensive or might have taken a limited approach with a “path of least resistance” philosophy to minimize disruptions. 

However, those companies that took a limited approach using standalone solutions or spreadsheets are now discovering they’re stuck in a dead-end with regard to integrating and optimizing lease compliance within their overall business operations.

As the leading experts in SAP Leasing Solutions for ASC 842 and IFRS 16, we've seen it all and we know what works. Integration can be hard. Data validation is required far more than you expected and reporting is anything but a snap, especially if you need data from your ERP as well as your leasing solution. 

Most companies are continuously dealing with pressures to keep up with changes in their external marketplaces, competitive landscapes, customer needs, and investor expectations. These external issues are also driving internal pressures to improve efficiency, productivity, agility, security and enterprise-wide alignment and integration.

People are hard-wired to recognize and interpret faces with amazing speed, accuracy and attention to detail. Even as infants we quickly learn to know our own parents’ faces and to differentiate them from strangers’ faces. Throughout life, the ability to automatically pick up on subtle facial cues and to “read” the meaning behind them are critical factors for streamlining complex social interactions and enabling rapid decisions such as friend vs. foe, and cooperation vs. opposition.

Imagine if you met someone without a face. How would you even begin to interact with them?

Well, that’s how most CFOs and other C-level executives feel when they hear the term “Financial Transformation” without a way to clearly visualize what it means.

Is your finance process complex? Is it all digitally connected? Are you looking for a path forward that doesn't require throwing out everything you have now?

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Whether you’re a CFO or a financial controller, you know how much time and effort you and your team spend deep in concentration to get your monthly accounting figures to balance. Your accounts payable and accounts receivable work doesn’t get much attention unless things go wrong, but all the time you need to stay on top of your tasks to keep things running smoothly.

Accounting has traditionally been a backwards looking profession.  Let me be clear that I did not just call accountants backwards people, but in general their mandate has been to document, audit and verify what has already happened.

Some of the forces helping make these changes a reality are enterprise-wide integration of advanced analytics, unifying financial information in a single-source-of-truth, movement toward continuous-close processes and the rise of Machine Learning.

Today’s CFO is bombarded with buzzwords and talk about the latest and greatest trends in corporate finance. The typical finance professional is usually occupied with more practical considerations. Buzzwords aren’t high on the agenda when some new regulatory control is fighting for your attention or you’re busy keeping an eye on the bottom line.

Still, those buzzwords and trends persist. It’s little wonder that finance pros are confused by it all.

Here are a few such terms you might have heard of:

1. Predictive accounting – using accounting to predict revenue.
2. Machine learning in finance and accounting.
3. Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

It’s natural to ask whether any of this matters. Is it worth devoting mental bandwidth to these new trends?

This post is a summary of why I think these trends may be relevant to you, and how getting onboard now can help you add long-term value to your organization.

Are you struggling with implementing big-picture compliance solutions on a limited budget?

Did time and cost constraints force you to adopt RevRec compliance with short-cuts, spreadsheets or brute force manual calculations - leaving you with a dead-end "solution"?

Do you face similar no-win trade-offs with regard to new Lease Accounting changes coming in January 2019?

You're not alone.  Lots of small to midsize companies are grappling with difficult compliance issues.

This eBook provides a brief overview how S/4HANA represents the future for companies currently using SAP platforms, as well as many other companies looking for a sustainable path to finance innovation.  It also lays out some of the key considerations in developing a roadmap to implement and get the best results from S/4HANA.