- Chintan Joshi
Month-end close is still one of the most manual, email-driven, and error-prone cycles in Controlling — but it doesn't have to be. SAP BTP's intelligent automation capabilities are enabling finance teams to fundamentally rethink how the close gets done.
In this session, we'll take a practical look at how SAP CO experts and super users can leverage SAP Advanced Financial Closing and SAP Build to eliminate spreadsheet-based task tracking, automate repetitive closing steps with SAP-curated agents, and document task completion automatically — with a full digital audit trail. Real results speak for themselves: customers are reporting up to 90% faster book closing and 2,800 closing tasks automated.
Key Takeaways:
- Evaluate the close at a high level first, then attack one area at a time — the heat map tells you where the value is.
- Inventory and COGS run hottest: Material Ledger, WIP, variance and settlement account for most of the pain in a manufacturing close.
- Most of the answer is standard SAP, not a custom build — Universal Allocation, Intelligent Accrual Management and Intelligent GR/IR sit in the core; AFC and Cash Application are separate SAP products with their own cost.
- Event-based production accounting moves work out of month-end rather than making the month-end batch run faster.
- Every day removed from the close is a day returned to analysis and decision support.
- Speaker: Chintan Joshi
