Period end closing is always a critical and high visibility item in any ERP. The timely and effective monitoring and control of period end closing is top most need for the finance department. For this purpose, you must process a sequence of interdependent steps diligently in a specific and well-defined order. Entities use various tools for this, ranging from excel to more sophisticated tools like SAP Financial Closing Cockpit, Blackline’s Runbook etc.
SAP Financial Closing Cockpit (FCC) supports the planning, automating, processing, monitoring, and analysis of tasks in financial close for the entities. Talking about SAP FCC, the product has evolved over a period starting with simple scheduling manager (SCMA) to Classical Closing Cockpit to SAP FCC. Now newer dimension of fiori applications, providing intuitive dashboards and KPIs are available in both on-premise and cloud version. FCC journey looks like below:
S/4HANA On-Premise Environment
For SAP On-premise environment, in ECC or older version of S/4HANA, FCC had to be installed as add-on product. FCC was available in two versions, 1.0 and then enhanced 2.0. Starting with S/4HANA Enterprise Management version 1709, SAP has started to deliver the FCC as part of the digital core, so no more add-on to be installed for this, which makes this product well integrated into the core components. But still regardless of being delivered as part of digital core, the usage of FCC need a separate license (Latest BOM number as of now is 7019413 - S/4HANA Financial Closing cockpit).
As you know, with SAP S/4HANA the front-end is shifted to Fiori launchpad to provide a streamlined user experience. But until 1709 there are no app available in FCC area, and 1709 also introduced only few apps as listed below which are primarily GUI apps, that means it is just fioritization of the SAP transaction codes without providing any additional feature in the way of working on those process:
With the latest release S/4HANA 1809 FPS01 released on 30th January, SAP has provided a lot of intuitive fiori application, which is providing the new ways to monitor and control the period end closing:
The details of these new Fiori applications are as below:
Thus, to be able to use these new Fiori applications, you need to add this technical catalogue to a new business role/ existing business role and then assign that to target user for these apps.
S/4HANA Cloud Environment
As we have talked about on-premise environment above, and now moving to S/4HANA cloud here also SAP has provided advanced features for financial closing via scope item (2V8), which is available from S/4HANA Cloud 1811 and need additional license on top of basic scope bundle. Advanced Financial Closing serves as a cloud closing hub, currently supporting integration to on-premise financial systems to conduct the closing process in the remote systems. Below is the link of fiori applications available in S/4HANA cloud environment included in standard SAP role SAP_BR_GL_ACCOUNTANT for S/4HANA cloud:
