Easy Integration of Excel with SAP Solutions for Financial Data









 
WINSHUTTLE, INC. BOTHELL, WA 98012, USA (800) 711-9798 WWW.WINSHUTTLE.COM
  
Excel remains an important productivity application at most companies and many information workers maintain or receive their data in Excel files, especially accounting, budgeting, and other financial data. In companies that have implemented various SAP solutions, these Excel data silos end up being very counterproductive due to delays involved in getting the Excel data into the SAP system in a timely fashion. This article describes how to easily integrate Excel data with SAP solutions and the resulting benefits from such integration - reduction in financial closing time, reduction in data entry resources, and availability of timely data for reporting.







According to a recent CFO magazine survey, spreadsheets were the most widely used 1technology out of 14 finance-specific technologies . SAP itself has found that corporate information workers spend about 80% of their day in Microsoft Office applications 2disconnected from their SAP enterprise systems . The popularity of spreadsheets is not surprising. Offering familiar features such as bulk copy and paste, formulas, and various lookup and formatting functions, spreadsheets are a very convenient way for many business users to create or update data. In addition, the ability to easily transfer and share these spreadsheet files makes them an extremely convenient tool for group collaboration and review. Furthermore, the ubiquity of Microsoft Excel makes it a very easy and convenient format to transfer data between organizations. In finance and accounting departments in any industry, we find many examples where transactional data (or even master data) is created or transmitted as spreadsheets - general ledger entries, A/P invoices, A/R invoices, budgets and other planning data, incoming payments, bank reconciliation statements, purchase orders, etc.
1 CFO-IT Magazine, Summer 2004, available at: http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3014451 2 Presentation by Udo
, VP of Emerging Solutions at SAP, made at Sapphire 2005, available at: www.sap.com
©WINSHUTTLE, INC, 2006. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.


 
 
Many process efficiencies are now available to corporations who have adopted mySAP, ECC, APO, and other solutions provided by SAP. Standardized business processes and the centralized data repositories are just a few excellent benefits offered by these SAP products. The existence of so much corporate data in Excel and so many business processes built around Excel often becomes a barrier to the realization of the full potential of the SAP solutions, lowering the return of your investment (ROI) in SAP. Keeping the data accurate and real-time in the SAP system requires the timely entry of Excel data into the SAP system. In many companies, this Excel data continues to be manually entered into SAP - resulting in unnecessary delays during month-end, quarter-end, or year-end closings and the consequent unavailability of timely data for reporting purposes. Moreover, the manual double entry of data is an enormous waste of personnel resources increasing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the SAP solutions.



 

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One alternative to the manual entry of Excel data into an SAP system is to write custom ABAP or VB programs to automate the loading of spreadsheets for specific applications. However, developing robust custom programs for specific Excel upload applications is an expensive proposition and takes several man-months of effort - involving multiple iterations of requirements gathering, programming, testing, documentation, transporting, and refinement. Many companies have developed custom programs for very specific business applications using very specific Excel data formats. Since these programs are tied to a particular data format and a particular set of fields, any changes to the data format or additions or removal of fields needs to be re-programmed and takes a long time... [download for more]