Cost Center Reporting

Real-Time SAP Cost Center Reporting in Excel, with Wands for SAP

Common Challenge: SAP Cost Center Reporting LimitationsCost Center reporting is essential for any business using SAP. However many organizations struggle with the limitations of standard CO

reporting, and the cost and complexity of building custom reports that require ABAP, Security, and Functional consultant resources. Native SAP tools such as Report Painter tend to be too inflexible for the needs of business users, who want to lay out information side by side for deep and detailed analysis.

Companies also need to be able to report on their own specific combinations, i.e., Cost Element – combined with Cost Center/WBS/Internal Order/Profit Center and other fields – to get the information they need. This is difficult to achieve with standard SAP reporting. New, ad hoc reports to analyze costs related to specific questions are required as well. Finance and Accounting often depend on IT staff to repeatedly create, maintain and optimize these complicated reports. But IT may have limited time and expertise for these reporting requests.

Therefore, many organizations turn to manual exporting of SAP CO reports into Excel for user self-service to modify the layouts they need for analysis. But downloading and formatting these SAP reports is often time-consuming and painful.

Finally, companies often need real-time information on their costs and actual/budget variances as cost control becomes ever more important to the bottom line. BOBJ/BW reports are usually run off data that is not current, which can affect the timeliness and impact of decisions.

The Solution: GL Wand and Reports Wand for SAPWith Excel4apps, Finance & Accounting business users can create and maintain real-time Cost Center reports without the need for IT involvement. This enables quicker, deeper analysis in the user tool of

choice – Excel.Major benefits include:• Easily create customized reports that pull live actual & budget data directly

into Excel for immediate analysis. • Use for standard cost center reporting or create your

own customized, detailed reports to meet the unique needs of different cost centers – with only Excel skills required.

• Have a clear picture of costs and the breakdown of costs to understand the details, in Excel, in refreshable drill-able reports.

• Provide meaningful self-service reporting for cost center managers and decision makers.

• Refresh and modify reports with just Excel skills. • Drill from balances to FI or CO documents,

with no programming.

SOLUTION BRIEF

Do you use S_ALR_87013611?S_ALR_87013611 is a key cost center report that business users often prefer to analyze in Excel. With GL Wand for SAP, users can stop exporting and reformatting this report over and over again, and instead use Excel functions to retrieve real-time cost center balances and detail directly into a formatted, refreshable Excel report.

Before & After

Les Entreprises Barrette:• Monthly consolidation report

in 3 minutes with GL Wand vs. 4 hours.

• Retrieving historical data is much easier.

• Running faster simulations.Read more: excel4apps.com/barrette

Goldcorp:• Monthly cost center reports

completed in 50 minutes with refreshable GL Wand Excel reports vs. 1-2 days.

• Monthly capital project capex reports completed in 10 minutes with a GL Wand template vs. 1.5 hours.

• Mine department cell cost report with detailed cost, total cost and cash flow for each cell each month for 14 cells is now possible with GL Wand in 2.5 hours; previously was not feasible.

Read more excel4apps.com/goldcorp

Upsher Smith:• Instead of 8 hours to prepare

cost center spend report and another 8 hours to review it - with GLW, 15 minutes to prepare and then 4 hours to review and analyze.

View video: excel4apps.com/dale

• Highly flexible reporting on multiple combinations of cost objects, out of the box.

• Automate the distribution of Cost Center reports as static snapshots or refreshable, drillable reports.

With Excel4apps, easily create and modify live Excel reports such as:• Monthly run reports by cost center, by cost element for actuals vs.

forecast and budget; showing current month and YTD as well as the full year budget and forecast.

• “By month” info for the current year and next year for the same cost center and cost elements.

• Margin Reports to identify high or low margin segments of your business or products / product categories by using profit centers for revenue, combined with costs flowing from cost centers to enable contribution margin reporting.

• Internal Orders - Quickly report on the costs collected for specific events. - Report on the progress of your assets under construction. - Activity Types report on the amount of planned number of hours

per cost center. - Reveal how many hours were used on a specific cost center.

• Profit Center Reports - Performance at product category, product line and product level. - Combine revenue with costs to enable gross or contribution margin

reporting.

• CO-PA - Immediately view profitability at the customer level – remembering

that 80% of profit often comes from 20% of your customers! - Analyze product profitability associated with various characteristics like

region, which can also be rolled up to different product groups and product categories.

• Project Systems - Determine how much revenue was earned on this project vs cost. - See total cost accumulated over a specific period of time. - View costs accumulated at the various levels of the WBS elements

rolling up to the total project level. - Compare actual to budget to committed costs to determine whether

the project is on target or anticipating cost overruns.

REAL RESULTS

www.excel4apps.com/sap

Excel4apps is a best-in-class provider of Microsoft Excel-based reporting and data-loading software for use with SAP. By empowering business professionals with independent and secure access to real-time ERP data via Microsoft Excel, the company’s products expedite accurate and timely business decisions. Founded in 2005, Excel4apps now serves users in 68+ countries.

Excel4apps enables business users to easily report, analyze, plan and post their SAP data real-time in Excel. Our self-service solutions install quickly and integrate seamlessly with SAP, reducing user reliance on IT resources and streamlining Excel-based processes. We help you get more out of the platforms you already own – Microsoft Excel and SAP.

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