It’s a familiar pain point across the NeuGroup Network: Treasury teams in large organizations operating across a patchwork of ERP systems, with multiple instances and specialized finance tools built up through acquisitions and years of incremental upgrades, struggle to standardize treasury processes or produce consistent financial reporting across the enterprise.
- To tackle that perennial problem, some NeuGroup member companies recently began implementing SAP Central Finance—a solution within SAP’s S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition that consolidates transactions from multiple ERPs into a central environment—to bring together financial data and allow treasury and finance teams to operate from a more unified dataset, which members said is foundational for future analytics and AI initiatives.
- In a recent virtual session of NeuGroup for Technology Transformation, several members said they are using Central Finance to aggregate financial transactions and enable centralized payments, intercompany netting and multibank connectivity while improving cash visibility across the enterprise.
- "For us, what is even more important is cash flow positioning,” one member said. “Knowing where my cash is and being able to forecast.”
Centralizing finance. SAP Central Finance creates a single source of truth by replicating and reposting transaction records from ERPs into one place. Instead of pulling balances from separate systems, finance teams can work from a common dataset. “That opens the door to much better analysis,” one member said.
- Members agreed that the platform is particularly relevant for organizations running multiple ERPs—including both SAP and non-SAP platforms—that have evolved separately over time.
- “Even if it’s SAP across the company, it’s not ever really the same,” said one member who recently completed a Central Finance implementation. “The way transactions are booked or how intercompany flows are handled can be different in each instance.”
- But be aware: adopting the tool at this company required significant change management across finance, treasury and IT teams. Aligning data models and workflows—and deciding which processes become the enterprise standard—often represents the most complex part of the project.
Central Finance in action. Now that it’s mostly done, the member is using the tool to bring fragmented ERP environments together. He said one key benefit is the ability to standardize and centralize data without having to replace all of the company’s underlying ERP systems and instances.
- Another notable reason he chose Central Finance for this project is the visibility it provides into data at the transaction level, unlike other traditional consolidation tools that primarily aggregate balances, according to the member.
- This paid off almost immediately: shortly after going live, his company acquired a business running a different SAP environment, which was brought into the Central Finance structure without needing to replace or update the additional system.
Long-term consequences: fewer upgrades, more AI? For some member companies, Central Finance is being implemented alongside S/4HANA as well as SAP’s treasury and risk management module. Historically, upgrading to S/4HANA has been a large, enterprise-wide effort that can take years in organizations running multiple ERPs. And upgrades to S/4HANA can delay treasury benefitting from functionality only available in the latest iteration.
- But with Central Finance, SAP says treasurers will no longer need to move every ERP to the newest version of S/4HANA to get the benefits of updates; by moving data into the centralized S/4HANA environment, they’ll be able use the new features there.
- And by consolidating financial data and standardizing processes first, organizations may be able to simplify their system landscapes before migrating underlying ERPs. Whether that ultimately changes the sequencing or economics of S/4HANA upgrades remains an open question.
