Business Consolidation (SEM-BCS) (SAP Library - Business Consolidation (SEM-BCS))

Business Consolidation (SEM-BCS)

Note

The following sections contain the documentation on the BW-based component Business Consolidation.

The documentation on the R/3-based component Business Consolidation is located elsewhere. This documentation can be accessed, for example, by calling up Application Help in your R/3-based Business Consolidation system.

Purpose

You can use the SEM component Business Consolidation (Consolidation) to determine the resources of a group (or a similar enterprise or organizational unit), the claims by others to those resources, and the changes to those resources. Consolidation also provides the means for internal and external enterprise reporting.

You can consolidate on the basis of customer-defined consolidation units. Consolidation units can represent, for example, companies, plants, business areas, profit centers, and cost centers. You can also portray matrix organizations (for example, using a combination of companies and profit centers).

You can standardize the financial data reported by individual consolidation units to adhere to the accounting and valuation standards of the group. You then translate the standardized financial data from the various local currencies into the group currencies. Finally, you can eliminate the effects of group-internal relationships (for example, from interunit trade and services). Thus, you calculate the consolidated financial statements as if the group were a single entity.

You can use the analysis functions of SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) and those of SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW) to analyze and report on your consolidated financial statement data.

Integration

The Consolidation component provides functions to collect master data and individual financial statement data from data files from non-SAP systems as well as SAP systems.

All SEM components are based on BW. These are:

Business Consolidation (SEM-BCS)
Business Planning and Simulation (SEM-BPS)
Corporate Performance Monitor (SEM-CPM)
Stakeholder Relationship Management (SEM-SRM)
Business Information Collection (SEM-BIC)

The data processed by Consolidation is written to the BW system. There you can share the data between Consolidation and the other SEM components. For example, you can:

Collect SEM-BPS planning data for use as reported financial data in consolidation
Use consolidated actual data as the basis for further planning in SEM-BPS.

Features

Versions

You can use versions to execute parallel consolidations with different categories of data (for example, actual data, planning data, forecasting data), using different accounting principles (for example, US GAAP, IAS, German HGB), using different valuations, and/or for simulations.

Hierarchies

You can create hierarchies for almost all characteristics (for example, consolidation units and financial statement items), where some hierarchies have special, consolidation-specific properties.

Consolidation Charts of Accounts

The component enables you to use different charts of accounts for consolidation. For example, this allows you to generate several consolidated financial statements in parallel to accommodate different accounting principles.

Collection and Standardization of Reported Data

You can use online data entry or flexible upload to collect individual financial statement data and other consolidation-relevant data into the consolidation system.

You can post manual entries, for example, to standardize the reported data to meet the accounting and valuation requirements of the group.

Consolidation Tasks

You can automatically execute the following consolidation tasks:

Currency translation (which translates the financial data into the currency of the consolidation group)
Validation
Interunit eliminations (for example, for payables and receivables, revenue and expense, or investment income)
Elimination of interunit profit/loss in inventory
Consolidation of investments
Reclassification
Allocation
Balance carryforward

The automated postings are controlled by the task settings you define once beforehand in Customizing.

Reporting

After performing the consolidation tasks, you can use BW reports to analyze your data. SAP provides pre-defined BW business content (InfoCubes, queries, etc.) for this purpose.

You can use XBRL to create individual or consolidated financial statements.

Execution and Monitoring of the Consolidation Process

You use the consolidation monitor to execute the consolidation tasks and to monitor the entire consolidation process.

Constraints

The automated execution of the elimination of IU profit/loss in transferred assets is presently not available.

The automated execution of consolidation of investments presently only covers the purchase method with the activities first consolidation and subsequent consolidation.

You can use manual posting to perform the consolidation tasks that are not yet automated to meet the statutory requirements for creating consolidated financial statements.