A core task in a finance department to ensure liquidity, portfolio and risk management. To do this, the treasurer uses the analyses of the current liquidity and risk situation to make decisions about future investments and borrowings, taking the conditions on the financial markets into account. The Transaction Manager offers a comprehensive set of functions for managing the financial transactions you decide to conclude. The objective of the Transaction Manager is:

• To manage financial transactions and positions from the trading stage through back office processing to the transfer to Financial Accounting.
• To automate and streamline typical processes as far as possible in the system
• To provide flexible reporting and evaluation structures for analyzing financial transactions, positions and portfolios.

The integration of the Transaction Manager in CFM also means that the effects of the financial transactions on the liquidity or the interest rate risk can be measured directly.

To use the Transaction Manager components, you must make Customizing settings for the Transaction Manager, the SAP Business Partner, and for market data:

Transaction Manager: Corporate Finance Management ® Transaction Manager

SAP Business Partner: Corporate Finance Management ® Basic Functions ® SAP Business Partner for Financial Services

Market Data: Corporate Finance Management ® Basic Functions ® Market Data Management

Besides the connection to the CFM analyzer components, Market Risk Analyzer, Portfolio Analyzer and Credit Risk Analyzer, the Transaction Manager is linked to the In-House Cash, Cash Management and Liquidity Planner components.

When you conclude financial transactions, the company policy can determine whether the emphasis is on providing an internal service for the affiliated group companies, or on participating actively in the financial markets in order to invest liquid assets, finance planned investment, or hedge existing risks. The Transaction Manager takes on the task of processing the related financial transactions, from entering them through to transferring the relevant data to Financial Accounting. The Transaction Manager is structured so that both traditional treasury departments that focus on trading and asset management departments are supported. The advantage of this is that you can process all types of transactions on the same platform - from short-term finance to strategic longer-term investments.

The Transaction Manager concentrates on the common features shared by both types of system – the processes for data entry, monitoring, processing and posting transactions and positions are essentially the same – which means that you no longer need to opt for one system or the other. This paves the way for automatic ‘straight-through processing’ from deal capture through to accounting, a feature frequently requested by users. To achieve this goal, the user front-end is being enhanced, and key functions are being standardized for different financial instruments across the money market, foreign exchange and securities areas, including confirmation, payment processing, valuation procedures and accounting.

New position management functions give you a clear overview of your positions, which can be evaluated according to a wide range of criteria. They also form the basis for managing parallel positions to comply with the different accounting regulations, and deliver the data for performance and benchmarking calculations in the Portfolio Analyzer.

You can control short-term liquidity and risk positions by concluding money market and foreign exchange transactions (for example, to iron out liquidity deficits/surpluses or hedge currency risks). The Securities area supports these instruments for the medium to long term. Derivative financial instruments allow you to actively manage interest rate and currency risks.

There are a number of activities for product types – depending on how the tasks are distributed in your company – which an actual financial transaction can pass through. We refer to this sequence of activities as the transaction and position management process. You can set up this process in different ways depending on the product type. You can also configure the structure and conditions of the various transactions flexibly, which enables you to represent even the most complex condition combinations in the system.

This concept gives you substantial freedom when it comes to setting up conditions and structure characteristics, whilst at the same time ensuring that the processes themselves are consistent. The Transaction Manager provides the basic framework, within which you can then define the settings for key parameters. Product types represent the financial transactions used in your company. The use of product types greatly simplifies data entry, and allows you to make sure that transactions are entered in a uniform manner.

By configuring the transaction and position management process flexibly for each product type, you can benefit from the effects of rationalization, and at the same time fulfill organizational requirements for process security. Standard security measures, such as the dual control principle, can be applied consistently by building additional release requirements into the workflow. The integration of these processes and the direct transfer of the relevant information to Financial Accounting allow you to manage your business transactions efficiently. A typical feature of all financial instruments is the standardized basic structures or processes, which your company can specify beforehand.

Your employees fulfil different roles in the processes described by the organizational structure in your company. The SAP System allows you to define specific application menus according to these roles, which contain precisely the functions that each employee needs. When you define the company-specific roles and create the menus, you can base these on the standard roles delivered for the Transaction Manager, such as the Trader or the Staff Accountant.

The trading area includes the functions for mapping financial transactions in the system and exercising rights. The system supports a range of practical aids and monitoring tools that traders can use to optimize trading. These include functions for entering and evaluating offers (competitive bids), fast entry functions for the most common transactions, order limit checks, date checks, expiration and barrier checks for options, and other supportive evaluations. It also includes price calculators, such as the cross rate calculator, the option price calculator and the NPV calculator.

In the back-office area, you can complete the transaction data (such as account assignment information and payment details). You can also use the correspondence functions, such as automatic confirmations and counterconfirmations. In the back-office area, you mainly process positions, such as securities account transfers or corporate actions.

In the Accounting area, you can use the automatic posting functions for transferring data to Financial Accounting and for updating the general ledger in real time. It also has flexible functions for processing payment transactions as well as valuation procedures and accrual/deferral procedures. This allows you to manage your positions in parallel according to HGB (German Commercial Code) and US-GAAP. This is achieved by flexible position management functions that can be structured according to internal and external criteria, and thorough documentation of all accounting activities in the form of accounting documents.

The Transaction Manager incorporates a flexible authorization concept that guarantees functional segregation of trading, back office and accounting activities. For the various activities in the transaction and position management process you assign user authorizations, which help you assign different authorization profiles to the employees from the different organizational areas in the company. You define these authorization profiles in conjunction with the specific roles. The authorization concept enables you to define release requirements to have the transaction controlled by one or several persons before it is transferred to accounting.

You can evaluate all activities in the Transaction Manager using extensive documentation and control functions. These functions ensure that specific instruments or various instrument groupings can be evaluated at each stage of the transaction process. This fulfills the various documentation and control requirements of both Financial Accounting and Treasury.

A number of central functions and tools are shared by all the Transaction Management components. These include business partner and address management, financial mathematics modules, status-controlled transaction processing and real-time reporting. Cross-application functions, such as central business partner management or the Information System provide you with a comprehensive overview of the business relationships maintained with your business partners. The use of standard organizational elements allows you to represent different organizational forms (such as a group-wide treasury center) and integrate the Transaction Manager with other SAP applications.

The SAP real-time datafeed is a universal, open interface that can be used to import data from any information provider or datafeed platform. With the interface, you can transfer exchange rates, swap rates, security price information (stocks, bonds), reference interest rates (such as EURIBOR, EUROLIBOR), index values, commodities, volatilities (for exchange rates, interest rates, security prices and indexes), and futures prices.

You can also import current and historical market data later using a File Interface. To do this, you have to copy the market data of the provider to the file format supported by SAP. You also have the option of calling up market data directly in the system from a spreadsheet and to copy the data or enter it manually.

Since the market data management is a function that is also required by other CFM components, you can find the Market Data Management functions by choosing Corporate Finance Management ® Basic Functions.

Standardized interfaces - referred to as BAPIs (Business Application Programming Interfaces) - turn the SAP applications into "open systems" that let you exchange data across system boundaries. The Transaction Manager provides you with BAPIs for creating, changing, displaying, reversing and counterconfirming single transactions in the Money Market and Forex areas, as well as for spot dealing in Securities. Using these BAPIs ensures that only consistent single transactions are copied in the system. BAPIs are also available for creating, changing and displaying securities master data and for redemption schedules for drawable bonds. This allows you to manage the securities class data more efficiently and to keep it as up-to-date as possible.

Central access to information, and the ability the structure and present the data as you need it are fundamental prerequisites for efficient reporting. The primary goal of the reporting functions offered with the Transaction Manager is to keep track of financial transactions and cash flows, and show the impact on Financial Accounting.

This enables you to control the current status of each financial transaction at all times and to trace the related history (such as order, contract, exercise, notice, reversal or rollover). To help you monitor deadlines and analyze your positions, the Transaction Manager provides flexible tools that display all the relevant transactions together with their status and their history. You can define yourself which transactions should be included in the evaluations and the level of detail you want to see. From the aggregated display, you can branch directly to the individual transactions. You also get a more detailed view of the total commitment of your business partner.

When you generate the reports, you can make flexible selections that let you narrow down the data to show exactly the right information for a particular purpose. Most of the reports also incorporate drilldown options, which make it easier for you to navigate to the details.

A drilldown reporting tool is available for adapting the standard reports delivered with the system interactively to reflect your specific company requirements. With this tool, you can structure the reports interactively to reflect your own requirements. It supports functions for transferring the results of evaluations to PC applications, presenting them in graphical form, linking reports, and structuring reports in a report hierarchy.

With these features, the Transaction Manager not only offers efficient and fully integrated transactions and position management, but also comprehensive reporting functions you can tailor to your individual needs.