by Gary Byrne, Managing Editor, Financials Expert and GRC Expert
Financials Expert - Volume 11 (2012), Update 2

Revaluation of fixed assets is a common business event. Maybe your organization is going through a merger or acquisition, or maybe you are involved in a year-end fixed asset revaluation? Whatever the case may be, you want to make sure that you are following best practices for a fixed asset revaluation.

by Ashim A. Nanda, Senior Consultant, IBM Global Business Services
Financials Expert - Volume 10 (2011), Update 8

The rules for allocating the site support costs to the production and quality cost centers need to be revisited multiple times during the year owing to many changes in production floor operations. Learn how to use tracing factor automation to reduce the amount of time necessary for cost allocation.

by Anshul Jain, Senior Associate, PwC
Financials Expert - Volume 10 (2011), Update 8

Learn how to split intercompany elimination differences using SAP Enterprise Controlling Consolidation System (EC-CS) and thus accelerate the closing process.

by John Jordan, ERP Corp
Financials Expert - Volume 9 (2010), Update 9

Posting to accounting periods can be restricted by company code, account type, general ledger account, and user. The open and close accounting periods screen can be simplified if you are not using authorization groups to restrict previous period postings to specific users and do not need to open special periods.

by Rajan D. Karki, Senior FI/CO Consultant, Quality Systems & Software
Financials Expert - Volume 9 (2010), Update 8

Explore the use of selection variables provided by SAP Financial Closing cockpit. If used correctly in the closing process, selection variables reduce the steps of maintaining the variants in various programs and thus help speed up the closing task. For example, if a business has 100 company codes and wants to schedule the depreciation run for all company codes, it has to either create 100 different variants or create one variant and change the value in the variant for an individual run. Using SAP Financial Closing cockpit, you can create one variant and selection variables then automatically update key parameters in any program based on the closing hierarchy and the key date of the task list in the closing template.

by Janet Salmon, Solution Manager, SAP AG
Financials Expert - Volume 9 (2010), Update 6

If you have been looking at the latest business functions in SAP ERP, you may have come across the term simplified reporting, but have little idea what the new business function offers. Simplified reporting represents an easy way to modernize the reporting experience for your users in all areas of core SAP ERP Financials using your existing SAP ERP license. It also paves the way for the use of SAP BusinessObjects tools such as Crystal Reports by providing a consistent way to access the data in your SAP ERP tables.

by Davin Wilfrid
Project Expert - Volume 3 (2010), Update 3

SAP North America CFO Mark White shares advice and success stories for attendees at the Financials 2010 and GRC 2010 events, sponsored by SAP and Wellesley Information Services.

by Lawrence Chung, FI/CO Consultant
Financials Expert - Volume 9 (2010), Update 3

Use results analysis to automatically calculate reserves for installation and warranty based on the costs planned for the relevant work breakdown structure elements.

by Tim Hodge, Senior SAP Platinum Consultant, ICM America LLC
Financials Expert - Volume 1 (2002), Issue 4 (April)

At some R/3 sites, the labor time spent on any given Manufacturing Order is recorded at a standard value, possibly as part of a backflushing transaction; at others, the hope is to have the operators record their actual time spent on each given Manufacturing Order, leaving wide open the possibility that operators may introduce data entry errors. SAP R/3 does not have a standard-delivered report that can identify which Manufacturing Orders have significant errors. However, this article demonstrates a fairly simple ABAP report that can make this kind of "exception research" easy to do.

by Rohana Gunawardena, Senior Consultant, Exium, Inc.
Financials Expert - Volume 3 (2004), Issue 1 (January)

When a global company has a period-end close, a great deal of coordination needs to occur among the independent locations to make sure that tight deadlines are met. The author provides eight tips to prevent misunderstandings that can occur because of timing differences when you have offices in more than one time zone.