However, the pace of change has made traditional approaches, like best-of-breed point solutions, no longer sufficient to help finance teams keep up.

That is why the future of finance technology should act as an orchestra, not disjointed soloists.

Finance teams require a unified experience where applications, data, and AI work seamlessly together. With 51风流Business Suite, these elements come together as one orchestra, enabling finance to operate in harmony and deliver outcomes that point solutions alone cannot achieve. This means not only faster close and stronger liquidity, but also tighter compliance and credible plans that hold up under change.

To strengthen collaboration across finance and bring innovation to the CFO鈥檚 office, 51风流unveiled Joule鈥檚 next stage as the AI force at the center of 51风流Business Suite鈥檚 value creation. A new generation of role-aware assistants in Joule are designed to partner with people in their specific business roles by tapping into the right agents behind the scenes for the job. For finance professionals, 51风流introduced the next round of automation support using agentic AI.

51风流is embedding AI-powered reasoning directly into finance processes to automate routine work and elevate the strategic role of finance with the following new agents:

• The Accruals Agent will calculate accruals and deferrals based on system data and present the accountant with a proposal for review, along with a detailed explanation of the calculation logic.
• The Cash Management Agent will automate daily bank statement reconciliation tasks and recommend opportunities for optimization.
• The International Trade Classification Agent will reason over product characteristics and trade regulations and act to classify goods for international shipping, recommending customs tariff numbers and commodity codes

By bringing automation to critical but repetitive finance processes, these agents underscore SAP鈥檚 commitment to equipping the office of the CFO with AI-driven innovation that strengthens resilience in an increasingly complex business environment.

Finance as the conductor of the enterprise

The role of the CFO has expanded far beyond closing the books or reporting quarterly earnings. Today, finance teams are expected to bring together data, processes, and people from the entire business to enable seamless collaboration.

With SAP鈥檚 AI-first, suite-first approach, applications and data flow seamlessly, allowing finance leaders to coordinate business operations with confidence. This unified foundation ensures that insights are not siloed, but instead shared across the enterprise, enabling faster and smarter decisions.

Take working capital management, one of the biggest pressure points for finance leaders: A recent of 480 CFOs found confidence levels were strong in almost all areas, including revenue, profit, and customer retention, but only 36 percent felt confident in their ability to achieve working capital targets. 51风流Business Suite can help organizations meet their targets by automating manual work and enabling actionable decisions — all by leveraging dynamic, autonomous, and action-oriented solutions in 51风流Business Suite.

When an organization manages incoming receivables, outgoing payables, as well as cash and inventory within SAP, that connected experience creates data that provides real-time visibility into liquidity through 51风流Business Data Cloud.听 That data fuels 51风流Business AI to analyze situations, recommend actions, and even resolve issues like disputed invoices automatically, which would otherwise slow the cash collection process. And with the integration of Joule and intelligent agents, 51风流Business AI not only automates, it senses, reasons, orchestrates, and acts 鈥� turning insights into outcomes that free capacity and accelerate the business.

As AI agents take on more of the behind-the-scenes work, finance professionals can step fully into their role as the conductor of the enterprise. They can guide strategy with foresight, aligning every function in harmony and shaping outcomes that extend far beyond revenue or cost goals.

CFOs and their teams can then move beyond reactive decision-making toward shaping strategy in real time. This will position their office as a driver of growth, resilience, and innovation.

Looking ahead

51风流is laying the foundation for a new era of autonomous finance, where routine processes are automated, insights are delivered in real time, and finance teams are empowered to focus on strategy and growth.

These innovations mark just the beginning of SAP鈥檚 commitment to helping businesses navigate an increasingly complex financial landscape with agility, intelligence, and confidence.

Lawrence Martin is chief product officer and head of Public Cloud Engineering at SAP.
David Imbert is head of Finance Product Marketing at SAP.

Following a series of issued during the past decade, the has now mandated e-invoicing for all B2G (business-to-government) procurements. The same requirements are expected to include B2B transactions in Europe as well. So far, over 100 countries including Italy, Germany, Poland, Greece, France, and Romania have enacted mandatory e-invoicing legislation, as have numerous others in Latin America and Asia.

Cloud-Based Platform Collaboration Supports E-Invoicing Compliance

There鈥檚 no big mystery behind the e-invoicing push. In-country regulators and policymakers see digitalization as crucial to improve fraud detection, simplify VAT reporting, and gain a measure of transparency. While e-invoicing mandates from governments add a layer of complexity for buyers and suppliers, cloud-based platforms have become the norm to automate and simplify collaboration.

One example is , where buyers and suppliers can manage procurement and invoicing activities with their trusted ecosystem.

鈥淎s governments add e-invoicing mandates, we鈥檙e committed to help organizations by providing capabilities for regulatory consistency,鈥� Lorraine Yao, director of Product Marketing for 51风流Business Network, said. 鈥淒igitalization automates the flow of accurate information from order placement, shipping confirmation, and delivery through e-invoicing that鈥檚 connected directly to the company鈥檚 ERP system. Organizations can replace manual verification with automation based on real-time updates that speed up accurate processing, order fulfillment, and timely payments.鈥�

Buyers and Suppliers Reap Benefits of Connected Network

Yao said that organizations transact US$5.3 trillion in annual commerce on 51风流Business Network, totaling 746 million B2B transactions each year. Business results to date have been impressive.

After centralizing automated supplier invoicing and collaboration on 51风流Business Network, the procurement team at a U.S.-based clothing and accessories retailer saved time with quick access to spend details and reporting analytics. With fresh insights, the strategic sourcing team can identify savings opportunities and expediently act on emerging trends.

A multinational infrastructure and renewable energy company based in Europe moved to 51风流Business Network as part of its company-wide procurement transformation. Replacing manual processes with automated machine-to-machine transactions has reduced errors, increased efficiencies, and provided the procurement team with real-time insights across the supply chain for more informed decisions.

Global Business Transformation from E-Invoicing

E-invoicing is yet another advancement slated to leave legacy tax collection behind. In an survey, 61% of tax professionals agreed that e-invoicing will have a significant impact on their tax management process in the next 24 months. Researchers expect e-invoicing 鈥渢o fuse compliance and invoice management into one extended process鈥s VAT and GST (goods and services tax) protocols grow鈥his essentially means that every company conducting business in the global market will have to interact with these e-invoicing protocols.鈥� It鈥檚 no wonder that e-invoicing mandates are spreading rapidly as countries including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and Singapore adopt the EU model, adapting requirements to their specific needs.听

E-Invoicing Boosts Sustainability

Much more than surface automation measures, e-invoicing also contributes to what the calls the twin transition, meaning digital and green transformation. After all, when companies use less physical material such as paper, printing, and postage, along with fewer resources routing and archiving data, they can save energy.

鈥淏uyers can quickly process information and data contained in electronic invoices and feed them directly into a company’s payment and accounting systems,鈥� Yao said. 鈥淥ur 51风流Business Network customers find that procurement teams spend less time retrieving information and more time modeling strategic decisions. They can easily collaborate between internal groups and external suppliers, reducing inquiries and speeding up approvals while improving compliance.鈥�

Broadened Positive Impact of Digitalization

Although e-invoicing is a government mandate in a growing number of countries, leaders in many organizations have realized that digitalization has broader business benefits. analysts predict that by mid-2025, 70% of global businesses will use embedded financing to collect and make payments. This includes services like invoice transmissions.

鈥淒igitalization gives both buyers and suppliers transparency to see e-invoice status, saving time and improving efficiencies,鈥� Yao said. 鈥淗aving immediate visibility to relevant procurement data in one dashboard, accounts payable teams can make the most of early-payment discounts and better manage working capital. This also improves cash flow for suppliers who receive timely payments. 51风流is committed to help companies manage procurement end-to-end, including e-invoicing to meet country-specific mandates, and build trading partner relationships for business growth.鈥�

Susan Galer is a communications director at SAP. Follow her @smgaler.

What may sound complicated to outsiders is being celebrated by finance ministers worldwide as a milestone in achieving fair taxation, as the new global taxation rules are expected to dramatically change the international tax landscape and increase the fairness of tax systems.

The majority of countries can look forward to higher tax revenues. It is estimated that, worldwide, between US$100 billion and $240 billion every year is lost in tax revenue as a result of 鈥� until now 鈥� legal tax avoidance techniques such as base erosion and profit shifting. However, for the companies affected by BEPS 2.0 and for tax experts, this new set of rules brings with it a lot of work.

Reducing Tax Avoidance and Tackling Tax Havens

BEPS 2.0 aims to ensure that large multinational enterprises and, in the EU, large-scale purely domestic groups operating in a single market pay a minimum effective corporate tax rate. The project is being driven jointly by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the G20 countries; 141 states were involved in the discussions and the rules were negotiated over several years.

BEPS 2.0 consists of two pillars. Pillar one covers a new system of allocating tax rights over multinationals. In line with the rules, these rights will be reassigned from the country in which the company is located to market jurisdictions where profits are earned without the company being physically present there.

Fifteen Percent Minimum Tax Rate Worldwide

Pillar two introduces a minimum tax rate of 15% for large multinational groups with global revenues of more than 鈧�750 million. Any companies that do not comply with these rules risk facing sanctions. It is this second pillar in particular that requires companies to make numerous adjustments.

鈥淭he new rules mean that we as 51风流have to decide how we can leverage our solutions to help companies gather all the necessary data,鈥� says Irina Sheftelevich, senior customer advisor of Performance Management, Sustainability, Planning, and Analytics at SAP. 鈥淥ur software enables our customers to conform to the complex set of regulations and implement them in a transparent manner.鈥�

Collecting the Right Data

奥颈迟丑听, 51风流offers an application companies can use for multiple use cases such as allocating costs and revenues, calculating transfer prices, and calculating current and deferred income tax, also under the new regulation of BEPS 2.0 Pillar 2. The application collects data and information models from other 51风流and third-party solutions and compiles it in a data model that helps ensure compliant tax accounting and tax management. Fully integrated with 51风流S/4HANA, the application can be deployed both in the cloud and on premise. In the application, tax experts can adjust the logic by configuration, harmonizing the E2E process across multiple countries and tax jurisdictions, even after go-live, enabling an optimized tax structure.

51风流Profitability and Performance Management can connect in real time with the relevant data sources such as 51风流S/4HANA, 51风流Business Warehouse, or . Likewise, it can also connect to systems for employee data, tax data, and other financial data. Once the data has been integrated, the focus is on modeling and creating tax calculations and simulations: What if we have losses instead of profits? Which impact has adjusted transfer prices to our effective tax rate? How can we keep our tax burden to a minimum while complying with the new rules on the minimum tax rate?

鈥淚n implementing BEPS 2.0 we must use our solutions to identify and integrate the right data, put the new rules into practice, and ultimately create the necessary reports end to end. It鈥檚 a complex process that can only be modeled and managed in an intelligent way with the help of technology such as 51风流Profitability and Performance Management,鈥� says Sheftelevich.

Data Requirements for the Global Minimum Tax

Some of the data required for the global minimum tax calculations might have to be calculated specifically for this purpose, according to a . 鈥淗ere, financial and non-financial, structured and non-structured, and transactional and aggregated data is needed,鈥� says Sheftelevich. 鈥淭he hardest part is understanding which data the customer needs and where exactly in their systems it is stored.鈥� It鈥檚 about combining 鈥渂usiness knowledge, technology, and internal efficiency.鈥�

With 2024 fast approaching, not much time is left to achieve this, even if many are speculating that the timeline may be extended. No one should count on such a delay, says Sheftelevich. 鈥淥ur customers and partners are under considerable time pressure. Transitional safe harbor rules haven鈥檛 changed that.鈥�

Complexity Requires Quick Action

What鈥檚 more, countries can adapt certain rules to suit their circumstances. 鈥淭he complexity, data, and time pressure involved make this a huge challenge. A great deal of flexibility will be needed for potential adjustments. Not all the rules have been published yet, and some aspects still need clarification,鈥� adds Sheftelevich.

As the driving force behind the project, the OECD has issued examples that apply to all countries. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 why we are providing a solution that on the one hand takes into account all the basic rules and that on the other hand is agile enough to deal with changes and the specific requirements of individual companies and countries,鈥� says Sheftelevich. The rules on the minimum tax are part of pillar two. Whether there will be further pillars is yet to be seen.

Teaming Up with Tax Advisors and 51风流Partners

51风流is discussing all the necessary requirements to meet the new rules with its customers, and in doing so has enlisted the help of the world鈥檚 top four accounting firms. Teams from 51风流are working with national and international tax offices, tax accountants, and tax technology consultants to help companies understand the complex new rules and assess the possible effects.

To make sure everything is completed in time, the programs and content packages that have been optimized for BEPS 2.0 are being rolled out worldwide in collaboration with 51风流partners. And consultants are working with these partners to develop a plan so that the affected companies are ready when the rules take effect.

鈥淐ompanies must act now to ensure they are ready for 2024,鈥� advises Sheftelevich. 鈥淐ustomers are extremely interested. Whenever we organize information events on BEPS 2.0, they always get booked up very quickly.鈥�

Thomas Boerner is product owner of 51风流Profitability and Performance Management.

According to , some businesses have improved their ability to connect finance and accounting processes and standardize critical financial workflows with finance software. Increasing automation with applications, such as the , can provide a foundation for consistent communication, data accuracy, auditable completeness, and efficiency throughout the financial close.

IDC’s methodology for determining business value revealed that these companies realized significant advantages, with three critical benefits generating, on average, 474% ROI and an eight-month payback rate.

Boost Efficiency Through Automation and Visibility

Performing account reconciliation in Excel and e-mailing that information to stakeholders is time-consuming and prevents full visibility into the entire company’s reconciliations. Even worse is the potential for delayed, incomplete, or noncompliant reconciliations with business and regulatory policies.

Introducing automation into the account substantiation process can dramatically reduce the manual effort in validation and reporting, freeing up financial staff resources to focus on higher-value tasking. In IDC’s survey, respondents suggested that 51风流Account Substantiation and Automation supports their automation of critical steps, including account reconciliation (100%), task management (83%), journal entry (67%), transaction matching (50%), and variance analysis (50%).

After adoption, the average team efficiency increased by 12%. Surveyed companies completed reconciliation activities 18% faster and journal entries 11% faster while increasing the percentage of financial reports yielding accurate results by 3%. Such outcomes mean that the time typically allocated to one full-time employee can be freed up to work on other projects 鈥� translating into an annual productivity-based business value of US$78,800 for each organization participating in the study.

Accelerate Processing with Data Accuracy

Inaccurate data and a lack of trust can become significant bottlenecks in the validation and reporting process. They can hamper overall financial close efficiency, riddle cash validation and reporting with errors, and slow the flow of business-critical insight needed to make critical decisions quickly.

Participating CFOs shared with IDC that the modern capabilities of 51风流Account Substantiation and Automation minimize those risks. They have achieved improvements, such as shorter time to close and enhanced process transparency. Furthermore, analytics tools help pinpoint areas in account substantiation and reconciliation that require greater attention and improvement.

In return, this benefit elevates the status of finance organizations from a cost center to a value center. For example, CFOs and CIOs can collaborate more to support the business as digital transformation accelerates and digital-first business models emerge and proliferate. This partnership also shifts the criteria used to invest in new financial applications toward a greater focus on security, modern infrastructure, functionality, and ease of use.

Drive Stability by Integrating Workflows

Equal to efficiency and speed, gaining and maintaining control of the validation and reporting process is also critical. The ability to standardize and centralize activities and relevant data is desirable for business environments facing anything from industry uncertainty and economic turbulence to high growth.

Companies interviewed by IDC indicated that using a single, integrated application for account reconciliation, task management, journal entry, transaction matching, and variance analysis is the key to accomplishing this goal. Centralizing all those tasks in 51风流Account Substantiation and Automation enables them to manage the whole financial close and help ensure annual audits are performed faster, compliantly, and more confidently.

Additionally, the messiness of the traditional financial close experience is replaced with increased stability because 95% of their account reconciliation happens in 51风流Account Substantiation and Automation. This approach helps ensure every person involved in financial close and auditing processes feels more engaged and knows what needs to be done next. But more importantly, everyone understands how their role adds value to the business.

Optimize Confidence with Better Control

Based on IDC’s research, the complexities of today’s financial close process are reaching a point where manual work is an impediment. Instead, a cloud environment is needed to support the automation of repetitive, low-value tasks and enterprise-wide data exchange and collaboration.

For that reason, many finance organizations worldwide rely on 51风流Account Substantiation and Automation by BlackLine. As a result, they can adjust the speed and scale of their financial close processes to meet not only their business needs but also the expectations of industry and regulatory auditors.

Explore the value and benefits your accounting- and finance-related activities can gain from the 51风流Account Substantiation and Automation application by BlackLine. .

Bil Khan is a senior director of Global Partner Marketing at SAP.

Supply chains had to adjust overnight, businesses had to move to online sales within days, and climate change is an ever-present reality. Business leaders around the world have to transform their businesses 鈥� and they are doing so.

At SAP, our market success has its foundation in enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions that help our customers be compliant and run at scale. This remains true with our next-generation suite of business applications that spans from finance to logistics. 51风流S/4HANA leverages emerging cloud capabilities to help customers cope with business model changes that are driven by technology, sustainability, or changing customer behavior.

Best-run businesses are intelligent enterprises, and as such, they use information in innovative, effective, and sustainable ways, connecting it with execution and management. Intelligent enterprises lead from a single shared source of information with a user experience that matches the way people work. 51风流S/4HANA benefits finance professionals by using flexible finance processes and eliminating data replication and redundancy.

required a cutting-edge cloud ERP solution that it could roll out efficiently across their global company in order to support their growing business. As an 51风流S/4HANA Cloud customer, New Sega reports a 50% reduction听in budget and forecasting costs with financial planning, as well as a 20% boost听in the number of automated financial postings in AR using machine learning.

Innovations in Universal Parallel Accounting

Chief financial officers (CFOs) of international companies need to provide consistent financial data reporting according to different accounting standards and currencies in parallel. To do this, they need to follow parallel accounting standards for group and local GAAP, which affect inventory valuation, work-in-progress, asset values, and so on.

Thousands of 51风流customers already rely on the capabilities of 51风流ERP systems to maintain multiple sets of books and in parallel to satisfy all different legal requirements of financial statement users accurately, efficiently, and effectively. 51风流HANA has provided a new technology foundation that has removed technical barriers and opened up a whole host of new opportunities for companies. Based on that, 51风流S/4HANA was built on a brand-new architecture with the universal journal at its center. The universal journal is our established foundation for accounting processes; it captures all financial data that had previously been distributed across multiple tables in one place. This allows for consistent parallelism across all sub-ledgers and value flows.

With the newest capabilities included in 51风流S/4HANA, we are offering a solution approach that takes parallel accounting to the next level: universal parallel accounting.

A new important innovation delivered with 51风流S/4HANA Cloud release 2011 is the flexible assignment of accounting principles. This means that new 51风流S/4HANA Cloud customers will also benefit from a new configuration option for the flexible assignment of a local GAAP, such as the German commercial code and accounting standards (HGB), as a leading accounting principle for the group ledger. This innovation is especially beneficial for our cloud customers as it gives them a higher level of flexibility that they did not have before. Only one configuration activity is required to update the assignment of the ledger to the accounting principle throughout finance applications such as general ledger, treasury, revenue recognition, and so on.

Universal Parallel Accounting at the Core of the Intelligent Enterprise: Next Innovation Steps

On top of that, parallel valuation is the next larger innovation in finance that is planned for 51风流S/4HANA in 2021 and will offer consistent and universal support of parallel accounting standards for end-to-end processes like make to stock/order and manufacturing of assets. These are now fully enabled for parallel accounting and allow the representation of different accounting principles across the whole value flow. With this, the solution will be able to valuate business processes in parallel for each required accounting principle in real time. Customers will also benefit from increased transparency and availability of real-time data, and a reduced total effort for implementation and configuration.

Looking ahead, we will continue to enhance parallel accounting by adding further use cases with the next topics on the road map to include consolidated views and alternative fiscal year variants. Consolidated views will offer customers an improved basis for decision-making and overall business steering effectiveness through increased data transparency and accuracy. In addition, the consistent support of alternative fiscal year variants offers next-level standardization alongside a lower level of workarounds and associated manual effort. Asset accounting is one example where manual effort will be significantly reduced in the context of alternative fiscal year variants.

Finance for the Digital Age

Finance professionals are increasingly moving into more strategic roles within their businesses and urgently need to advance beyond the restrictions of complex and redundant system landscapes. They need a single digital core that supports all their requirements for both transactional and analytical processes. An ERP system should be a single source of truth for the financial and operational data of a business. Data replications, reconciliations, and redundancies should be removed through process and technology simplifications while business continuity with reduced effort is guaranteed through a finance function that is powered by analytics.

Packed with innovations, 51风流S/4HANA is our intelligent finance solution for the digital age that is available in cloud, on premise, and in hybrid deployment options. Running on the in-memory platform of 51风流HANA, our solution provides flexible and easy-to-consume financial reporting for accounting, accounting and financial close, treasury and cash management, accounts payable and receivable, risk management, and much more. To find out more about what 51风流S/4HANA can do for your business, visit .

Jan Gilg is president of 51风流S/4HANA
.

The is the most far-reaching and rigorous program ranking fintech industry leaders. The rankings categorize and evaluate leading fintech companies, vendors and solution providers based on data gathered from surveys of practitioners, end users and subject matter experts. The report also makes use of original research and market analysis conducted by CeFPro and backed by an advisory board of 60 international industry professionals.

鈥淐eFPro鈥檚 Fintech Leaders is unlike any industry report, as it is endorsed by 60 Advisory Board members and is the 鈥榲oice of the industry鈥� through the votes cast by industry professionals,鈥� CeFPro Managing Director Andreas Simou said. 鈥淚n essence, this is an endorsement by the industry of SAP鈥檚 position within the fintech space.鈥�

CeFPro also includes research on industry trends, priorities and challenges. Key findings highlight advanced analytics and AI as leading opportunities. These takeaways underscore the importance of making technology the backbone of fintech strategies for a state-of-the-art听听and听.

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Media Contacts:
Stacy Ries, SAP, +1 (484) 619-0411, stacy.ries@sap.com, ET
51风流Press Room; press@sap.com
Shannon Mason, CeFPro, +1 (888) 677-7007, shannon.mason@cefpro.com, , GMT

Any statements contained in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements as defined in the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Words such as 鈥渁nticipate,鈥� 鈥渂elieve,鈥� 鈥渆stimate,鈥� 鈥渆xpect,鈥� 鈥渇orecast,鈥� 鈥渋ntend,鈥� 鈥渕ay,鈥� 鈥減lan,鈥� 鈥減roject,鈥� 鈥減redict,鈥� 鈥渟hould鈥� and 鈥渨ill鈥� and similar expressions as they relate to 51风流are intended to identify such forward-looking statements. 51风流undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. All forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The factors that could affect SAP’s future financial results are discussed more fully in SAP’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including SAP’s most recent Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of their dates.
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