from Hacker News

I have been working in financial reporting and performance management for the holding company of a large group for several years. The group consists of several hundred legal international entities and has activities in several business areas.

My job (that of my team) is to select the technical systems for planning, consolidation and reporting, to ensure their operation and to continuously adapt them to new requirements.

At this point, our data model is so bloated that new (non-technical) colleagues need several months before they can work with reports (SAP BW "Queries") without regular support.

Is this normal??

The complexity is usually driven by:

- Different aggregation types for key figures

- Step-by-step consolidation of each subgroup

- Time-dependent hierarchies and master data

- Translation of financial statements into foreign currencies

- Different group structures in planning, forecasting and actual comparisons.

Some specific questions I would like to discuss are:

Data model

- (How) do you align business specific KPIs with IFRS KPIs?

- Do you use step consolidation across all subgroups? Or does your reporting only take place on reported data or the entire consolidation group?

- What happens when the group hierarchy is restructured during the year? Do you use time-dependent hierarchies or master data?

- Do you distinguish between planned and actual hierarchies?

- How many currencies do you translate your planning/financial statements into? How?

- ... many more on this topic

Platform

- What stack do you use? I would love to see something beyond the SAP universe that could meet our requirements.

Reporting

- What is your experience with online self-service solutions?

- Anything beyond Microsoft Office products?