Easy Integration of Microsoft Office Excel with the SAP Business Suite for Financial Data

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1 Easy Integration of Microsoft Office Excel with the SAP Business Suite for Financial Data Summary This white paper describes how SAP customers use Winshuttle solutions to automate the shuttling of financial data between Microsoft Excel and SAP Transactions. This paper is written for business decision makers (BDMs) in medium or large enterprises who want to know more about how Winshuttle software can improve business productivity and optimize business operations.

2 Introduction For most mission-critical financial and business operations, including sales, inventory management, and accounting, Microsoft Office Excel is the most frequently used tool for conducting data analysis, data processing and presentation. In companies that have implemented various SAP solutions, these Excel data silos end up being very counterproductive due to delays involved with entering Excel data into the SAP systems. This article describes how to easily integrate Microsoft Office Business Applications data with SAP solutions and the resulting benefits from such integration reduction in financial closing time, reduction in data entry resources, and availability of timely data for reporting, and decision making. Excel Spreadsheets in Corporations According to a recent CFO magazine survey, spreadsheets were the most widely used technology out of 14 finance-specific technologies. SAP has found that corporate information workers spend about 80% of their day in Microsoft Office applications disconnected from their SAP enterprise systems. The popularity of spreadsheets is not surprising. Offering familiar features such as bulk copy and paste, formulas, and lookup and formatting functions, spreadsheets are a very convenient way for many business users to create, stage, or update data. In addition, the ability to easily transfer and share these spreadsheets makes them an extremely convenient tool for group collaboration and review. Furthermore, the ubiquity of Excel makes it a very easy format to exchange data across and between organizations. In finance and accounting departments in any industry, we find many examples where transactional data (or even master data) is created or transmitted as spreadsheets general ledger entries, A/P invoices, A/R invoices, budgets and other planning data, incoming payments, bank reconciliation statements, purchase orders, etc. Excel in the SAP World Many process efficiencies are now available to corporations who have adopted the SAP Business Suite and SAP Business All-in-One. Standardized business processes and centralized data repositories are just two of the excellent benefits delivered by these SAP solutions. The existence of so much corporate data representing so many business processes which have been built in and around Excel spreadsheets often becomes the barrier to achieving the SAP solutions full potential, thus lowering the return on your investment (ROI) in the SAP system. Keeping data accurate and current in the SAP system requires the timely entry of Excel data into the SAP system. In many companies, this Excel data continues to be manually entered into SAP, 2

3 resulting in unnecessary delays impacting month-end, quarter-end, or year-end closings and the consequent unavailability of timely data for reporting purposes. Moreover, the manual double entry of data is an enormous waste of personnel resources increasing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the SAP solutions. Integrating Microsoft Office Business Applications with the SAP Business Suite - Technical Options The Programming Option One alternative to the manual entry of Excel data into an SAP system is to write custom ABAP or Visual Basic programs which automate the loading of spreadsheets for specific applications. However, developing robust custom programs for every specific Excel upload application is an expensive proposition and each takes weeks of effort involving multiple iterations of requirements gathering, programming, testing, documentation, transporting, and refinement. Many companies have developed these custom programs for very specific business applications using proprietary Excel data formats. Since these programs are tied to a particular data format and a particular set of fields, any changes to the data format or additions or removal of fields needs to be re-programmed and takes a long time. The most acute problem with using programming as a solution for integrating Excel data into SAP is in the sourcing and allocation of scarce programming resources. Most programming resources in IT departments are heavily subscribed delivering more mission-critical projects, such as implementation of new products, upgrades, portals, etc. Automating the transfer of Excel data files into SAP solutions is a significantly lower priority with the large backlog of IT projects. Consequently, with the programming option unavailable, business users only choice is to continue to manually re-key Excel data into a SAP solution, adding to overhead, wasted time and data entry resources. The Technical Tools Option In addition to custom ABAP programming, some companies rely on technical tools available from SAP as a way to handle Excel data integration. However, these tools are generally designed to support other tasks including test automation or batch data processing not necessarily Excel data integration. Nevertheless, these tools continue to be used for that purpose. While an end of a wrench can be used to drive a nail, it is not the optimal approach. Technical tools such as BDC, CATT, and LSMW are also intended to be used by technical resources in IT departments, rather than for the everyday business user. 3

4 Additionally, companies find that technical tools are not typically designed for use with financial applications or with other transactional data that feature a variable number of line items. For example, if a script for automating data uploads had only 2 line items during recording, then that script is limited to creating 2-line-item documents. This severely limits a technical application that is uploading financial transactional data. A Simple Solution to Integrate Microsoft Office Business Applications with SAP Data SAP companies now have a simple to learn, simple to use, and simple to deploy solution to shuttle data between Microsoft Office Business Applications and SAP applications. Winshuttle provides Transaction, a tool that affords a simple way to load Excel data into an SAP solution without requiring any programming and without involving any technical resources. This allows business users to automate the loading of Excel data themselves not only eliminating manual data entry, but also eliminating the expense and delay involved in using the technical options described above. Using Transaction, users follow a simple 3-step process to automate the loading of any Excel file into any SAP Transaction in any SAP solution: Record, Map and Run. The SAP system authorizations for a user are completely respected by Transaction and the software does not need additional levels of authorizations beyond the standard SAP approvals. The Transaction software is very easy to install and maintain, and does not require any server components to be installed or configured. Transaction is available in two options for easy deployment among finance users. The first option is the full Transaction program which allows the creation and editing of the record, map and run process and would be generally limited to super users and business analysts. The second option is a Run-Only application, known as Runner, which allows the users to load their own data but does not allow them to inadvertently change a fully-tested recording. Runner users are typically the SAP end-users. Transaction and Runner software is being used by hundreds of SAP customers worldwide to integrate Excel with their SAP solutions. Companies such as Starbucks, Coca Cola Bottling Company, Advanced Micro Devices, Daimler, Canada Post, and Westinghouse have been using the Transaction software to realize vast productivity improvements with quantifiable cost and time savings. 4

5 CASE STUDY: TransMontaigne, Inc. - Using Transaction Daily for Creating and Maintaining Fixed Assets Denver, Colorado based TransMontaigne, Inc. is a Fortune 500 oil and gas company with over $11 billion in revenue recorded in TransMontaigne has been a Winshuttle customer since 2005 and Transaction is being used on a daily basis to handle journal entries, A/R functions, maintenance, and fixed asset functions. Between 5 and 3,000 records are affected in their SAP system on a daily basis via the transactions ABMA, ABT1N, ABZP, and AS01. The fixed asset functions involve creation of new assets, running depreciation on the assets, reconciliation, and disposal of assets. Maintenance was consuming at least 4 days of work every month. With Transaction, the amount of work involved for all fixed asset SAP functions at TransMontaigne has been reduced from 4 days every month to less than 3 hours per month. For the SHUTTLEproducer at TransMontaigne it look less than 2 hours of one-time work to record and map all of the fixed asset Transactions. For other applications of Transaction at TransMontaigne, including general ledger entries and accounts receivable entries, up to 40 hours of monthly work is being saved in eliminated data entry requirements. Posting General Ledger Documents from Excel to SAP Solutions via Transaction The case study above illustrates a very simple example of using the Transaction application for master data creation; however, the Transaction software is much more powerful than that. It provides a suite of very flexible, easy-to-use features that allow the loading of significantly more complex data records such as accounts payable invoices, accounts receivable invoices, general ledger documents, incoming payment documents, and budget spreadsheets. A sample Excel file format for creating journal voucher documents via the FB50 transaction is shown below. For records with a variable number of line items, each Excel row can be either a header row (indicated by the H in the first column) or a detailed line item row (indicated by the D in the first column). A typical Transactional document like this has a single header row followed by many line items rows. A single Excel sheet can have multiple documents, each new document beginning with a new header row. Creating journal voucher documents via the FB50 transaction. 5

6 In the Excel spreadsheet that contains the data to be posted, pushbuttons can be setup as Excel macros that launch the Transaction application and call the appropriate Transaction recording when pressed. In the example shown above, there are two pushbuttons one which calls a Transaction recording for validating all the line-item data before posting and the second one which calls a Transaction recording that actually posts all the line-item data. Notice that the Transaction solution accepts Excel formulas in any of the mapped data fields, so the Excel file template can use references, lookup operations, or any complex calculations for data that needs to be loaded into SAP. When the data validation recording is called via the Transaction application, that recording takes each line item of a journal voucher, one at a time, and simulates the posting of this line item into the SAP transaction (FB50 in this case). The goal of this simulation is to identify any errors in the line-item data before trying to post the document. A live validation against the SAP system ensures that all the validation rules are checked, and therefore the data has been qualified before the posting is carried out. The figure below shows the results of running the validation recording in the log column when the log result shows No message returned from SAP, it indicates that the line-item data is good. If a line item field has erroneous data, the actual error message from the SAP system is displayed in the log column. Once all of the data in the journal voucher has been corrected, the document can be posted into the SAP Transaction by calling the Transaction posting recording. When the document has been successfully posted, the resulting log column in Excel then displays the actual document number of the posted document as shown in the image below. If there are any errors in the journal voucher, nothing would get posted into SAP and you will see the error message instead of the document number in the log column. 6

7 As can be seen above, Transaction allows the building of a very user-friendly and intuitive application for the posting of financial data. A very similar framework as the one shown above can be used for accounts payable Transactions (FB60, FV60, F-43), for accounts receivable Transactions (FB70, FV70), and for most general financial posting or parking Transactions (FB01, F-02, F-65, FV50, etc.). Transaction enables the posting of cross-company general ledger documents and can even enable very complex postings which require Profitability Analysis (PA) segments to be filled out for certain G/L accounts. Finally, using an Excel macro (Excel 2003 or earlier), documents with greater than 999 line items can be split into multiple documents with less than 999 lines on each document with appropriate balancing offset entries in each document. CONCLUSION Microsoft Excel remains an important productivity application at most SAP customers companies, driving a continuing need to integrate Excel data with SAP solutions. Traditional methods of loading Excel data into SAP solutions can be laborious, time-consuming, and most often requires IT resources. Winshuttle offers a simple to learn, simple to use, and simple to deploy solution for business users to migrate their data into the SAP application, translating into quick ROI. 7

8 Theresa Ciacchi Senior Account Executive - Business Solutions Group 118 W. Streetsboro Rd. Suite 221, Hudson, OH p. (440) c. (440) e. tciacchi@adaptivecorp.com Adaptive Corporation, Inc. Providing Innovation by Design Cleveland Dayton San Francisco Irvine Raleigh Dallas Toronto 8