Effective financial data management is crucial for improving business operations, as it can help your organization make informed decisions, optimize resources and maintain financial health. However, if you have inaccurate and incomplete roll-ups caused by duplicate and missing master data, it can result in transaction processing and accounting errors, leading to tremendous financial loss.

You may also have reconciliation issues between multiple source systems caused by conflicting and redundant master data hierarchies. These issues must be rectified before making any key decisions based on these financial datasets.

Let’s examine how careful financial data management can help improve your decision-making, trust, compliance and risk management.

Benefits of Financial Data Management

Budgeting and forecasting: Accurate financial master data supports effective budgeting, forecasting and planning, allowing you to anticipate future cash flows, investments and potential challenges.

Identifying strategic growth levers: With up-to-date financial data, you can identify trends and allocate resources to profitable areas, plan for expansion and support strategic growth initiatives.

Controlling costs: Financial data management can also allow you to track expenses and identify inefficiencies, helping your business reduce costs and improve margins.

Increased agility and responsiveness: Careful financial data management will enable you to simulate multiple different scenarios, assess potential impacts and pivot strategies quickly in response to new opportunities or threats.

Increased transparency and trust: When financial master data is well-managed, it can build trust among external stakeholders — such as investors, customers and partners — demonstrating financial stability and organizational integrity.

Improved compliance and risk management: Timely management of accurate financial master data ensures that your company meets regulatory standards and proactively identifies any financial risks, such as liquidity issues, so you can address them early.

Offering these benefits to the relevant stakeholders would require you to centralize the definition, management and governance of key finance master datasets, including the general ledger (GL) account, chart of accounts, company code, cost center and more. Reference 360, with its rich business-user-driven interface, gives you a self-service approach to integrate, govern and centrally manage finance data. The solution makes it easier to manage your charts of accounts, cost centers and crosswalks, along with a side-by-side comparison of financial hierarchies that can provide alternate business perspectives.

However, multiple data users will likely want access to your financial master data in the ERP systems to enable key decision-making processes. That means your company needs an API-based approach for inbound and outbound synchronization with major ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle. Out-of-the-box integration support for SAP S/4 HANA and ECC systems would make it faster to share this financial master data with your various business stakeholders.

The Reference 360 extension for SAP Finance is a prebuilt solution bundle available to all Informatica Reference 360 customers. The extension contains prepackaged assets to accelerate the implementation of Reference 360 for finance data management. Using the extension, customers can quickly integrate the Reference 360 solution with their SAP systems. This extension is a ready-to-use package that includes predefined reference datasets and hierarchies, code lists, Cloud Data Integration assets and data quality rule associations.

Customers can easily import SAP financial master data into Reference 360 and create, define, manage and govern that financial data in Reference 360. Then, they can quickly export reference data from Reference 360 to SAP S/4HANA.

The Reference 360 extension for SAP Finance is specifically helpful for customers embarking on their ERP migration journey who need to migrate financial master data from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA. The extension can also be used to configure SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA. It can also synchronize data with Reference 360 in batches.

The Reference 360 extension for SAP Finance is available as a ready-to-use package and includes the following predefined assets:

• Reference datasets: GL Chart of Account Master (GL COA Master), GL Company Code Master, Cost Center and Cost Center Hierarchy
• Cloud Data Integration assets: Predefined taskflows, mapping tasks and mappings
• Data quality rule associations: Basic and advanced rule associations to standardize and validate the reference dataset attribute values

The diagram below shows reference datasets shipped with Reference 360 Extension for SAP Finance, including master and lookup reference datasets. The reference datasets also include code lists for SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA.