Month-end closing in transition: How SAP Advanced Financial Closing (AFC) supports

In many companies, the month-end and year-end closing still looks surprisingly analog today: Excel sheets sent back and forth via email, multiple versions of the same file, manual to-do lists, and constant questions like “How far along are you?”
The result: high coordination effort, lack of transparency on the status of individual tasks, and an increased risk of errors – especially in international corporations with many entities.

This is exactly where SAP Advanced Financial Closing (AFC) comes in. The cloud solution was developed by SAP to standardize, automate, and make the financial closing process transparent across all units, systems, and countries.

Central control of all closing activities

With AFC, all closing tasks are consolidated in a central closing calendar.
Instead of decentralized Excel sheets, there is a shared, system-supported overview:

• Which tasks are planned?
• Who is responsible?
• By when must each task be completed?
• Are there dependencies on other activities?

On this basis, group-wide templates can be created and rolled out to all entities. This makes the closing process not only more efficient but also more audit-proof and consistent.

Transparent workflows and clear responsibilities

Each task in the closing calendar is assigned to a responsible person – including start and end date, priority, and status. Through workflows and notifications, AFC ensures that:

• Tasks are initiated on time
• Delays are immediately visible
• Escalations can be carried out in a structured manner

This not only reduces email ping-pong but also creates clear governance in the closing process. Auditors receive traceable documentation at the push of a button showing who completed which task and when.

Real-time monitoring instead of status inquiries

A key added value of SAP AFC lies in real-time monitoring of the closing process. Instead of collecting status reports manually, finance and closing teams receive:

• Central dashboarding of progress across all units
• Analysis of critical paths to optimize closings
• Drill-down capabilities from the group view down to individual entities and tasks

This allows bottlenecks to be identified early and addressed proactively – a crucial factor when the closing process becomes time-critical.

Integration into the S/4HANA landscape

AFC is designed as a cloud extension (Software as a Service) for SAP S/4HANA. Typical benefits in combination with S/4HANA include:

• Use of standard APIs and predefined templates for recurring closing tasks
• Control of technical jobs (e.g., period openings, reconciliation runs, reconciliation reports) directly from AFC
• Harmonization of the end-to-end closing process from operational posting to the consolidated financial statements

This allows AFC to integrate seamlessly into a modern finance transformation roadmap and supports companies on the path to a digitized, accelerated closing process.

Concrete benefits companies achieve

Companies that implement SAP AFC typically report:

• Reduced cycle times in month-end and year-end closing
• Higher automation through fewer manual reconciliations
• Greater transparency for management, group accounting, and auditors
• Better resource planning in the finance area

AFC demonstrates its full strengths especially in corporations with many company codes, different time zones, and complex intercompany dependencies.

Conclusion: From “classic closing” to a digital closing process

The manually driven month-end closing with Excel sheets and email chains is becoming obsolete in an increasingly digital financial world. With SAP Advanced Financial Closing, companies gain a tool to:

• standardize,
• automate, and
• monitor in real time

Anyone looking to accelerate their closing, reduce risks, and simultaneously meet the requirements of auditors and regulators will, in the long term, not be able to do without a closing tool like AFC.

If you want to assess how well your current closing process is prepared for the use of SAP AFC or which steps would be sensible for an implementation, we are happy to support you with an individual analysis.

Learn more about the SAP S/4HANA transformation here