Finance professionals have long relied on Excel to manage journal entries, reconciliations, and financial reporting within SAP. While Excel remains indispensable, the challenge has always been bridging the gap between this familiar tool and the complexities of SAP’s data structures. With insightsoftware’s automation approach, finance teams can streamline manual tasks, accelerate the month-end close, and gain true ownership of their data—no IT dependency required.
The Pain of Manual SAP Processes
For many organizations, SAP financial reporting still involves slow, error-prone, and highly manual processes. Accountants spend countless hours keying in transactions, reconciling balances, and fixing errors after the fact. IT involvement is often required for even small report changes, leaving finance teams waiting days for updates they need immediately.
As one Gartner study found, 86% of finance executives aim for faster, more real-time close processes. Yet for some companies, the “month-end” process stretches well beyond a month. Reducing that timeline has become a key business priority—freeing finance to focus on analysis and strategic decision-making rather than manual data handling.
Automation with Familiar Tools
insightsoftware’s approach centers around keeping users where they’re most comfortable—inside Excel—while connecting directly to SAP for real-time reporting and transaction posting. The company’s Financial Optimization for SAP (FinOps) bundle brings together tools like GLSU and WAN into a single, finance-owned platform.
This solution bridges the gap between SAP and Excel, offering:
- Real-time data refresh and drill-down reporting directly from SAP.
- End-to-end automation for journal entries, accruals, and deferrals.
- Error prevention and data validation before posting to SAP.
- Self-service capabilities that eliminate IT dependency.
The result? Finance teams can reduce their close cycles by up to 60%—and in some cases as much as 90%—simply by eliminating repetitive manual steps.
GLSU: Uploading Made Smarter
At the core of FinOps is GLSU, a long-trusted Excel-to-SAP upload tool. It allows users to create, validate, and post journal entries directly from Excel. Every entry is pre-validated before reaching SAP, ensuring errors are caught immediately—saving both time and rework.
Once posted, SAP document numbers automatically flow back into Excel as clickable links. Auditors appreciate this transparency: they can click a document number in Excel to instantly access its SAP record, complete with attachments and supporting documentation.
Even large, complex entries—such as those exceeding 999 lines—are handled effortlessly. GLSU automatically breaks them into sequential documents, ensuring compliance while maintaining efficiency.
Simplified Reporting and Real-Time Insights
Beyond uploading, FinOps provides a suite of refreshable, drill-down reports that connect live to SAP ECC or S/4HANA. Finance teams can generate trial balances, income statements, and cost center reports without waiting for overnight data refreshes or IT intervention.
Each report exists as an Excel template—easy to share, customize, and reuse. Pre-built templates cover most common reporting needs, and users can create their own within minutes.
This model gives finance professionals real-time visibility into their data while maintaining full SAP security and audit control.
Business Value and Future Readiness
The tangible business benefits are compelling:
- Month-end close reduced from 8–12 days to 3–5 days on average.
- Errors caught before posting, eliminating costly reversals.
- IT freed from routine finance tasks, allowing faster response to strategic projects.
- Audit trail continuity, with all actions visible in SAP.
FinOps is also future-proof, working seamlessly across ECC, S/4HANA on-premise, and S/4HANA Public Cloud—ensuring continuity before, during, and after migration.
Empowering Finance to Lead
insightsoftware’s FinOps solution exemplifies a broader trend in finance transformation: putting control back in the hands of finance users. By combining Excel’s flexibility with SAP’s reliability, companies gain the best of both worlds—speed, accuracy, and independence.
As the speaker concluded, automation isn’t about replacing SAP or IT—it’s about making SAP easier to use and empowering finance professionals to do what they do best: analyze, advise, and drive business performance.
This blog is based on the presentation by insightsoftware at the SAP Controlling Conference. To access the full session and other in-depth SAP Controlling topics, sign up for our membership here.
