SAP® Build Process

Automation for Use

in Finance

Building with simplicity to automate

faster and operate with confidence
 Table of Contents

4 Executive Summary

6
Streamlining Processes for Finance
Professionals

10
What is SAP Build Process
Automation?

12
How Finance Professionals Benefit
from Process Automation

16 Pre-Built Bots Showcase

26
Enabling Simplicity, Speed, and
Confidence for Finance Professionals

30
Continue Your Journey with
SAP Build Process Automation

2 3
 Executive
Summary
Finance professionals are often overburdened with
manual tasks that leave them unable to focus on high-level
strategies. Many finance departments, maybe such as
your own, could greatly benefit from process automation.

In this e-book, we’ll explore how the SAP® Build Process

Automation solution can help finance professionals
easily build automated processes into organizational
workflows – freeing up finance colleagues for long-term
planning. We’ll also delve into four popular bots that can
help finance departments realize immediate value.

4 5
 Streamlining
Processes
for Finance
Professionals
Finance departments face competing time pressures,
changing regulatory and reporting requirements,
and more. They’re also often burdened with manual
completion of easily repeatable tasks. Adding to
these complications is the reality that finance leaders
count on their teams to produce accurate, detailed
reports and data – in almost real time – so leadership
can make informed decisions. However, finance
teams have struggled to manage their huge, growing
volumes of operational transactions and processes.
These overwhelming demands can leave the members
of your organization’s finance department feeling
overworked and unable to excel at their jobs.

Automating simple tasks within payroll, accounts

payable/receivable, and account reconciliation processes
can save finance departments invaluable time.

6 7
 Seven in ten finance teams (72%) SAP understands the needs and challenges of finance departments. Our team
that works with SAP S/4HANA® has built bots and workflows in SAP Build Process
spend up to 10 people hours per Automation to address common tasks and challenges that finance departments face.
This content relates to scope items in best practices for SAP S/4HANA implementation
week, or 520 hours per year, on – our content is truly integrated with SAP S/4HANA, not simply a tool on top.

accounts payable–related tasks that In this e-book, we’ll explore some of the most popular pre-built content that

could be automated.1 SAP S/4HANA offers to automate the processes you’re already running. You can
use the content as is or modify it to support your unique needs. Let’s dive in!

1. “CFO Research Identifies That 72% of Finance Organizations Spend as Much as 520
8 Hours per Year on Manual Accounts Payable Tasks,” Business Wire, July 28, 2020.
9
 S AP B uild P roces s Automation

Integration,
process insights, Fusion team
and sentiments development

What is
Processes and Forms and
workflows multistep approvals

SAP Build
Integration
SAP with
and non-SAP Low-code
SAP integration
and third-party app dev and
software business sites

Process
Business rules Pre-built
and decisions content

Automation?
Business
Businessprocess
process
transformation
transformation
solutions from SAP

Task Unified launchpad

automation and task center

SAP Build Process Automation empowers business

Experience Management
Experience Pro-code
users and technologists to become business experts. solutions from
management app dev
Through this solution, stakeholders can build automated SAP and Qualtrics

processes and workflows visually and simply. Document Process visibility

SAP Build Process Automation offers pre-built content understanding and flexibility
and features – such as bots, process steps, business
rules, and workflow components. With powerful yet
intuitive low-code and no-code capabilities, the solution Hundreds of pre-built
helps your business drive automation by applying the processes and automations
expertise of business experts (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Example of SAP Build Process Automation

10 11
 How Finance
Professionals
Benefit from
Process
Automation
Businesses that embrace process automation
in their finance departments can unlock a
myriad of advantages.

Let’s examine some of these benefits.

12 13
 Transparency Scalability
Financial matters often require high visibility from The volumes of data that your business manages are
multiple high-level stakeholders in your organization. growing by the day – and will grow exponentially as digital
Automation can assist with creating records for auditing services continue gaining prominence. Automation can
purposes, providing more transparency and visibility into help to manage the massive volumes of data your finance
financial matters across your organization. team would otherwise have to sift through manually.
It’s easy to implement rules to flag outliers requiring
attention and monitor bots, ensuring people provide a
final quality check.

Error reduction Cost savings

Automating manual tasks like data collection provides Automation helps your business eliminate the
full visibility into all moving pieces in finance pipelines, need to perform repeatable tasks manually, which
such as contracts, invoices, vendor information, and reduces the time that employees spend on routine
more – helping your company eliminate errors that are tasks. By empowering your organization’s finance
often associated with manual information management. professionals to focus their energies on strategic work,
they can attend to more lucrative projects. This helps
drive costs down company-wide.

Improved employee satisfaction

Many employees don’t enjoy repetitive tasks, as these
tasks are often time consuming, leaving employees
unable to focus on more important work. Automating your
financial processes and operations enables your finance
team to focus on strategic tasks that help your business
grow and make your employees feel more fulfilled.

14 15
 Pre-Built
Bots Showcase
Now let’s examine four popular bots
in use today. With these bots, we’ll
explore how to:

• Create sales orders automatically from a

Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

• Automate mass updates of asset master data.

• Automate the upload of manual entries via an

application programming interface (API).

• Create purchase requisitions from Excel.

Each of these use cases can help you unlock invaluable

process and operation improvements that will grow your
business. Let’s learn how SAP Build Process Automation
can empower your organization’s finance professionals.

16 17
 Automatic Creation of
Sales Orders from Excel
(4G5)
Situation Solution
Sales order requests are often received A pre-built bot integrated with
by e-mail, in Excel attachments and SAP S/4HANA can automate the sales
in large volumes. Processing these order creation process. After customers
large volumes of sales orders generally enter the necessary data, this bot
involves manually cutting and pasting can monitor a specified base folder
data into your system. The finance where completed Excel templates can
professionals manually making these be collected. The bot can also scan
updates are burdened with a time- a specified inbox for unread emails
consuming process that’s often using provided search terms – such as
error prone and leads to doubled “sales order” – to extract the attached,
efforts. Let’s review how SAP Build completed Excel templates. The Excel
Process Automation can help solve for file data will be transformed into a Learn how to create sales orders automatically through the
that problem. structured order request, which the capabilities of our pre-built bot.
sales order creation API will process to
create sales orders in SAP S/4HANA.
Once the sales orders are created,
relevant sales teams are notified
automatically. With this bot, sales This is one of our most
popular bots for customers
representatives can focus on creating
better customer experiences, rather
than be stuck doing easily repeatable using SAP S/4HANA.
tasks.

Explore automatically creating sales orders from Excel

in our store.

18 19
 Mass Update Asset
Master Data
(57O)
Situation Solution
Asset master data in SAP S/4HANA is A pre-built bot can be integrated with
the authoritative data maintained by an SAP S/4HANA to complete mass
organization that relates to various fixed updates to master data. The “Mass
and intangible assets. For example, with Update Asset Master Data” bot provides
a piece of IT equipment, you may need an option to make bulk updates to the
to record the cost center its owner works asset master data in SAP S/4HANA.
in, when the asset was purchased, and The user fills out an Excel input template
its serial number. Then, if the cost center supported by the bot and keeps such
plan changes, you’d need to adjust the files in a specific folder. Then, the
cost center assignment for all affected bot will read all inserted Excel files
assets – or, as part of year-end closing, and upload the asset master data to
you’d need to revise depreciation terms. SAP S/4HANA. Updates can be easily Learn how to make automatic mass updates to asset master
It would be easy to make an error when cascaded to all relevant assets, errors data with the capabilities of our pre-built bot.
updating these entries individually – or can be reduced, and your organization’s
to simply miss an item altogether. finance professionals can work on more
SAP Build Process Automation offers a meaningful endeavors.
better way to deal with this infrequent
but cumbersome process. This bot is perfect for
asset-intensive companies.

Explore automating mass updates of asset master

data in our store.

20 21
 Automated Upload of
Manual Entries via API Excel
Up
lo
ad
Bot notifies the
user of status

(4CA)
Business users Template
select the type and outcome
of template to via e-mail.
prepare

Situation Solution Monitor Email

Bot 4CA
for Journals
ad
Proper journal entries are paramount to A pre-built bot can help automate lo
Up
a business maintaining healthy financial the upload of manual journal entries.
practices. As a result, journal entries are The “Automated Upload of Manual
generally completed manually and under Entries via API” bot automatically
much scrutiny from management to collects journal entry templates from
*Other Bots Journal
ensure their accuracy. However, because Microsoft Outlook, extracts and Journal Entries
Entries Managed with an
journal entries are frequently updated, validates the content, and posts the Posted SAP Fiori® App
collecting and uploading these entries entries into SAP S/4HANA via API. This SAP S/4HANA Cloud
can be cumbersome for financial bot can help your finance team not only
departments. Finance professionals save invaluable time, but also provide
need tools to help automate the them with standardized entry templates
upload of journal entries in a succinct, so your business can achieve greater This diagram showcases the process flow for this bot.
standardized way to assist with ensuring uniformity for journal entries. Figure 2: Automated Upload of Journal Entries into the Process Flow in SAP S/4HANA Cloud
their accuracy and availability.

This bot helps keep your

finance journals aligned, from
reporting to auditing.

Explore automating uploads of manual entries via APIs

in our store.

22 23
 Create Purchase
Requisitions from Excel
(48M)
Situation Solution
Organizations always need supplies The “Create Purchase Requisitions from
or materials and equipment. When Excel” bot simplifies the creation of
organizations allow department purchase requisitions. This process bot
managers to place orders directly with automatically creates purchase requisitions
suppliers, fraudulent activity can occur from Excel files in SAP S/4HANA. It first
and there’s also a risk of spending reads purchase requisition details from
beyond budgets. As such, procurement Excel files, updates or uploads the data
departments have the key responsibility in SAP S/4HANA via API, and then
of ensuring minimal cost overruns and creates the new purchase requisition
often need to review all purchase in SAP S/4HANA. This bot saves your
requisitions. Manually creating individual finance team tremendous amounts
purchase requisitions one after another of time – time they’d otherwise spend Learn how to use our pre-built bot in SAP S/4HANA to
isn’t just a time-consuming process, but manually creating purchase requisitions automate the creation of purchase requisitions from Excel.
also a tedious one. Finance professionals one by one.
need access to tools that help them
automate the creation of purchase
requisitions, which will streamline
and accelerate your organization’s This bot is perfect for
streamlining purchasing
supply needs.

needs across your organization.

Explore creating purchase requisitions from Excel

in our store.

24 25
 Enabling
Simplicity,
Speed, and
Confidence
for Finance
Professionals
What do pre-built bots from SAP have in
common? They help finance professionals
optimize the processes they’re already running
in SAP S/4HANA. The content can be used as
is or modified to suit your needs. With workflow
management and robotic process automation
combined in a single low-code tool, automation
has never been easier.

26 27
 Key Capabilities SAP Build Process Automation Provides Additional Automation Use Cases for SAP S/4HANA Finance
Your Business In addition to the pre-built automations covered in this e-book, there are many
additional ways customers can use our low-code solution for process automation
Build with simplicity (as shown in Figure 3).

SAP Build Process Automation uses visual drag-and-drop tools to create workflows
with pre-built, finance-specific content. Finance users can now build workflows
with ease, as well as automate tasks and decisions. To jump-start projects, users
can select from a rapidly growing library of more than 340 pre-built process flows, Financial Accounting & Enterprise Risk
Financial Close Treasury Tax
forms, business rules, dashboards, and bot automations across applications, lines of Operations & Compliance
business, and industries.
Automation Use Case Examples

Automate faster Automatic Automatic Bank statement Reconciliation Crawling agency

posting of general-ledger upload between forms portals to
Built-in AI capabilities help finance users streamline their processes with machine
payment advices entries with retrieve data
learning for decision assistance, intelligent document processing, and more. approval workflow Reconciliation Fill-in tax returns
The solution provides native integration with SAP applications, as well as connections Automatic & reporting & upload Automated
posting of invoices Financial generation of an
with non-SAP applications, to enable automation of complex workflows that span closing tasks Collection audit plan
multiple applications and lines of business. Automated of tax certificates
collection
reminders
Operate with confidence
With SAP Build Process Automation, organizations can manage their processes
and automations confidently on their cloud of choice while interoperating with Benefits of SAP Build Process Automation
their existing infrastructure. IT departments can empower business users to build
process workflows, automations, and decision models while safeguarding operations 5%–50% 20%–70% Reduction Improved Up to 100%
with centralized governance, testing, and monitoring capabilities. To help ensure reduction in reduction in in manual errors working capital audit &
compliance and automate processes in a scalable, reliable fashion, the service is customer billing, days to close governance
credit, and annual books compliance as
designed to meet stringent enterprise-class service-level agreements, compliance collection costs per policy
standards, and privacy regulations.

Figure 3: Automation Examples for the SAP S/4HANA Finance Solution

28 29
 Continue Your
Journey with
SAP Build
Process
Automation
In this e-book, we delved into the powerful,
pre-built content that SAP Build Process Automation
offers finance professionals.

There’s more to explore with SAP Build Process

Automation:

• Try SAP Build Process Automation with

our guided experience

• Check out the home page for SAP Build

Process Automation

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Studio SAP | 85241enUS (23/06)
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