Automation of SAP CO Cost Center Budget planning process with Excel

Cost center budget is a major subject in SAP controlling. this process separates the company into different cost centers.
Each cost center represents a unit within the company, such as facility or department.
The person in charge of a certain cost center is responsible for developing the budget for his area.
Companies can classify cost centers in a number of ways as geographic location, individual product line or function.
In this blog, we will concentrate on the Excel sheets generation of each cost center with its own data and then the distribution of the documents, update the sheet data, and finally send back to SAP and update the budget.


The Challenge

A large international company conducts annual budgeting and quarterly reviews and
revisions across all 600 of their cost centers.
Each cost center has one person who is responsible for the budget, with some people
responsible for multiple cost centers.
Once a year, the Finance team manually prepares Excel templates and populates prior
year actuals into 600 different spreadsheets, then emails them to each of the cost
center owners.  This takes about three weeks to do.
The cost center owners then populate their expected budget numbers for the upcoming
year into the template then send back to a group email box, where the Finance team
uploads the proposed budget figures into SAP.  At least they have a 3rd party
application for this but it is still a manual upload process spreadsheet by spreadsheet.
If there are mandatory budget reductions, for example, a 5% reduction mandate, the
process must be repeated.
Similarly, within each quarter, the same process is used to collect updates
on future quarters.


The Solution

Create an automated way to generate and email out a spreadsheet template filled with
prior year actuals and spots for next year budget.
Setup an automated way to collect the submissions emailed back from the cost center
owners and upload into SAP’s budget functionality.
This solution will be fully automated.
Ox4Sap is the application handle this solution Because of it’s abilities to handle
Office documents on the server and manipulate Office documents without Office
application, Ox4Sap is the right product to this scenario.


sap interactive excel

Figure 1: Generate data sheets from SAP

sap cost center budget

Figure 2: Cost center owner update the Sheet data

sap budget planning

Figure 3: Update Budget data on SAP