What’s Next for Cartesis/SAP BFC Customers – Part 4

For decades, organizations worldwide have relied on Cartesis/SAP BFC (BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation) for complex consolidation needs. Cartesis/SAP BFC has provided valuable support by simplifying financial close processes and by enabling sophisticated statutory consolidations and reporting. However, the end of support for Cartesis/SAP BFC has been updated yet again and is set for 2030. Organizations are proactively exploring advanced solutions that not only match the capabilities of these legacy systems but also integrate consolidations with planning, budgeting and forecasting.

In the previous post in our “What’s Next for Cartesis/SAP BFC Customers” blog series, we detailed 5 key considerations for Cartesis/SAP BFC customers who are moving toward an evaluation process, and identified 3 options to consider, as outlined in the first post in this series:

• Choice 1: Continue with legacy Cartesis/SAP BFC until support ends.
• Choice 2: Invest in SAP’s unproven next-generation products, such as Group Reporting, Analytics Cloud, Central Finance or some variant hybrid strategy.
  • Requires at least one S/4 HANA Finance instance for Group Reporting.
• Choice 3: Take control of the Finance Transformation by evaluating alternate EPM strategies such as OneStream.

We’ve curated a guide to show you real time examples of how customers like you have overcome those very challenges head on. Click here to see Top 10 Reasons Why Customers Choose OneStream to Get More Value from Their SAP Investment.

In this blog post, we’ll focus on Choice 3, and show why OneStream’s Intelligent Finance Platform emerges as the optimal solution for Cartesis/SAP BFC customers, focusing on consolidations as the central topic.

The Legacy of Cartesis/SAP BFC in Sophisticated Consolidations

Cartesis/SAP BFC was one of the most technically capable, sophisticated consolidation solutions. Engineered to manage complex financial consolidation processes with a unique integrated data model, serving as a repository for intricate consolidations and integrating various financial management data for reporting on actuals, budgets and forecasts. Below are some of the key capability’s customers have depended on:

• Specific Dimensionality: Tailored dimensions for consolidations such as audit trail, multi-period, flows, ledgers, journals and versioning, as well as user-defined dimensions for additional detail (e.g., cost centers, regions, products and customers).
• Built-In Controls: Data integrity through built-in controls on data collection, validations and the ability to collect commentary and attachments.
• Business Rules: Robust business rules with filters, scopes, conditions, coefficients and a wizard to create consolidation calculations, as well as the capability to create SQL formulas for more intricate rules.
• Financial Details: Specific financial details such as account types, currencies, rates and the power to simulate these across consolidations, consolidation methods, and intercompany and inter-segment eliminations.
• Reporting and Forms: Reporting and forms that traverse the entire lifecycle of financial consolidations, covering everything from data collection to financial reporting.

However, despite Cartesis/SAP BFC’s support ending in 2030, no immediate parity with SAP Group Reporting exists. Nor is parity expected until 2030 if you have confidence in SAP’s roadmap. As a result, organizations are seeking the next generation of sophisticated consolidation solutions.

But the good news is that organizations now have a choice.

Why OneStream Is the Answer for Sophisticated Consolidations and Beyond

Modern Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions such as OneStream present an array of sophisticated consolidation capabilities while offering a unified approach to CPM. That approach distinguishes OneStream from other approaches that rely on a patchwork of multiple products and integrations.

Architected to be a unified platform for all CPM processes, OneStream started with consolidations at its core, arguably the hardest and most complex part of CPM. Today, the platform has effectively tackled the complexities of global consolidations and reporting.

In the chart below, we compare the complex consolidation capabilities between OneStream and Cartesis/SAP BFC to illustrate why OneStream stands out.

The list below gets a little more granular on some of the key capabilities that come with using OneStream:

• Unified Platform: Combines sophisticated consolidation capabilities with planning, budgeting and forecasting – eliminating the need to integrate across multiple products and ensuring data accuracy, consistency, reconciliation and transparency across all financial processes.
• Built-In Financial Intelligence: Uses built-in financial intelligence (e.g., time, account, currency, intercompany and flow) and a consolidation engine to accurately produce consolidated financial results – expediting implementation, reducing costs and ensuring accurate results.
• Robust Data Quality and Governance: Establishes robust data governance through a built-in ERP/source-agnostic data quality engine to flexibly handle complex mappings and transformations, ensuring data integrity, security, compliance and a clear audit trail.
• Powerful Dimensionality: Delivers powerful dimensionality for complex global consolidations; the flexibility needed by global organizations (i.e., varying cost centers, regions, products and customers); and innovative Extensible Dimensionality, allowing dimensional detail to be flexed by process while ensuring direct reconciliation across actuals, budgets, plans and forecasts.

• Configurable Workflow Processes: Provides flexible workflows, controls, validations, commentary, attachments and certifications, which allows for tailoring the consolidation and CPM processes to specific needs – enabling real-time collaboration, task assignment and task tracking – and ensuring the platform can adapt and grow without extensive customizations.
• Optimized Reporting: Streamlines financial and operational reporting with drill-down/drill-back capabilities, deep integration with Microsoft Office and a “create once and use everywhere” capability, ensuring end-user self-service, sophisticated reports and real-time analysis via interactive dashboards that fuel insights into organizational performance.
• Modern Platform for Growth: OneStream’s modern, globally compliant cloud architecture unifies consolidations, budgeting, planning and forecasting in a single platform with scalability and flexibility, delivering faster processing times, streamlining the close process and improving overall system performance.

Not to mention, the OneStream MarketPlace extends the platform’s capabilities with solutions such as Account Reconciliations, Transaction Matching, Tax Provisioning and specialty planning solutions (e.g., for People, Capital and Cash Planning). Continuous innovations in areas such as Sensible Machine Learning also mean customers derive continuous value from their investment in OneStream, lowering both technical debt and the total cost of ownership.

Conclusion

As organizations confront the challenges of handling sophisticated consolidations in an increasingly complex financial landscape, legacy systems like Cartesis/SAP BFC and other multi-product CPM approaches fall short. Instead, OneStream’s Intelligent Finance Platform provides a modern, unified platform for financial consolidations, reporting, budgeting, planning and forecasting.

By transitioning to OneStream, Cartesis/SAP BFC customers can seamlessly meet the requirements for complex global consolidations while embracing flexibility, scalability, collaboration, data governance and continuous innovations. 

With over 1,300 customers, many successful migrations from Cartesis/SAP BFC to OneStream, and a mission to ensure every customer is a reference, OneStream stands as the pathway to a future of optimized, accurate, and trusted financial consolidations and unified CPM.

Learn More

Ready to join the organizations that have already taken the step from Cartesis/SAP BFC to OneStream?  Check out our video here, and be sure to visit our website.