Oracle Financials

Multi-Period Accounting in SLA

Author: Thomas Simkiss Date: February 28th, 2012
Categories: Oracle Application Services, Oracle E-Business Suite R12

Multiperiod accounting is a flexible, powerful tool available with Release 12 of the Oracle e-Business Suite which allows users to systematically record accounting entries across multiple periods. This post will focus on real world applications of this functionality, and present the detailed steps required to implement the functionality within Payables and Purchasing.

R12.2 Financials – New Functionality Added for Financials

Author: Lee Briggs Date: August 23rd, 2011
Categories: Oracle E-Business Suite R12

Although yet to be confirmed, Oracle is expected to release version R12.2 of it’s eBusiness Suite in October 2011.  BizTech has analyzed the following modules, and has determined that significant functionality is expected to be added in R12.2.  Some of the more significant functionality has been backported to older releases, and where appropriate, BizTech has identified the necessary patches.

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R12.2 Financials – Tax, Legal and Regulatory Updates

Author: Lee Briggs Date: August 23rd, 2011
Categories: Oracle E-Business Suite R12

Although yet to be confirmed, Oracle is expected to release version R12.2 of it’s eBusiness Suite in October 2011.  BizTech has compiled a list of the Tax, Legal and Regulatory updates that are expected to be added, amended, or removed in this latest release.

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R12.2 Financials – Modules with No New Functionality

Author: Lee Briggs Date: August 23rd, 2011
Categories: Oracle E-Business Suite R12

Although yet to be confirmed, Oracle is expected to release version R12.2 of it’s eBusiness Suite in October 2011.  BizTech has compiled a list, module by module, of the main features that have been added, amended, or removed in this latest release.

BizTech has analyzed the following modules, and has determined that at this time, no new functionality is expected to be added in R12.2

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Auto Invoice – Common pitfalls

Author: Jonathan LeBlanc Date: August 23rd, 2011
Categories: Oracle E-Business Suite R12

This is a continuation of my earlier post, ‘You have been tasked with developing an interface to AR and you’ve never used Oracle’s Auto Invoice before. What do you do?’. This time, the idea is to show some of the scenarios one would face while trying to import the invoices.

As most of you would agree, most of the time, the code never works the first time you run it. When you try to run Auto Invoice, after developing the code to interface the invoices into AR, you are naturally going to see some rejections.

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Intercompany / Intracompany Accounting in Oracle R12

Author: Thomas Simkiss Date: August 22nd, 2011
Categories: Oracle Application Services, Oracle E-Business Suite R12

If you are using R12 you may have encountered a requirement to setup all your legal entities with intercompany accounting for each. That is, for each legal entity, whether your setup requires that you configure intercompany relationships for each entity you have, or you are able to use the all other setup, it can still be a lot of work to configure.

One of the many benefits of R12 is that the new legal entity structure provides the ability to track intercompany transactions as a very granular level. Per the Oracle Financials Implementation Guide, there are different types of intercompany journals. The Balancing API first determines the type of the intercompany journal (one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many) with respect to the legal
entities. However, for intercompany balancing there is no clearing company usage and all legal entities are balanced by summary net with respect to each other.

Intercompany accounting for transactions performed between separate legal entities that belong to the same corporate enterprise.

Intracompany balancing for journals that involve different groups within the same legal entity,
represented by balancing segment values. A group could be a profit center, manufacturing plant, a warehouse, a cost center, or any other organization that represents a subset of a legal entity. Often, these transactions pass through a clearing organization, which is also represented by a balancing segment value.

In 11i, it was possible to use a clearing account or company, whereby a company can use a single account or company to own all its intercompany (or intracompany in R12 parlance) transactions.

This situation can look like this:

Parent Company is a holding company represented by value 1000. Parent Company pays the invoices on behalf of its subsidiaries, Child 1001 and Child 1005. Rather than have transactions flow across legal entities, Parent company wants all due to and due from to flow through it.

So, when an invoice is entered and paid for Child 1001, the journal entry would be this:

1001.Expense.0000 100
1000.A/P.0000 100
1000.I/C.1000 100
1001.I/C.1001 100

This is a relatively straightforward configuration which can be achieved via standard intercompany configuration.

However, what if there is a transaction between 1001 and 1005. Standard I/C setup will not allow a clearing account, so the intercompany would be between 1001 and 1005.

If you configure Legal Entity Parent Company, and assign value 1000 to it, and then assign the balancing segments for 1001 and 1005 to the Legal Entity Parent, you can achieve the desired result.

Using Intracompany accounting, for a source of Other, category of Other, allows you to configure all intracompany transactions to use the default clearing company of 1000.

The journal entry for a transaction between 1001 and 1005 would then look like this:
1001.Expense.0000 100
1005.Expense.0000 100
1005.I/C.1000 100
1001.I/C.1000 100

The journal above represents transactions run through the 1000 parent as per the requirements.

NOTE: If you are required to configure the 1001 or 1005 Legal entity for reporting purposes or bank ownership, this method will not work.

View-Only Access to Key Flexfield Values (Part 1)

Author: Lee Briggs Date: August 9th, 2011
Categories: Oracle E-Business Suite R12, Oracle Supply Chain Management

Many of my clients were initially surprised that, while Oracle provides a form to create and edit segment values, there is no seeded method to provide view-only access.  Some have been further surprised to find out there was no seeded method to restrict access to specific segments.

A client of mine, a global financial institution, had identified 80 individuals who would require view-only access to all the segments in 2 Charts of accounts, and I was able to meet this challenge using 2 separate forms personalizations.  I’ll discuss restricting access to specific modules, flexfields, structures, and segments in a follow-up blog entry, but for now, let’s look at preventing specific responsibilities from creating or editing segment values.

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Supplier Site Payment Methods in R12

Author: Jonathan LeBlanc Date: July 26th, 2011
Categories: Oracle E-Business Suite R12

In R12 the suppliers were merged into the Trading Community Architecture (TCA). The default payment method for supplier sites are now located in the IBY_EXT_PARTY_PMT_MTHDS table and not the AP_SUPPLIER_SITES_ALL table. Below is a query that will return a list of all suppliers, supplier sites and their payment methods. The default payment method is denoted with a primary flag = ‘Y’. 

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You have been tasked with developing an interface to AR and you’ve never used Oracle’s Auto Invoice before. What do you do?

Author: Jonathan LeBlanc Date: May 19th, 2011
Categories: Oracle Application Services, Oracle E-Business Suite R12

You have been tasked with developing an interface to AR and you’ve never used Oracle’s Auto Invoice before. What do you do? Unfortunately, at one time I was in this situation. Though I knew the concepts of the process, the real time implementation involved a lot of challenges. The following is for those who have never interfaced invoices through Auto Invoice. My goal is to provide an overall understanding of the process and pitfalls that one should be aware of.  

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What do I do? My bank requires data not in the Oracle Payments Disbursement Payments Instruction Extract?

Author: Jonathan LeBlanc Date: April 18th, 2011
Categories: Oracle Application Services, Oracle E-Business Suite R12

In a previous post, I spoke of an organization that needed to create a custom BI Publisher template to accommodate their Canadian bank’s proprietary file format for EFT files in R12.  What I didn’t mention was that some of the required data was stored in descriptive flexfields within Oracle.   Descriptive flexfields are not included in the Oracle Payments Funds Disbursement Payment Instruction Extract data which is the standard data definition for AP funds disbursement.

As is the case with many organizations, they were concerned that they would have to modify the standard programs to accommodate their bank’s requirements.  Their minds were put at ease when they learned that Oracle provided a standard API which allows organizations to add additional fields (i.e. XML Tags) to the XML extract.  This standard PL/SQL package was the IBY_FD_EXTRACT_EXT_PUB.

The standard XML file that is generated by the Payment Instruction Extract is organized into 4 hierarchical groups:

1. Payment Instruction – The payment instruction group encompasses the entire file.
2. Payment – The payment group represents a payment to a specific supplier.
3. Document Payable – The document payable group represents the individual invoices that are being paid to the supplier within the payment.
4. Document Payable Line – The document payable line group represents the lines within the invoice being paid to the supplier.

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