Reporting Tools in Oracle Fusion/Cloud

Fusion Financials provides various types of reporting methods that work off the same standard and multi-dimensional balances. Now because all of the reporting and analytic tools leverage the same source of truth, it ensures that all the roles in your company regardless of the type of report they need will be on the same page.

• Financial Reporting Studio
• OTBI (Oracle Transactional BI)
• BI Publisher
• Smartview
• Account Monitor
• Account Inspector

Financial Reporting Studio

Financial Reporting Studio is the report designer tool or a report repository. It is Oracle’s best client based report authoring tool. It enables users to create customize and view income statements and balance sheet reports.

Business users do not have to run the report, all they got to do is open it and real-time balances are shown automatically. Users can then drilldown from reports to subledger transactions, as well as publish reports in a variety of formats (MS Excel, PDF, MS Word, MS Powerpoint, etc.).

Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence

OTBI is a fusion specific reporting tool , used by top level managements of organizations without the need for any technical knowledge. It is a flexible and easy to use analysis tool that helps gain real time insight into transactional data.

• It is a real-time online reporting tool querying directly from Fusion Application data.
• This is an ad hoc analysis tool based on transactional data focused on operational and transactional reporting.
• Business users can easily create reports and dashboards through personalization.
• It focuses on transactional and operational data such as invoices, payments and assets.
• In OTBI, instead of constructing a SQL query, you can simply drag and drop selected data from subject areas and use different graphical views.
• Users can create out of the box reports (e.g reconciliation reports).
• The more commonly used reconciliation reports are receivables to GL recon report and payables to GL recon report.

Oracle BI Publisher

BI Publisher is a reporting tool which requires technical knowledge(SQL) to develop the report. Through BI Reports definition process only we have an option of writing SQL queries to fetch the data from database otherwise the BI Reports creation is completely a technical task where we have to write a program to develop the report.

• It helps to author, manage and deliver document reports
• The reports created here are out of the box operational reports
• BI Publisher provides high fidelity, pixel-perfect documents
• They generate high volume transactional and operational printed reports
• It has flexible and customizable output formats: excel, pdf, doc and html

 Smartview

Most business users are proficient in Excel and hence Smart View, an excel based utility enables the user to analyse real time GL balances in Excel sheets. These sheets are connected to the Essbase cube directly. Smartview is an ideal tool for financial analysts or power users to pivot across any dimension to perform ad-hoc analysis, add calculations and create graphs using Excel’s built-in functionalities.

With Smartview what we can do is whatever analysis you want to do against accounts or you want to prepare some reports or if you want to do some analysis which you can directly from the spreadsheet instead of doing it from the system.By using FRS,within the system there is a framework from where you can do but by using Smartview functionality we can do this in spreadsheet where we can do all analysis and get the real time data.

 Account Monitor

The Account Monitor is itself designed to create active searches. The good news is that Account Monitor has Embedded Intelligence built-in to help you assess the impact of balance changes (favorable vs unfavorable). This in turn makes it a powerful tool for real time, multidimensional account analysis.

·        This solves the issues most accountants face, by adopting a Proactive method of monitoring critical balances.

• It has user friendly and user-configurable rules and thresholds
• It gives users timely alerts when account balances exceed thresholds
• It provides year over year or actual vs budget comparisons
• It provides the facility to drill down to view break down of balances for each child value that rolls up to the parent value
• It drills down to the subledger level and you can even check the receipts created
• For visual understanding it makes use of graphs and pie charts

Account Inspector

This tool is best for users to perform ad-hoc balance queries. It enables them to perform multi-dimensional analysis, slicing and dicing of information, and pivoting– all within a web page. How it works is , after you specify your query criteria, such as your ledger and chart of accounts dimensions, you can expand on any parent value to get a breakdown by each child value that rolls up to the parent value. Again, because this query is working off of the same live, pre-aggregated data, you can change query criteria and instantly refresh results, which is what every business user wants.

Automatic Offset in Oracle Payables

When an AP invoice is entered, there may be multiple expense/ distribution accounts and the corresponding liability account generally booked is the default account picked from the Supplier site or the one defaulted at Invoice header level. However, there may be scenarios where a business entity is using the same Operating Unit to make purchases against multiple balancing segments. In such cases, it would be imperative to have different liability accounts booked against each of the different distribution accounts.

For example, consider an AP Invoice with a default liability account and two different distribution accounts.

Liability is an offset account. We can offset liabilities in three ways i.e

• None
• Balance
• Account

If you enable Automatic Offsets, Payables automatically balances invoice and payment distributions that cross balancing segments by creating offsetting entries for each balancing segment. Automatic Offsets is a powerful feature that greatly affects processing throughout Payables

Liability account set at Supplier site is: -

None: If the Automatic Offset method is "None" then while offsetting the liability account for the invoices which are distributed with multiple BSVs , it will use the liability account mapped at Supplier Site and automatically generates Intercompany Accounts to balance the journal.

It will generate Intercompany accounts provided when we enable Intercompany accounts at the GL otherwise it will fail to generate accounting.

 

Example for None

                                                                           Debit                    Credit

               01.01.00.00.1530                            5000

               02.11.00.00.1530                            5000

               01.00.00.00.2210                                                          10000

               01.00.00.00.1810(IC Rec)             5000

               02.00.00.00.2370(IC Pay)                                            5000

 

Balance: In Balance method when offsetting the liability account Balancing Segment is derived from the same entry and remaining all the segments are going to come from Supplier Site.

 

Example for  Balance

                                                                           Debit                    Credit

               01.01.00.00.1530                            5000

               02.11.00.00.1530                            5000

               01.00.00.00.2210                                                          5000

               02.00.00.00.2210                                                          5000

Account: In Account method all the segments are going to come from same entry and Natural Account segment is going to come from Supplier Site.

 Example for  Account

                                                                           Debit                    Credit

               01.01.00.00.1530                            5000

               02.11.00.00.1530                            5000

               01.01.00.00.2210                                                          5000

               02.11.00.00.2210                                                          5000

Enable Automatic Offset Method at the Payables Option

N: AP -> Setup -> Options -> Payables Options -> Operating Unit: Select OU

Accounting Option -> Automatic Offset Method: None

Create an invoice and validate and then run create accounting to see the impact.

 Similarly change the Automatic offset method to Balance and Account and create invoices and run accounting to see the impact.

P2P Journal Entries in Fusion

1. Purchase Requisition no JE
2. Request for Quotation no JE
3. We prepare a Purchase Order against best RFQ no JE
4. Goods Receipt(You receive the goods enter a Goods Received Note (GRN) in Oracle Purchasing)
               Receiving Inventory A/c…………….Debit (Picks from Receipt Accounting options)
               AP Accrual A/C………Credit (Picks from Accrual Account of PO-TAB/TAD)
5. When we are moving the Goods from Staging area to Sub-Inv or Delivery happens/ Put Away
               Material A/C..............Debit (Picks from Charge Account of PO-TAB/Cost Accounting Options)
               Receiving Inventory A/C......Credit (Picks from Receipt Accounting options)
6. While Creating the Invoice
               AP Accrual A/c………….Debit (Picks from Accrual Account of PO-TAB/TAD)
               Liability(Supplier) A/c…………..Credit (Picks from Supplier Site/Common Options)
7. While making payment to supplier
               Liability(Supplier) A/C…………… Debit (Picks from Supplier Site/Common Options)
               Cash Clearing A/c…………….Credit (Picks from Bank Setup)
8.When reconciling
               Cash Clearing A/C...................Debit (Picks from Bank Setup)
               Cash A/C..........................................Credit (Picks from Bank Setup)

Key features of Oracle Financials Cloud

Centralized Setup using FSM: Centralized implementation experience using FSM. Central place to enter all setups across products like Financials, SCM, PPM.

Revenue Recognition Compliance: Centralized and automated revenue management to address revenue as per ASC 606 and IFRS 15 accounting standard with ability to recognize revenue independent of billing

Multi-dimensional reporting. This is a key feature for general ledger. General ledger in the Financials Cloud integrates with Essbase, a multidimensional database that can generate financial statement reports. You can use the data from Essbase using Oracle Financial Studio reports, using Smart View, a spreadsheet tool so accountants can retrieve these reports in a very familiar environment, in Microsoft Excel.

File Based Data Import: Seeded functionality to upload high volumes of data. Data conversion can be done using FBDI templates in Cloud without any technical knowledge.

Extensive spreadsheet integration. You can create quite a few transactions in different modules in an Excel spreadsheet template. So in receivables, you can create customer receipts. In AP, you can create supplier invoices from a spreadsheet template that Oracle provides. This extensive spreadsheet integration also defining setups, such as GL setups, banking setups, etc.

Embedded Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI). Oracle delivers OTBI reports, but you can also create your own OTBI objects to answer daily business questions. This would be a reporting tool available to all of the the subledger applications, like Revenue Management and receivables, payables, cash management, etc.

Infolets and Infotiles. They help our users see what needs to be done on a day-to-day basis. These mini dashboards improve efficiency and guides the end-users through the daily processes that need their attention.

Imaging integration for Payables. You can create a supplier invoice based on an image. So that image of that invoice, a PDF document or a document ending in an extension like JPEG, JPEG can be sent to an email account that Oracle provides, and then we use technology to read the images in that document and create a supplier invoice.

Role based dashboards. These are navigational components that allow a user to do a number of functions related to their jobs in one navigational component, multiple links, multiple sections in a page, and that increases efficiencies. It reduces the number of clicks are they have to do.

Shared Services Center: Enhanced support for processing payments received from customers centrally for multiple business units operating under shared services model. Invoice of one business unit can be paid by a payment from another business unit