Oracle General Ledger

Oracle General Ledger is one of the core products of EBS suite, and this is integrated with almost every segment within EBS.

Oracle General Ledger - Major Functions and Features

The major features of general ledger. Here are some listed major functions and features of Oracle GL Modules.
Define multiple calendars and accounting structures while dynamically creating new accounts combinations based on user defined rules
Uses standard , reversing and recurring journals
Uses Mass Allocations to automate your cost and revenue allocations quickly and accurately
Uses the Financial Statement Generator (FSG) to create custom financial reports
Uses the GL Desktop Integrator to combine the power of Oracle GL with an Excel spreadsheet to budget, report, analyze & enter accounting information.
Extensive foreign currency capability
Automate currency conversion, translation & revaluation in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles
Query and report on all foreign currencies and translated balances using single or multiple sets of books
Use multiple reporting currencies sets of books to manage routine reporting of foreign currency transactions
Record and review accounting information
Import data from subsidiary ledgers or enter journals to record actual or budget transactions directly into GL
Enter encumbrance journals to track encumbrances through the purchase approval process and to control spending against budgeted amounts
Review account balances online or through standard reports
Manipulate accounting information
Correct actual, budget and encumbrance information
Revalue and translate balances denominated in foreign currencies
Consolidate balances from multiple sets of books
Analyze accounting information
Integrate GL with Financial Analyzer to simplify the budgeting and forecasting process to efficiently answer ad hoc requests and to identify areas for profit improvement


Oracle General Ledger Integration

Here is a list of just some of the Financial, manufacturing and Human Resource Management products that integrate with General Ledger. Typically the integration of General ledger in EBS can be best understood as:

The integration data information can be best understood as below:
Oracle Financial
Oracle Payables sends invoices, payments, realized gain and loss on foreign currency, and invoice price variance to GL.
Oracle Receivables sends invoices, payments, adjustments, debit memos, credit memos, cash, chargebacks, and realized gain and loss on foreign currency to GL.
Oracle Assets sends capital and construction in process asset additions, cost adjustments, transfers, retirements, depreciation, and reclassifications to GL.
Oracle Purchasing sends accruals or receipts not invoiced, purchase orders, final closes, and cancellations to GL.
Oracle Projects sends cost distribution of labor and non-labor costs, and project revenue to GL.
Oracle Treasury sends revaluation and accrual entries to GL.
Oracle Property Manager sends revenues and expenses related to real estate to GL.
Oracle Lease Management sends accounting distributions related to leases, such as bookings of contracts, accruals, asset dispositions, terminations, and adjustments for multi-GAAP contracts to GL.
Oracle HRMS and Payroll
Oracle HR shares employee information with GL.
Oracle Payroll sends salary, deductions, and tax information to GL.
Oracle Manufacturing:
In terms of manufacturing this is Integrated as:
Oracle Inventory sends cycle counts, physical inventory adjustments, receiving transactions, delivery transactions, intercompany transfers, sales order issues, internal requisitions, sub-inventory transfers, and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) to GL.
Work In Process(WIP) sends material issues or backflush from WIP to GL, along with completions, returns, resource and overhead transactions, and cost updates.
Oracle Labor Distribution normally sends salary costs to GL.
Other Products
Oracle GL not only integrated with Application product, it does have capability to integrate with other products which is used for adhoc cum management Reporting, these tools are mostly.

Business Intelligence/Analytic Solutions
Enterprise Planning and Budgeting (EPB)
Oracle Financial Services Applications (OFSA)
Daily Business Intelligence (DBI)
Activity-Based Management (OABM)
General Ledger’s integration with Oracle Enterprise Planning and Budgeting (EPB) allows us to easily identify, analyze, model, budget, forecast, and report on information stored in our general ledger. Using Oracle GL to maintain and report on account balances throughout the accounting period, and use Financial Analyzer to analyze financial data, such as actual and budget balances, which is after closing the period. We can automatically transfer actual, budget, or encumbrance data, as well as functional, statistical, and foreign entered data from General Ledger to Financial Analyzer, which is on of requirement if company does have different management reporting approach. With financial Analyzer, we can perform sophisticated budgeting and modeling, make changes to budgets and write back budget data to a new budget in GL or to several budget versions for comparative reporting. We would also drill directly from EPB balances to balances and transactions in Oracle General Ledger. With this extended functionality your EPB users with immediate and direct access to GL data without having to run reports or account inquiries in GL, that makes process efficient without any extra step.
Oracle Financial Services Applications (OFSA) is a product suite that helps financial services institutions assess enterprise performance. This integration allows the transfer of General Ledger balances to OFSA to reconcile OFSA instrument tables, calculate transfer pricing of non-interest balance sheet items, or perform allocations. The results of OFSA allocation and transfer pricing results can then be transferred back to GL for posting and reporting.
The integration with Oracle Daily Business Intelligence (DBI) allows us to get a daily snapshot of company’s financial picture through its E-Business Suite Portals. This is achieved by over 200 pre-inbuilt Portals provide every user in the enterprise with the right information that they need, about every aspect of their business. This makes a centralized place to see the information spans across multiple applications in real time basis.
The integration with Oracle Activity Based Management (OABM) allows you to perform complex analysis on costs that are collected in General Ledger in a separate analysis environment—apart from your GL data. OABM is optimized to support multi-layer complex cost assignment rules, activity hierarchies, and complex product and service definitions in terms of activities with complete activity definitions.

Why Oracle Apps?

• Support for Global Functionality.
• Operate in One World with One Solution.
• No Language Boundaries
-Support for 30 languages
-Multi-lingual external documents
-All languages installable in same Unicode instance
• No Currency Boundaries
-Supports multiple currencies
• No Legislative Boundaries
-Customers operating in 100+ countries
-Support for statutory & customary local requirements
• Supports flexible management of business processes
• Has a common data model
• Supports statutory and customary local requirements
• Is built on open standards
• Collaborates with trading partners

Oracle Apps. Automate All Business Processes ( Across All Industries)

Discrete Manufactureing for

• Aerospace & Defense
• Automotive
• Consumer Products
• High Technology
• Industrial Products

Process Manufactureing for

• Chemicals
• Consumer Packaged Goods
• Life Sciences

Service

• Engineering & Construction
• Financial Services
• Professional Services
• Retail

Asset Intensive

• Communications
• Energy
• Travel & transportation
• Utilities

PublicServices

• Education
• Government – Defense
• Government – Civilian
• Healthcare

Advantages of Oracle E-Business Suite

• Oracle Database
• Consultants
• UI
• Role Based Security
• Advantage over Best of Breed Software
• Fast adoption of standards
• Ease of customization and installation
• Reports

Oracle Database
The biggest USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of Oracle ERP is that it is based on Oracle Database, which in itself is a market leader. So the Oracle ERP is best placed to take advantage of the advances in the database technology. The buzzword is "If it is in the database, you will get it and get it fast!!"

Consultants
As far as the components of the suite itself are concerned Oracle Financials is a market leader, Oracle HRMS and Payroll they are catching up pretty fast. So the market indications are pretty positive and you have enough consultants in the market to cash in.

UI
Oracle Apps UI comes in two flavors - The Oracle Forms and the Oracle Self Service Application (HTML). The former is meant for the power user and provides incredibly quick learning curves for people from the finance and other domains who are used to Fox pro and dBase forms.
The Oracle Self Service Application is an HTML based solution and specifically caters to the global organization where Internet plays a major role.

Role Based Security
Oracle has been a pioneer in Database Security systems and the buzz word of Oracle Database is "Unbreakable". Oracle Apps seem to gain from this legacy of secure systems. The role based security system offered by Oracle Apps is one of the better security models available currently.

Advantage over Best of Breed Software
Best of breed software cater to specific areas like HRMS, Financials etc. If your business is looking for software in only one specific area and you don't think s/w for the other areas are required, you might be tempted to go for these offering... But one word of caution, in case you go for s/w for other areas where you select another best of breed s/w, you might end up paying exceptional amount of money in integrating the two softwares.

This is where Oracle Apps and other Suite vendors like SAP score over the best of the breed software. Implementing different parts of the suite would be much less costly than best of breed software and getting them to talk to each other.

Fast adoption of standards
By past record Oracle has a good record of adoption of new legal and technological standards which keep arising from time to time. So standards like Rosettanet, uccnet would be adopted as they solidify.

Ease of customization and installation
Oracle has a good record on supporting products. Oracle Apps are quite easy to install and customize according to your business needs.

Reports
Another major USP of Oracle Apps. In fact one single thing that should make you sit back and take notice. Check out the Oracle Daily business intelligence package. Chances are your business needs it.

GL, SOB, COA, BSV, CCID, LE.. - What's in an acronym?

I'm sure that nearly every company has as many internal acronyms as Oracle, but it is sometimes problematic for us because we often assume that our customers operate with the same understanding of acronyms and terminology that we do. Even internally, we are not all on the same page when using some of these acronyms and terms. I'm going to attempt to clarify some of these terms & acronyms, and if I get them wrong, I'm sure that I'll get some comments!

GL - usually pertaining to the General Ledger product. Sometimes you'll hear "in GL" which more than likely means "not some other product" like payables, receivables, subledger accounting, or intercompany.

SOB - Set of Books, grouping of journals. In Release 12, SOB has been renamed "Ledger", luckily it's only one word, so there's no need for an acronym. You'll typically see SOB written, but not spoken - saying SOB makes people giggle.

JE - typically, "journal entry" in GL. However, JE is the also the product prefix for the EMEA localizations, so it's helpful to know if you're talking Europe or accounting.

COA - Chart of Accounts. Technically speaking, COA is the set of valid combinations of values that make up your accounting flexfield. Frequently, we hear customers speak of "a single COA" when they really mean "a single COA structure". The difference is slight and can greatly impact a conversation. "A single COA" implies that there is one set of valid combinations that is uses by all SOBs or ledgers. "A single COA structure" says that all of SOBs have the same segment names, but there may be multiple valuesets for a given segment (ie- the Cost Center segment in the US is made up of "ABC","DEF", "GHI"; whereas the Cost Center segment in the UK contains "E11","E12","E13")

BSV - Balancing Segment Value. The value part of this is frequently misused. Accurately use, the BSV is the value of the segment of the combination that is qualified as the balancing segment (in the Vision instance, "01", "03","99", etc.) However, it's often used in conversation to mean the segment name (in the Vision instance, the balancing segment name is usually "Company").

CCID - Code Combination ID. It never ceases to amaze me how many people use this acronym because it's a technical term, but it's usually used in a functional way. The CCID is technically, the ID of the record in the GL_CODE_COMBINATIONS table that represents a combination of values in the accounting flexfield. For example, the account combination of "01.2500.36.C12" could be stored in the table with the ID of 384569. Typically, people are referring to "01.2500.36.C12" not 384569 when speaking of the CCID.

LE - Legal Entity. This is relatively new term in Release 12 because legal entities play a more prominent role Legal Entities are used to determine tax as well as the difference between intercompany (between LEs) and intracompany (within LE) trading and accounting. In R12, BSVs can be mapped to LE as part of the accounting setup.

Account - depends on whom you ask. On most of our user interfaces, "account" refers to the complete accounting flexfield ("01.2500.36.C12"). However, when defining your COA structure, one of the segments must be qualified as the Natural Account segment (possibly segment 2), and sometimes people refer to just this segment value when referring to "account" (if segment 2 is the natural account segment, then in the context of the combination "01.2500.36.C12", the term "account" would refer to just "2500").

SLA - subledger accounting (architecture). In Release 12, we introduced subledger accounting, the centralized rule-based accounting engine for all subledgers. Oddly enough, the product prefix for SLA is XLA, so you if you see references to tables and forms that are prefixed with XLA - it's SLA related.

In upcoming posts, I'll attempt to bring some deeper meaning to some of these terms and acronyms. If there are any terms or acronyms that you'd like added or discussed, leave a comment, and I'll add them to the list.

Flexfield Features & Benifits (Oracle Applications)

FLEXFIELD FEATURES

Change your Chart of Accounts at will – add or delete a segment or value.
Enjoy easy-to-use, automatic features. Install, map and let the software do the rest.
Eliminate unused accounts and code combinations that waste resources and hamper performance.
Feel secure.

Built-in features automatically update related information to maintain the relational integrity among data.
Increase accuracy.

FlexField includes automatic error-checking that identifies exceptions, alerts the user and implements the solution.
Customize for your company’s unique needs without expensive consulting.Follow a simple, graphical interface that takes you through the FlexField process.

FLEXFIELD BENEFITS

Low risk. Avoid problems associated with alternatives, such as losing history or violating integrity of data.
Model and change your Oracle Chart of Accounts as often as your business changes.
Fast configuration – typically over a weekend.
Low cost – less than a few weeks of consulting and reusable.
Protects and enhances your investment in Oracle Applications.
Load, map and go – fully automated process.
Model your Chart of Accounts before implementing. Now you can forecast the potential benefits or risks of mergers or adding and deleting new divisions and products.
Robust Chart of Accounts that more accurately reflect your financial picture, including your general ledger.Support available after installation.

Oracle E-Business Suite

Oracle E-Business Suite very user friendly environment and easy to use for any type of user(i.e).

• Easy to Logon and off of Oracle Applications
• Easy to use forms and menus
• Easy to enter data using forms
• Can search for data using forms
• Can access online help in different way
• Easy to run and monitor reports and programs
• Customize the presentation of data using folders
• Set personal user profile options
• Manage an attachment to a form
• Identify and use the two types of flexfields