The Oracle Prodigy: June 2019

Overview of the Analyze Phase in Implementing Accounting Hub Cloud

This article provides an Overview of the Analyze Phase in the Accounting Transformation Implementation in Accounting Hub Cloud.

Analyze and Identify the Transaction Lifecycle of Source Systems

First, the number of custom subledgers to be created should be determined. In our example, we have separate third-party systems for commercial and individual loans, and a billing application. Depending on how your organization uses these third-party systems, we may want to register them as separate subledgers or just one subledger. Below is a quick comparison between the two:

Unified Subledger	Separate Subledgers
Share subledger accounting rules	Provides more security across applications
Lets you report across all data easily	less data in each processor, performance will be much faster
	accounting process can be run simultaneously for different applications
	much less likely to contend for database resources

For example, If the commercial and individual loan systems will be registered as a single, unified subledger, data for processing will be huge and this might impact system performance. On the other hand, this actually saves time, because we can re-utilize the subledger accounting rules. So considering these points, you will have to figure out whether it is a wise decision to go with separate or unified subledgers.

Another point that we have to keep in mind is that, we need to determine what source data is required to create subledger journal entries. You should not bring each and every transaction from the source system into Accounting Hub, rather, only transactions which need to be accounted for. You need to analyze the source systems and determine what transaction types to capture and what transaction types should be considered for accounting purposes.

In the loan system example, we have the following activities in your source system:

loan origination
loan interest approval
loan interest accrual reversals
loan scheduled payments
loan late payments
loan charge-offs

Some of the mentioned transactions will attract accounting entries, and some of them will not. Only the transaction types that needs accounting entries must be established as part of your event model under the source system that you're registering within the Accounting Hub Cloud. These transactions must be distinctly identified and registered as transaction types.

A transaction type and it's associated transaction data typically relates to a single document or transaction in the source system. Transaction types will become accounting events in the Accounting Hub Cloud, and for each of those accounting events, we must generate the accounting entries.

Next point that we need to keep in mind is to figure out how frequent do you want the data to come from the source system. This will depend on the immediacy and volumes of accounting requirements in your company. It should not be scheduled during the day when your database resources are being consumed at a high level.

Also, you will have to evaluate if you will bring each and every individual customer transaction from the source system, or just the summarized activity for a customer that you have managed throughout the day.

Analyze the Accounting, Reporting, Auditing, and Reconciliation Requirements for Transaction Types

This analysis should, at a minimum, answer a couple of questions, such as:

Under what condition does each of the subledger journal entry lines get created? Is it upon the loan approval or when the loan has been entered in the source system? You need to identify the event when the transaction should be picked from the source system.

What is the line type of each subledger journal entry line, debit or credit? You need to figure out if a transaction will use a debit line or the credit line. For example, the transaction "Loan Origination" will have a debit line for loan receivable account and a credit line for cash or bank account.

What description should be used for the subledger journal entry? This determines the description the subledger journal entry will have for each transaction type. This will be useful for reconciling the subledger journal entry to the source system.

How are the accounts derived for the entry? This determines how are the account segment values for each of the segment in your chart of account will be retrieved. What logic is needed to be applied to identify the account segment values of each transaction type.

What additional information may be useful for reconciling the subledger journal entry to the source system? You would need to identify what additional information needs to be captured that will be useful for reconciling the subledger journal entry to the source system.

Aside from identifying the accounting transactions in your source system, you should also determine which attributes you need to include in journal entry creation. There are 10 attributes, called transaction identifiers, that you can use to capture transactional information from your source systems.

These transaction identifiers can help you easily reconcile journal entries. Specify which fields you want to map against those 10 transaction identifiers to, and when the accounting entries are generated, the system will populate the values of those transaction identifiers at the journal entry level. These transaction identifiers can be utilized for designing either the description rules or the account rules. Example transaction attributes may include:

Amounts (including entered and accounted amounts)
Dates (such as accounting date and transaction date)
Descriptions
Journal Ledger accounts
Customer Information
Transaction Type Information
Product Information
Salesperson
Loan Type

Carefully analyze, plan and model the custom subledger by visualizing the accounted journal entries. and identify the transaction attributes from the source system that can be used for accounting and reporting purposes, and model the source system to meet your business requirement in the Accounting Hub Cloud.

Transaction Identifier Example

From the above loan source system example, the transaction "Loan origination" is the debit line, and Cash is the credit line.

Observe that the Account column shows different values. Analyze whether the entire combination or each of the individual segments will follow a specific rule to retrieve the values. Those values could be based on the transaction attributes that were brought from the source system. This can be achieved with a mechanism called mapping sets.

For example, the value for the Line of Business segment (segment 2) can be based on the salesperson who is tied to that transaction line. Below, If the transaction was tied to Mr John Doe, the Line of Business Segment is 10. Additionally, the cost center segment can be dependent on the loan type. If the loan type is an adjustable rate, the value for the cost center would be "0000" and if the loan type is fixed rate, the cost center value is "2120".

When you have listed all the transaction attributes that are required to obtain the appropriate accounting entries from the Accounting Hub Cloud and visualized all these details, you will be able to retrieve the values for your chart of account segment and map them into the application. And based on that, the journal entry will be created.

Accounting Attributes

Next, we need to figure out, what are the accounting attributes that we need to assign for our source system. So the Create Accounting process basically utilizes the values of the sources assigned to accounting attributes and accounting rules to create subledger journal entries.

Each accounting attribute is associated with a level when you create the subledger journal entries. It could be the header level definition, or it may be the line level definition. Below are the mandatory accounting attributes and source assignments, these must be used whenever you are registering your source systems.

Accounting Attribute	Predefined Source Assignment
Accounting Date	Transaction Date
Distribution Type	Accounting Event Type Code
Entered Amount	Default Amount
Entered Currency Code	Default Currency
First Distribution Identifier	Line Number

Accounting Hub Cloud basically pre-defines transaction dates as accounting date. So whatever is your transaction date, that is identified by Accounting Hub as accounting date. The Create Accounting process will use this to derive the accounting date of the journal entries. There is another option that we have to keep in mind as far as accounting date is concerned, that is called accrual reversal accounting date source. This attribute is relevant to applications that must perform automatic reversal on accrual journal entries at a specified date or period. You can assign application and standard date sources to the accrual reversal accounting date on the Accounting Attribute Assignment page.

The First Distribution Identifier information is equivalent to the line number in the predefined source assignment. This basically links the subledger transaction distributions to their corresponding journal entry lines.

So these are the accounting attributes that we should always keep in mind, and they will always be associated to a predefined source assignment.

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Overview of Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud Rapid Implementation Approach

The rapid implementation approach is a new approach that has been introduced for the purpose of registering source systems quicker with the use of spreadsheet templates, where you will populate the details based on which the registration of the third-party systems will take place.

This is especially useful if you have numerous third-party application systems and you would like to register them into the Accounting Hub Cloud solution. It offers a simplified, streamlined source system registration and automation-ready transaction upload to Financials Cloud.

Steps in the Rapid Implementation Approach

Source System Registration. First, you need to figure out which are the third-party systems that you want to use for the purpose of registration into the Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud. And within the application, you have an option to download a spreadsheet template. You can populate the information into the respective sections of the spreadsheet template. And based on the data that you will enter, when you upload that into the application, the system will register a source system automatically.
Upload Transactional Data. You can upload transactional data for the registered Accounting Hub Cloud subledgers in a CSV format. Optionally, you can automate the process from uploading to create accounting journal entries with the help of web services as well. This actually increases control of financial and management reporting requirements because you have a streamlined, smooth approach to bring the transactional data from the various systems into the Accounting Hub Cloud solution.
Accounting Transformations. To generate the accounting entries against the transactional data that we are bringing from the various systems, we need accounting rules. And those accounting rules are basically designed with the help of a solution called accounting transformations. Accounting transformations will basically help you to set up your accounting methods which are containers for all the accounting rules and other related attributes based on the journal entry that's supposed to be created.

When you register a source system, you will need to establish an event model under that. Once a source system has been registered and an event model has been established, you will design an accounting method. All of them will be utilized. And then you will load the transactional data by using those components.

Finally, these transactional data will be converted into journal entries and they are then posted into GL to update the balances in the Essbase cube. This allows your organization to run Financial Statements and reports using the Financial Reporting Center, the intended primary user interface for accessing all the journal ledger-related reports.

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Accounting Transformation Configurations in Accounting Hub Cloud

What is Accounting Transformation?

To use Accounting Hub Cloud, accounting rules need to be established with the use of accounting transformation. Accounting transformation is a mechanism that helps you to manage the creation of accurate, detailed, auditable accounting journal entries and reference information for transactions that were recorded from a third party system. And finally, those journal entries are pushed and posted to the General Ledger application.

Planning and Modeling Subledgers

The first thing that needs to be done is to plan and model the custom subledger applications that will be registered in Accounting Hub. You would need exists to have separate control over accounting and other business operation decisions for a specific source system.

If you look at the example below, we are presuming that we have a third-party application system that processes loans and billing:

For loan processing, we might be using a separate application for dealing with commercial loans and a separate application for dealing with individual loans. In that case, we need to register them as two separate subledger applications. Within that, we are going to have to determine what type of transactions are recorded in those individual subledger applications. In the example, both of them have a Transaction Type of Fixed Rate Mortgage and Adjustable Rate Mortgage.

In the same example, we have another third-party point of sale system that handles customer billing. This needs to be registered as a separate subledger application. Within that, there are two different entities that are operating in the US and UK. This can be registered together as one subledger because they can possibly share accounting methods and accounting rules.

Implementation Process for Accounting Transformation

There are six steps that are involved in the entire implementation process, but can be summarized into 3 Phases: Analyze, Build, Implement and Test. So whenever you are implementing the solution, you will have to keep these six steps always in mind, and they will give you a summarized idea of the implementation steps that you need to follow within the accounting transformation process.

The Analyze Phase is where you will analyze and identify transaction life cycle within the third-party application for transactions or activities that must be accounted and then you will analyze accounting, reporting, audit, and reconciliation requirements for each of the transaction types that you manage within those source systems.

For an in-depth explanation of the Analyze Phase, check out a separate article: Overview of the Accounting Transformation Analyze Phase in Implementing Accounting Hub Cloud.

The Build Phase is where you will actually register the source systems into the application. And then you will configure the accounting rules, and assign accounting methods to the respective ledgers. Whatever source system you have registered, you will have to build your event model underneath it. An event model basically represents the transaction types that you are managing in your source system applications which have financial impact in the Accounting Hub Cloud to make them eligible for accounting. Event Model will then have Event Classes and for each event class, you must establish the logic to generate the accounting entries by setting up the accounting rules and by establishing an accounting method.

For an in-depth explanation of the Build Phase, check out a separate article: Overview of the Build Phase in Implementing Accounting Hub Cloud.

Implement and Test Phase is the stage where you will implement and test the accounting methods by assigning them to ledgers to create a complete definition of accounting convention for the transactions and activities of each source system. Here, you will upload your transaction data from the source system as a sample data for testing purposes to ensure that all the accounting is correctly generated. Once confirmed correct, you can start moving setups into the production environment, and then start uploading your transactional data on a day-to-day basis, and start generating accounting entries for them.

Soon to follow!

Manage the accounting transformation accounting methods
how to create and process accounting entries,
optional manual features of subledger accounting,
advanced features of subledger accounting.

Overview of the Financial Reporting Center

The Financial Reporting Center basically offers the state-of-the-art reporting with analytical capabilities, helps you to generate reports from the Oracle Journal Ledger Balances Cube for consistent, timely, and accurate information, and also performs multi-dimensional analysis and enables you to drill down to journal details and to both Oracle and Oracle subledger transactions as well, so which means once the balances have been posted, you had the flexibility to access the balances by submitting various reports.

Then also helps you to retrieve results from the report objects and definitions that are stored in the Enterprise Performance Management System workspace. And you can access those reports under the BI catalog.

The Financial Reporting Center basically includes the access to different type of reports, including financial reports. These are those records that are designed by using a tool called Oracle Financial Reporting Studio. Oracle Financial Reporting Studio basically helps you to design fixed format financial reports that are fetching the data from the balances cube directly.

Account Group and Sunburst

Account Group and Sunburst are tools used to enter key accounts which should always be under watch. When a user creates an account group, it becomes visible in the Financial Reporting Center. And you can also use the Sunburst visualization tool to keep a track about the activities that are happening within an account. The Sunburst visualization tool enables you to interact with your account balances across various business dimensions in order to view balances from different perspectives.

Smart View

Smart View is a spreadsheet-based, multi-dimensional pivot analysis tool that is combined with the full Microsoft Office functionality. To access the balances from your cloud environment, you must ensure that you have installed the Smart View add-in on your local machine. Otherwise, you will not be able to establish a connection with the cloud environmental.

Smart View enables you to interactively analyze your balances and define reports by using the familiar spreadsheet environment. These queries are mainly for users who are operating within the GL application. And one user can upload a query by using workspace. And then from differential reporting center, another user can download the query to the local drive for utilization. So it's like kind of shared option is also available.

Overview of Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence in Oracle Fusion Applications.

Overview of Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher in Oracle Fusion Applications

Users with access to the Financial Reporting Center

General Accounting Manager
General Accountant
Budget Manager

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Devolve Performance Obligations in Revenue Management Cloud

The idea here is to devolve a single performance obligation into a series of performance obligations at contract inception. What does it mean to devolve? Let's think of it as converting one parent obligation into a series of smaller obligations. It allows you to convert that parent performance obligation into a series of obligations underneath children obligations.

An example would be a telecommunications company. They want to devolve or splitting or extending a year's commitment to provide services, and they want to devolve that commitment into 13 billing periods, instead of 12 periods.

Revenue Management will automatically devolve a performance obligation based on setup.

It devolves into a series of performance obligations by accounting period. So the methodology here is going to be the accounting period. And so we discussed a moment ago the example of the telecommunciations company wanting to stretch, extend, that obligation, that year commitment, into 13 billing periods. It creates an initial performance event on the obligation series-- in our case, the transaction price-- and recognizes and manages revenue on the obligation series.

Once that parent obligation is devolved, Revenue Management will go through the five steps to revenue recognition. And once that particular performance obligation is satisfied, the series of performance obligations are satisfied, that revenue is going to be recognized.

This is going to happen at contract inception. And so the identified customer contracts program will identify the performance obligation that needs to be devolved.

You have to tell Revenue Management which performance obligations need to be devolved so that it can capture that information and proceed to a split or to convert that one obligation into a series.

What is the business value of this new feature?

The idea is that these can be done automatically. Once you do the configurations, you don't have to do manual adjustments. There's nothing to do in GL where you have to enter a journal entry to make a correction. This is something that's going to be originated and taken care of in Revenue Management for each accounting period.

What happens in scenarios where you have returns and revisions if the performance obligation has been devolved?

When this happens, Revenue Management will recalculate amounts. What are those amounts that we are thinking about? We are thinking about our performance obligation amounts, Allocation, revenue recognition amounts

how is it going to recalculate? It's going to recalculate based on the revised amounts for the parent performance obligation. So it's going to look at this revised amount of the parent performance obligation.

Besides returns, the revision can be that a new line is being added to an existing contract in a material update or immaterial update. In both situations, Revenue Management is going to recalculate as safe as we've established here.

Setup Components

There are two key setup components: the performance obligation identification rules, and the implied performance obligation template (optional).

Manage performance obligation identification rules. there is an attribute there called "devolved performance obligation". This is something that you specify on the rule level. These rules are specific to the identification of performance obligation.

Implied performance obligation templates. This allows you to capture performance obligations that might not be in your source system.

There is the flag all the way to the end there called, devolve performance obligation.

Overview of Contract Management User Interface

Contracts Requiring Attention. Contracts that require user attention are going to be displayed in the Overview page

If we look at the Overview page, all the way to the top right, there's going to be the Tasks Panel navigation. The Tasks icon is going to allow me to navigate to "Manage Customer Contracts" page where I can run a search. The search button is going to allow me to search contracts using the contract numbers as a parameter. And then we have a link a shortcut to Reports.

You see at the top, there's different tabs: Pending Review tab, the Pending Allocation tab, Pending Revenue Recognition.

The Pending Review tab is going to display contracts with total transaction price over the user-defined amount. The user-defined amount threshold is set in the Manage System Options for Revenue Management page when you do your System Options configurations. A human being will perform the review and then mark the contract as reviewed. And then you can go on with the revenue recognition process at that point.

There is also a new attribute in the Customer Contracts Source Data Import Template called " Manual Review Required". This attribute will "force" the contract to be reviewed when uploading customer contracts using the FBDI template. If you populate the value Y for Yes, that contract will be marked for contract under pending review.

Pending Allocations tab. This would list contracts with missing standalone selling price. The contract data was loaded, but maybe there were no standalone selling prices for the period in question. Remember that with standalone selling prices, we work with effective periods. And so that would be the reason you will see any contracts here.

So how do you fix this issue? You would have to load standalone selling prices for the period in question. It could be also that there's missing foreign currency details. But mostly, if the contract ends up here, it's because of the issue with the standalone selling price.

Pending Revenue Recognition tab. This will list contracts and missing data that's required to automatically create satisfaction events. If you haven't recognized a revenue yet, it's because either you haven't satisfied the obligation with the customer, or the information hasn't been loaded to Revenue Management. So maybe the performance allocations are satisfied, but it has not yet been recorded in Revenue Management. Revenue Management needs to receive that data in order to proceed to recognize a revenue.

Also, it maybe that the satisfaction plan is missing. Start and end dates may be missing in connection with the satisfaction plan. When we think about satisfaction plan, I want you to remember the revenue scheduling rules. So revenue scheduling rules determine if everything is going to be recognized in one period or multiple periods daily. Is it going to be based on a fixed schedule versus variable schedule, and so on. Notice here also another important attribute, Satisfaction Plan Duration.

Manage Customer Contracts page

Manage Customer Contracts page allows you to review details such as performance obligations and promised details. If you look at the top-left portion of the page, right under Manage Customer Contracts, you see these radio buttons. You can search by Contract, by Obligation, or by Promised Detail. Here you can also mark contracts as reviewed, see contract history, view Accounting details, including inventory item information, selling amounts, revenue recognized, billing amounts.

If you go to the Actions dropdown, right next to the Save button, top-right corner of the page, here's the Contract History and the option to View Accounting. if we go to Contract History to see what we can find, we can see here this is an audit log. And it chose different actions that were taken and who did it. That's very helpful from an auditing perspective.

Automatic Renewal of Revenue Contracts

This is a new feature And the idea here is that if you have recurring contracts that you can automatically renew them. Revenue Management is going to renew that original accounting contract or convert it to a new periodic accounting contract.

To renew a revenue contract, Revenue Management needs to use attributes to identify which contracts to renew:

Recurring Indicator
Recurring Frequency
Recurring Pattern
Recurring Amount

These attributes are going to come from the Revenue Basis Data Import Template. These values must be populated and then you have to run a process called "Create Contract Renewal Source Data" program. The end of this program, are this renewable source data is going to go through the regular flow, where Revenue Management is going to use contract identification rules to group lines into a contract. Order lines are going to be identified and automatically renewed, so long as those recurring characteristics are there.

Ability to Clear Balances for zero price transaction lines without a bill.

The idea here is that you are dealing with free goods and services. That's the first thing we want to point out, free goods and services.
Revenue Management can create a billing line with a unit price of 0 for those free goods and services when a revenue source document line with a unit price of 0 is loaded. When that scenario takes place, then Revenue Management will create that billing.

Why is this important? Because you can clear out the right to bill and clear out balances in the contract asset account. This is not something you're going to be receiving any consideration from the customer. So you have to clear out that right to bill, clear balances in the contract asset account. So that's the idea here with this new feature.

Contract Revisions

You are required to disclose when a contract is being reviewed. There's different reasons why you would review a contract. It could be a return of the product that you sold. It could be a correction. You're processing a variable consideration estimation correction. Or it could be that you're modifying the contract. This is required to comply with the ASC 606 and IFRS 15 standard. You need to be able to distinguish between revisions.

So this is something that can be loaded in the database's import template. And so there's going to be a column there that will allow you to track these revisions called "Intent Type". What are some of the valid values there?

CM for Contract Modification
EC for Estimate Correction
UA for Unassigned

In terms of the setup, this is configured from the the Source Document Types configuration, in "Manage Source Document Types". When you define your source document types, you can populate a default revision intent. Also, when you look at an actual contract, in the Revenue Management work area under the "Manage Customer Contracts" tasks, if you go to Promised Details and Line Reference Details, you're going to see there the Revision Intent. And that is something that can be updated.

Discard Customer Contracts process

This dismantles the contract, It does not delete a contract. What it allows you to do is dismantle an already identified contract so that you can reassemble it. It gives you the flexibility to reorganize transaction lines.

Changes to Allocated Revenue on Open Performance Obligations Due to Immaterial Changes.

Contract revisions for material changes is core part of Revenue Management functionality. It is not new. What we are talking about here is immaterial. This new feature has been introduced to support additional flexibility of contract reallocation and recognition as a result of these immaterial contract updates. Your organization will decide what's immaterial versus what's material. It's subjective. It depends on your industry or on your organization.

The idea here is to maintain revenue recognized for past periods and to be able to record changes in revenue in current and future periods. Revenue Management will reverse revenue recognized from the contract revision date and reallocate revenue on open new obligations starting from that contract revision date.

Revenue Management is going to reverse recognized revenue on open obligations starting at the contract revision date. It will derive the unrecognized revenue, derive the consideration for reallocation, meaning what you expect to receive from your customers for delivering goods and services. And then here you can it will allocate the new consideration among the open and new obligations.

In the FBDI template there is a "Termination Date" and "Immaterial Change Type" column. These two attributes that are going to be relevant to this new feature here, Changes to Allocated Revenue on Performance Obligations Due to do Immaterial Changes.

In terms of the configuration, we are looking at a Source Document Type. And in the Source Document Type, we can specify a default Immaterial Change Type. That would be the place where you would go when defining the source document types.

Revenue Recognition in Oracle Revenue Management Cloud

Revenue is Recognized when performance obligations are satisfied, either by Point In Time or Over Time. Together with the Satisfaction Measurement Model and Satisfaction Method, they drive when the revenue is recognized point int time or over time.

There are three options on how to recognize revenue:

Quantity - Usually used for Products
Period - Usually used for Products
Percent - Usually used for Services

You can see that you can go with the option "Require Complete" or "Allow Partial". If it's a service that we are providing, like a warranty service that's going to extend for a number of years, we measure that performance obligation over time. As time goes by, we recognize the revenue. If we deliver physical products, we measure that performance obligation point in time.

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Overview of Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud

What is Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud?

Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud provides the option to bring transactional data from external systems into the cloud with use of the Subledger Accounting engine. Accounting Hub is a very useful solution if you want to utilize a single, rule-based accounting engine for various external applications that records your organization's day-to-day transactions.

These external applications (called Source Systems) are typically industry-specific applications that are either purchased from third parties, or they have been homegrown within the organization. Typically, these source systems are not be capable of generating rule-based accounting entries. Examples of such source systems could be core banking application, insurance policy administration system, billing applications, loan processing applications, and a point of sale (POS) system.

Rather than having a separate accounting rule logic for each source system, you can also register these systems in Oracle Cloud and use Accounting Hub for account derivation and have a unified accounting engine repository where you can maintain and apply your accounting rules, bring the data from all the external transactional applications, then push the accounting entries into the GL application.

Advantage of using Oracle Accounting Hub

With the help of Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud, you can:

Get the flexibility and control that you need in the implementation, expansion, and maintenance of user-defined subledgers to adopt in a flexible business environment.
Configure accounting rules to meet your corporate and statutory requirements.
Automate and control the processes that transform source system data to recording detailed auditable journal entries.

You can also use the modern reporting tools that are available in Oracle Cloud to reconcile the accounting journal entries. This will actually reduce the workload during the period-end processes. And you can also gain insightful information for your day-to-day business, for corporate performance, and for making business decisions.

Oracle Accounting Hub also helps you integrate and align information from virtually any source system into Oracle Financial Cloud services. It gives customers the freedom and flexibility to choose the tools they want we use to run their business as they start their transition to cloud-based computing. This capability provides a smooth transition to cloud computing for our Oracle Financials Cloud customers because they can continue their financial operations on existing systems while centralizing the critical information for management decisions, audit, and compliance to a central cloud service for easy access across the globe.

How does Oracle Accounting Hub Work?

For Example, you have an external Point-Of-Sale (POS) application where you actually manage your day-to-day transactions. We will register this POS system as a User-defined Subledger application within the Oracle ERP Cloud and import its transactions. With the use of the Accounting engine, we are going to generate the accounting entries of these transactions based on the rules that we have configured. And finally, these accounting entries are posted to the General Ledger application. From there, we can utilize the balances for complying with the management reporting requirements, audits and reconciliations, and to comply with statutory reporting requirements as well.

Accounting Hub Cloud Components

General Ledger. Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud comes along with Oracle General Ledger, where you will post all your actual balances. Oracle General Ledger provides journal entry import and creation, real-time balance storage, and accounting controls, intercompany balancing, and the period close functionality. It also comes along with a calculation manager, which helps you to define allocation rules using complex formulas. It helps you to automatically generate the allocation journals based on those allocation rules and helps you in also utilizing the in-house journal approval solution. And finally, you can also utilize the GL for your year-end process management as well. When journals are posted, the Essbase Cube, a multi-dimensional table that holds journal balances, is updated and you can generate reports of your organization's financials data.

Financial Reporting. Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud uses various Financial Reporting tools built in Oracle Cloud. Financial reporting is dependent on the data that is stored in the Essbase Cube, which will help you in faster and easier access to your balances by using various reporting tools.

Every time a transaction or journal is posted in the journal ledger, the balances cubes are updated at the same time with pre-aggregated balances at every level of summarization in your account hierarchy. This is leveraged by reports for quick processing. And you can extract the data in a much faster way because it is stored in a pre-aggregated format.

It helps you to slice and dice the data across dimensions. So you can easily move the definitions from rows and to columns, columns to rows. You can place them in terms of the page level. So it exactly works like a work table. And apart from that, you also get the flexibility to drill up and down and across on any parent level within the scope of your journal accounts.

Tools like Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) and the BI Publisher allows you to use seeded Financial reports across your enterprise in multiple formats. It gives you the flexibility to extract your balances in various formats including PDF, Excel, PPT, Word, etc. So that gives you a lot of flexibility because different stakeholders would like the data to be in their respective format so that they can utilize in a proper way.

Accounting Transformations. To transform the transactional data into Subledger accounting Entries, you need to use the accounting transformations. Accounting transformation is a mechanism that helps you to manage the journal entries for the transactions that would have been recorded in a third party system.

You will actually transform the transactional data that is imported from those third party applications into actual journal entries. And finally, those journal entries are pushed and posted to the journal ledger application.

For more information on Accounting Transformations, check out a separate in-depth article: Accounting Transformation Configurations in Accounting Hub Cloud.

Outbound Integration. You can also manage outbound integrations with Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft General Ledgers if you're already managing your transactional activities in any one of these two applications. You can even get the final posted balances from the GL of these applications into the Oracle Accounting Hub platform.

Configurations needed for Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud

You will need to Register Source Systems into Oracle Cloud using the Rapid Implementation Spreadsheets
Create the needed Accounting Transformations.
Upload the transactional data using various mechanisms such as a file-based data import or a web service

Subledger Accounting for Revenue Management Cloud

Subledger Accounting acts as an intermediate step between an Oracle Subledger and Oracle Fusion General Ledger. In this case, the subledger application is Revenue Management. Click here to view a separate article for more information on Subledger Accounting.

Below are some of the predefined accounting class used by Subledger accounting for Revenue Management:

Contract Revenue
Contract Asset
Contract Liability
Contract Discount Clearing
Contract Clearing
Contract Price Variance

The following types of business events trigger the creation of accounting events:

Initial performance events
Satisfaction events
Billing events
Revisions and return events

Contract Liability becomes Revenue and Performance Obligations are satisfied. and With use a clearing account, Contract Asset become a receivable when Performance Obligations are satisfied.

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Reporting for Revenue Management Cloud

Oracle Fusion provides two predefined reporting tools for Revenue Management Cloud: Business Intelligence Publisher and Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence.

A Business Intelligence Publisher (BIP) is a reporting tool that you run by navigating to the Scheduled Processes page. These are usually business-specific reports are are either sent to external business contacts.

Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) is a reporting and analysis tool used to create Analyses and Dashboards. These are usually used by internal teams rather than an actual report submitted externally such as auditors, governments etc. OTBI can also be used to create custom Infolets, which are miniature versions of dashboards. For more information on OTBI, check out a separate article: Overview of Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence in Oracle Fusion Applications.

Oracle Fusion provides two predefined reporting objects for Revenue Management Cloud:

Revenue Contract Account Activities Report (BI Publisher)
Standalone Selling Price Dashboard (OTBI Report)

Also, Oracle Fusion provides two predefined reporting Subject Areas than can be used by OTBI:

Revenue Management - Customer Contracts Real Time
Revenue Management - Standalone Selling Price Real Time

Below discusses the objects and subject areas in detail:

Revenue Contract Account Activities Report gives us account balances by performance obligation to support the audit process and perform detail analysis. This report shows information about revenue contract, performance obligation, customer name, source document references, period information, and most importantly account classes.

Account classes are accounts that you're going to see in connection with activity for a customer contract. They correspond to contract liability, contract asset balances, contract revenue, etc.

This is a BI Publisher report that is available to you out-of-the-box and you can run the report for a given ledger, and one or multiple periods, and you can also narrow down the results of the report by account class. It is defaulted to an Excel output. but it can also be data, or in CSV as well.

Standalone Selling Price Dashboard allows your organization to analyze standalone selling prices for a single period or a range of periods.

To Navigate to the Standalone Selling Price Dashboard, Click on the Navigator > More > under Tools, find Reports and Analytics. From Reports and Analytics > click on All Folders > Click on Shared Folders,> Financials > Revenue Management > Standalone Selling Price. Inside of this folder, find standalone selling price report.

Revenue Management - Customer Contracts Real Time. Provides real-time information on accounting contracts. Details for contracts, performance obligations, and promised details include related revenue prices for an effective period, satisfaction, billing, revenue distribution and accounting.

Revenue Management - Standalone Selling Price Real Time. Provides real-time information on Standalone Selling Prices and tolerance ranges for an item group, item or memo line by pricing dimension, item classification and effective period.

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Overview of Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence in Oracle Fusion Applications

This article discusses an Overview of Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence, or OTBI. OTBI can be used to create an Analysis, Dashboards, Infolets, Interactive Reports using a number of tools.

What is an Analysis?

Analyses are queries against an organization's transactional data that provides answers to Business Questions. Analyses can be enhanced through features such as graphs, charts, tables, calculated items and drilling down

Analyses Can be created using BI Composer and BI Answers and are saved in the Oracle BI Catalog.

BI Composer is a tool that is recommended for end-users because it is a simple, easy-to-use, and has a drag and drop graphical interface. Users can just drag and drop columns you want to have in a particular analysis. What this does is pulling data from the transactional tables without having to use SQL.
BI Answers is a more sophisticated tool to retrieve data from the transactional tables. It allows you to create an analyses as well. BI Answers has quite a few additional features. It also contains a graphical interface but is meant more for developers and business analysts. Using BI Answers, you can also create dashboards, a collection of reporting objects.

The data these tools use comes from Subject Areas. Subject area is nothing more than a group of attributes (columns) from the underlying application transactional tables that are available to the report writer. For Financials, the transactional tables that we are referring to here have to do with GL, AR, AP, cash management, etc.

An Infolet is an interactive container that's displayed in those page dots that we find in the Welcome Springboard. For more information on infolets, check out a separate article Overview of Infolets and Infotiles in Oracle Fusion Applications

Business Intelligence Mobile App Designer enables users to create multi-touch information-driven applications with rich interaction, rich visualization, and rich media meant to be displayed on tablets and mobile devices.

These reports, analyses and dashboards are organized by Application in the Business Intelligence (BI) Catalog.

Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)

The EPM Workspace helps you to create reports, books, snapshot reports, and financial report matches. It also comes with a batch scheduler and helps you to schedule batches to automatically run and burst the outputs through the email accounts for different users.

It also allows you to get a snapshot of books. The Term "book" in OTBI is a grouping mechanism so that you can run related reports together.

You will also be able to have access to the Allocation Manager, a Hyperion tool that allows you to do general ledger allocations (i.e. allocating expenses across multiple cost centers).

EPM Components

The Business Intelligence Catalog or BI Catalog is a repository of reporting objects that OTBI uses to generate reports and analyses, grouped by application. You cannot run BI Publisher reports from the BI Catalog but you can open and view how they have been designed.

The BI Catalog splits into two: My Folders and Shared Folders.

My Folders contain user-defined reports that are only visible to the user logged in
Shared Folders is visible to all users that have access to the specific application and have the sufficient roles.

How do I navigate to the BI Catalog?

If I'm working with Studio and I want to use some Hyperion features (like scheduling a batch of Studio reports) I should navigate to the catalog from the Financial Reporting Center. If I want to use OTBI, I should use Reports and Analytics.

To get to the BI Catalog via the Workspace, go to the Financial Reporting Center and from there, there's a link that takes you to Workspace. And then, select Application > Catalog.

Reports and Analytics. If I want to use OTBI, Reports and Analytics is what you want to navigate to. Reports and Analytics allows you to create an analysis using the BI Composer, the more simple tool for end users. If you want to use BI answers, to create a dashboard, click on "Browse Catalog" from inside Reports and Analytics. There's a new menu here that allows me to create an analysis, dashboard, and other objects.

To get to Reports and Analytics, Go to the Navigator > More > Reports and Analytics.

OTBI Objects and Related Icons

When you navigate around in this catalog, you're going to see Icons and each correspond to a different reporting object:

Folders. Folders as well as sub-folders simply organize the reporting objects.
Analysis is also an OTBI object. A query against the database without the use of SQL using a graphical drag and drop interface from Subject Areas
Report is the BI Publisher Report, t
hat will be that tool
Dashboard is also an OTBI object. A dashboard is a collection of reporting objects. They have one or multiple pages, can show a report, a link to an external page, images, etc. A dashboard can include one or multiple analyses, it can include another OTBI report, scorecards, Key performance indicators, links to financial reports, etc.
Prompt is a component of a dashboard.
Data model is a component of a BI publisher report.

Column Data Structure for Analytics

Now, there are two of them, so how do we build an analysis, an object, an OTBI object to retrieve data from the Revenue Management tables? That's the next topic here after this slide. So before we get there, one more word about these columns that we can use in an analysis.

Some of them are going to include numbers. That's what we call fact columns. They're going to store values that you can aggregate such as Billing amounts, transaction price, etc.

But sometimes, you get to see a column that is storing something other than an amount. That's what we call an attribute column. That's a contract number, a ledger name, etc.

Then you have other attributes, we call them hierarchical. These are information that's organized in a hierarchy, like year, quarters, and months. So those are the types of columns that you're going to find when you look at a subject area.

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Overview of Pricing Dimension Structure in Revenue Management Cloud

This article gives an overview about Pricing Dimension Structure in Revenue Management Cloud, including its components and importance. The diagram below shows the components of a Pricing Dimension Structure:

Pricing Dimension Structure Instance is the management structure of Pricing Dimensions. It provides additional settings here at the instance level of the Pricing Dimensions, such as enabling of the Creation of Dynamic Combinations. The relationship between the Pricing Dimension Structure and the instance is 1 to 1.

When the Creation of Dynamic Combinations is enabled, this means that combinations can be added dynamically, You don't have to pre-define the combinations because we are saying that they can be dynamically added when you are defining the Standalone Selling Price.

Pricing Dimension Structure acts like a Key Flexfield (KFF) and will allow your organization to depict its current pricing policies. Each structure is composed of segments, and a structure can have up to 30 segments. Each of these segments need a value set for each segment in your structure.

Value Sets

A value set determines the data type that will be used by the segment and will validates and control the values and that are acceptable for that segment. Also, a Value Set dictates the Size and Numerical Precision of a Segment.

Each Value Set can have different types of validation such as Independent, Format Only, Table, Dependent, etc. It is the best practice to always use independent. More information can be found from the Oracle Official Documentation.

In the example above, the Pricing Dimension "Hardware Products Discount Policy" is composed of three Pricing Dimension Segments (Geographical Region, Deal Size, Customer Type).

The Segment "Customer Type" has the data type "Character" and the acceptable values are only "Government" and "Commercial". As for the segment "Deal Size", you can define the ranges of amounts that will be acceptable.

Below is a quick video demonstration on how to create Pricing Dimension Instances, Structures and Value Sets in Revenue Management Cloud:

Pricing Bands

Price Bands are optional pricing configurations. Each segment in Pricing Dimension Structure can have a label. Price Bands Type can be Set, Quantity or Amount:

In the Example below, Quantity Band defines the price if the customer is purchasing between a certain number of units.

We are looking at volume of the units purchased. The more units we sell, the lower the price is going to be for the customer. You want to give them a favorable price.

As for the Amount band, it is saying if the deal size is between a certain amount, it will correspond to a certain unit price.

So you have the values high, medium, and low. And then these are the dollar ranges there. This means the more the customer buys, the lower the price will be.

The Set Band, on the other hand, uses criteria other than volume and deal size. This means that you can drive your pricing without looking at the size or volume of the deal. If you look at this example below, it uses the geographical information.

We see here North America. And then we see here the countries within North America, the United States. Countries that belong to the European Union. And that might be a criteria that you want to use in your Pricing Dimension Structure.

The implementation task of creating Price Bands is "Manage Pricing Dimension Bands for Revenue Management".

Deploying the Pricing Dimension Structure

Once the structure has been finalized, you need to run a Deployment process for your structure to validate the structure and make it available to be used.

Below is a quick video demonstration on how to create Pricing Dimension Assignments in Revenue Management Cloud: