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

For more full-detailed Tutorials and Tips, check out #TheOracleProdigy at https://lifeofanoracleprodigy.blogspot.com/

Follow The Oracle Prodigy on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/theOracleProdigy/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/D_OracleProdigy)

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.

1. 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.
2. 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. 

1. My Folders contain user-defined reports that are only visible to the user logged in
2. 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:

1. Folders. Folders as well as sub-folders simply organize the reporting objects.
2. 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
3. Report is the BI Publisher Report, t
4. hat will be that tool
5. 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.
6. Prompt is a component of a dashboard.
7. 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.

For more full-detailed Tutorials and Tips, check out #TheOracleProdigy at https://lifeofanoracleprodigy.blogspot.com/
Follow The Oracle Prodigy on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/theOracleProdigy/) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/D_OracleProdigy)