Overview of Advanced Collections in Oracle Fusion Applications

What is Oracle Advanced Collections?

Advanced Collections provides a comprehensive solution for managing and running the day-to-day collection operations. Advanced Collections can help an organization improve its cash flow, increase collection efficiencies, optimize customer relationships and instill corporate and fiscal discipline.

It allows the collectors to focus and track their on their collection activities with the help of Infotiles, which are containers of important information your collectors need to focus on.

Who uses Oracle Advanced Collections?

Collectors are responsible for following up payments from delinquent and pre-delinquent Customers, tracking their activities and sending dunning letters. They will be responsible in minimizing the risk of financial exposure and making sure that the owed money is collected.

Below is a quick video Demonstrating how to setup Collectors:

Advanced Collections Infotiles

We have predefined Infotiles for Advanced Collections in the Work Area:

1. Delinquent Infotile - Once an invoice is delinquent, it will get picked up by the processes and allocated against the particular collector with all of the delinquent invoices. Delinquent means that the invoice is still unpaid after its payment term.
2. Promises Infotile - Collectors can see if a customer has broken a Promise to Pay. Promise to Pay is, as the term implies, a promise made by the customer to pay their overdue invoice. If such promise is broken, you can apply collection strategies to that customer to perform Dunning, a phone call, an escalation, etc.
3. Strategy Tasks Infotile - This Infotile shows the Strategies collectors need to work on, such as following up on a payment by making a phone call, or sending a dunning letter. Strategies are Tasks that can either be manual or automated. For more information on Strategy Tasks, check out a separate article, Overview of Collection Strategies in Oracle Fusion Applications.
4. Activities Infotile - This is where you've got other activities that aren't work items from a strategy that you need to complete. So you can create them yourself, or somebody else might create them and assign them to you. And as you can see, when you're in here, the strategy task, you could complete it, cancel it, or reassign it to somebody else if you wanted to. A credit analyst can reassign a case folder to different credit analyst without needing an approval

Advanced Collections Features

Advanced Collections provides a way for Collectors to raise disputes, record payments, record a Promise to Pay.

1. Disputes - Disputes happen when a Customer has a concern regarding the Invoice they are being billed, it may be for a number of reasons such as billing error, a hardware issue, a promised discount, etc. The customer informs the collector about this and the collector can then go in and raise a dispute in behalf of the customer. Once approved, this will then go on to become a Credit Memo. For more information on disputes, check out a separate article, Overview of Collection Disputes in Oracle Fusion Applications.
2. Payment
3. Promise to Pay - As previously mentioned, a Promise to pay is a promise made by the customer to pay their overdue invoice. Payment promises are made after the transaction's payment term is overdue. For Example, if the invoice date is 1-May-2019 and the payment term for that invoice is NET 30, then the due date for an invoice. would be 31-May-2019. However, the customer failed to pay the invoice, thus, a promise to pay can be created to collect either a partial payment or a full payment.
   

Collections Case Folder

Allows you to group together related transactions to increase collection efficiency. Typically, they have the same bill-to customer which is used by a collector to take action on that collections cycle. You can use it to group similar transactions together, perform your collections activity against the entire group simultaneously.

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Accessing Tasks and Tasks Lists in Oracle Fusion Applications

Tasks Lists in Oracle Fusion Applications are a collection of Tasks related to a specific product Offering and Tasks are the actual activities that can be carried out to update setups and configurations for that Product Offering. An Example of this would be Managing Ledger Sets for the General Ledger for the Financials Product Offering:

We have three options to access Tasks and Tasks Lists in Oracle Fusion Applications:

1. Functional Areas
2. Implementation Project
3. Search

These options can all be accessed from the Setup and Maintenance screen.

Functional Area - When accessing the Setup and Maintenance screen, this option shows all the available tasks in a certain functional area and under a specific Product Offering:

Implementation Project - The difference of using Implementation Projects rather than just updating the configurations directly through the Functional Area is having additional options like assigning the setup tasks to a specific user and assigning a target date to complete a task. You can also update the status of the tasks from "Not Started" to "In Progress" and then to "Complete". As a project manager you can track the completion of tasks with the help of a dashboard on the overview page.

Search - This is the fastest way to go to a Task. Very useful if you're not familiar with the complete name of the Task and only know the keywords:

Out of the three options, accessing the Tasks from the Implementation Project would be the best option because it documents who, when and why the configuration was updated. But if a configuration just needs to be quickly updated, a quick search would suffice.

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