The Feature

Bye-Bye Discoverer 4i - Time to Upgrade

This is a reminder that the official desupport date for Oracle Discoverer 4i is October 31, 2006. Discoverer 4i has been obsolete for most Oracle customers for quite some time, but E-Business Suite users have worked with 4i under a special exception. That exception is now coming to an end. The official notice can be found on Metalink Note 337576.1. If you have not already upgraded to Discoverer 10g, you should begin to move out on this effort right away.

For those E-Business Suite users who have yet to upgrade to Discoverer 10g, you’ll be pleased to know that the upgrade from 4i to 10g is a pretty simple process. When you install Discoverer 10g, do so on a physically separate server. During the installation process, 10g will make a copy of your existing 4i End-User Layer (”EUL”) and upgrade the copy to 10g. Because you were smart enough to install 10g on a physically separate server, your users can build their confidence in 10g and complete their acceptance testing by comparing workbooks against the two EULs side-by-side.

If you’re already upgraded, pat yourself on the back for staying on top of this change. If you haven’t upgraded, no need to despair…just get on it right now!

How To Convert Legacy 1099 Balances to Oracle Payables

In the United States, you must report to the Internal Revenue Service certain types of payments you make to 1099 reportable suppliers. In Oracle Payables, you can designate suppliers as federally reportable, classify their invoice distributions by 1099 MISC Type, then at the end of the year when you submit your 1099 reports, Payables lists paymentsof reportable distributions made to 1099 suppliers.

Suppliers Subject to Income Tax Reporting Requirements

Define a supplier as federally reportable by enabling the Federal option and entering a value for Income Tax Type (1099 MISC Type) in the Suppliers window. Payables assigns the income tax type to each invoice you enter for that supplier. Also, to set up a federally reportable supplier, select a site to be the income tax reporting site by enabling the Reporting Site option in the Tax Reporting region of the Supplier Sites window.

Entering Invoices for Suppliers Subject to Income Tax Reporting Requirements

Once you set up a supplier as federally reportable and assign a default income tax type, Payables defaults the Income Tax Type (1099 MISC Type) to each invoice distribution you enter for that supplier.

How To Convert Legacy 1099 Balances from 3rd Party Systems to Oracle

Step 1 (AP): Create an invoice with an Income Tax Type Code for every 1099 vendor for the total amount of his total YTD payments in the legacy system.

Step 2 (AP): Create a credit memo without the Income Tax Type Code for the same amount.

Step 3 (AP): Create zero dollar payments for the legacy 1099 invoices.

No new payments will be paid out and all of the accounting entries will net to zero in the GL. The 1099 payments will now reflect the total amount of the invoice that was created with the income tax type. Run the 1099 Payments Report and review the converted balances.

Refer to Metalink Knowledge Base > Accounts Payable > 1099 [Metalink Login required] or Accounts Payable User Guide [Oracle OTN login required] for more information on 1099 processing.

OAUG Successfully Completed First Ever Enhancement Request Voting Cycle

The OAUG Enhancement Request System (ERS) completed its first ever full voting cycle. Users submitted enhancement requests for over 400 Oracle Applications products, including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft and Oracle Retail. Ultimately, the system collected over 1,100 submissions for this voting cycle.When voting concluded at the end of July, over 6,200 total votes had been cast.

Thank you to those OAUG members who took the time to vote. The results are currently being compiled in preparation to being shared with SIG coordinators, specific Oracle representatives and the International Oracle User Council (IOUC). Any formal responses received from Oracle regarding individual enhancements will be loaded back into the ERS.

The OAUG is currently evaluating the input received from SIGs and OAUG members regarding the submission, evaluation and voting processes to identify opportunities for improvement. Once this input has been analyzed and feedback has been received from Oracle, the OAUG will work with the SIGs to develop a timeline for the next voting cycle.

If you missed this voting cycle and wish to submit enhancements for the next voting cycle, login to the Enhancement Request System to submit your enhancements. If you have any questions about the ERS or ideas for improving the process, please contact the OAUG by e-mailing at enhancements@oaug.org.

How to Convert Legacy Revenue and Invoices to Oracle Projects

This is a brief overview of how to convert project revenue and invoice balances from your legacy systems to Oracle Projects. You start this data conversion process after your Oracle Financials and Projects modules were fully configured and your prerequisites were created. When migrating from your legacy billing system to Oracle Projects, you may need to bring your ending legacy balances as your opening balances in Oracle. This will allow you to seamlessly manage, bill and report on your client projects.

Oracle Project Billing application performs two main functions: it generates project revenue and project customer invoices. For the purposes of this article, let’s take for example a scenario when you go live with Oracle Projects on January 1, 2007, and let’s assume we need to convert legacy revenue and invoices in summary. When we extract the balances from the legacy system, we would summarize them by project, task, organization, revenue type, and date. The balances will be created and processed as billing events in Oracle Projects. Hope you will find the overview useful.

Complete Financial and HR configuration Prerequisites:

Step 1 (GL): Review your chart of account values. If needed, add new values for revenue accounts, companies, departments, products.

Step 2 (AR): Create customers, customer sites and customer contacts. Each billable project has to be associated with a customer, bill-to site, ship-to site and a billing contact.

Step 3 (HR): Define your project organizations. Classify organizations that will own projects as Project/Task Owning Organizations, and classify organizations that will incur revenue as Project Expenditure/Event Organizations.

Step 4 (HR): Include new project organizations to your project organizational hierarchy.

Step 5 (HR): Create your employees and employee assignments. Each project has to have a valid employee assigned as project manager in order to generate client invoices.

Complete Project Accounting Configuration Prerequisites:

Step 6 (PA): Review and update project structures: project types, project templates, revenue categories, event types, lookup sets…

Step 7 (PA): Create your projects and tasks. Make sure to select a correct project type and billing method for each project, i.e. (Time and Material, Fixed Price, Cost Plus, etc.) You cannot change them once you generated revenue and invoices.

Step 8 (PA): Assign projects to correct customers, sites and contacts. All three are needed to generate revenue and invoices.

Step 9 (PA): Create customer agreements and funding allocations. Baseline project funding by either:

• Baseline the funding in Funding Inquiry screen (if you allowed ‘Baseline Funding Without Budget’ option during the project type definition, or…

• Create Approved Revenue Budget and baseline it in the Budgets screen.

If you are converting revenue from multiple years, make sure to open prior periods (e.g. DEC-05 for 2005 revenue) in order to determine the correct PA Dates and GL Dates. See the How GL Date and PA Date Are Determined in Oracle Projects article. If you do not open respective past periods, your GL and PA dates for all balances will be in DEC-06, and your project reporting may be inaccurate (if based on either PA or GL date).

Convert Legacy Revenue Balances:

Step 10 (PA): Disable revenue transfer to General Ledger. Navigate to the Implementation Options screen and disable the Transfer Revenue to GL flag. This will prevent your legacy revenue balances from being sent to Oracle General Ledger since they were already posted in your legacy system.

Step 11 (PA): Create legacy revenue balances as Revenue Events (Revenue Amount is populated). For high volume uploads, create a custom script and use Oracle Event APIs. For smaller volumes of several hundreds to few thousands of events, use DataLoad. Unfortunately, there is no Oracle Web ADI Upload for project revenue events available at this time (Release 11i.10).

Step 12 (PA): Generate revenue for legacy revenue events. Run the PRC: Generate Draft Revenue for a Range of Projects process through the last day the period (e.g. 31-DEC-2006).

Step 13 (PA): Run the Interface Revenue to General Ledger. This will set the legacy revenue balances to look like interfaced to GL. If you disabled the GL Transfer option in Step 10, no journal entries will be created.

Step 14 (PA): Turn back on the Transfer Revenue to General Ledger implementation option. Navigate to the Implementation Options screen and enable the Transfer Revenue to GL flag.

Enhancement Tips: It would be very useful to have ‘Revenue Sources’ in Oracle Projects, similar to Transaction Sources for expenditures) to manage the revenue conversions - control events are accrued, accounted for, billed, etc.

Covert Legacy Invoice Balances:

We need to distinguish between billed and unbilled legacy invoices. Billed invoices are those that were already printed and sent to the clients. Unbilled invoices are those that were generated in the legacy system, but were not printed and sent out. It is desirable to completely process your legacy invoices in the legacy system, so that you only need to convert the billed legacy invoices.

In the approach described below, we will create summarized legacy invoices as billing events and invoices in Oracle Projects. In order to prevent the balances from becoming open AR balances in Receivables, we will need to delete them in Oracle Receivables. Unfortunately, Oracle Projects 11i.10 does not provide an implementation option to disable the transfer of project invoices to AR. Follow the following steps to complete the conversion:

Step 15 (PA): Create legacy invoice balances as Billing Events (Bill Amount is populated). This can be done in one upload with the Revenue Balances described in Step 3.2.

Step 16 (PA): Generate draft invoices for legacy invoice balances. Run the PRC: Generate Draft Invoices for a Range of Projects process. Use the last day of the respective period (e.g. 31-DEC-2006) as Through Date and Invoice Date.

Step 17 (PA): Approve and release draft invoices.

Step 18 (PA): Interface legacy project invoices to Oracle Receivables. Run the PRC: Submit Streamline Interface process with the XI: Interface Interfaces to Receivables option.

Step 19 (AR): Delete the legacy project invoices in Oracle Receivables. As Receivables Manager, navigate to the Transactions form. Find, incomplete and delete the legacy project invoices. Optionally, use another DataLoad to delete the invoices.

Unpaid Legacy AR Invoices

What we converted above was a summary of billed customer invoices for each project. Some of them have already been paid, some have not in Receivables. You will need to convert any unpaid AR invoices as open AR transactions in Oracle Receivables.

Unbilled Billable Items

Also, what still needs to be converted is any unbilled billable items like billable timewcards, expense reports, etc. This will be discussed in an article about converting legacy expenditure balances.