The Feature

Oracle Project Costing – Know What It Takes to Run Your Projects

February 26, 2006 on 3:00 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Reviews | 17 Comments |  Print |  Email

Oracle Project Costing is one of the core applications in Oracle Projects suite. It allows you to set up your projects, project work-breakdown structures (WBS) and project budgets, collect project-related expenditures (including timecards, expense reports, supplier invoices, inventory costs, and other miscellaneous transactions), and account for them in your General Ledger. Depending on a project type, costs can be either billable to be billed to clients, or capital (CIP) to become fixed assets, or they can be other indirect (overhead) costs associated with running your business. Oracle Projects gives you tools to process all three types.

WHAT IT CAN DO…

Expenditure Entry

• Define expenditure types and categories
• Enter expenditure batches via online entry, data import, expenditure copy, or upload from Microsoft Excel
• Enter transactions in multiple currencies, including functional and project currency
• Vary labor rates based on employee, job, organization, or time period
• Use rule-based accounting to hide complexity from end users

Burdening and Allocations

• Define and assign burden multipliers
• Define burden schedule and versions
• Override and revise burden schedules
• Define allocation rules per operating unit
• Use allocation runs to process, review, and release allocations
• Distribute costs with full or incremental allocations
• Use AutoAllocation to process allocation runs in a sequence or in parallel

Transaction and Budgetary Controls

• Set up transaction controls based on expenditure category, expenditure type, employee, or non-labor resource
• Limit charges to assigned resources or employees only
• Budget at summary or detailed level
• Create budgetary controls to check for available project funds

Adjustments

• Configure multiple types of expenditure item adjustments
• Perform mass adjustments
• Transfer or split expenditures
• Adjust multi-currency transactions
• Process, review, and release adjustments online
• Create audit trail for all expenditure adjustments, including name, date and type of adjustment

Resource Sharing Administration

• Define multiple types of resource sharing – inter-company, inter-operating unit, and intra-operating unit
• Configure resource sharing administration methods – borrowed and lent accounting, inter-company billing accounting, or no cross-charge
• Set up resource sharing controls and transfer price rules

Asset Capitalization

• Define and create capital assets
• Place assets in service and capitalize CIP asset costs
• Allocate and group asset costs
• Calculate and record capitalized interest
• Process retirement costs and proceeds from sale

Cost Analysis

• Create and review expenditure reports
• Expenditure summary and detail Reports
• Project Expenditure Adjustment Activity Transfer Activity report
• Expense Report Entry and Timecard Entry audit reports
• Create and review capital asset reports

Integration

• Integrate with other Oracle applications – including Payables, Purchasing, Assets, General Ledger, Internet Expenses, Inventory, Project Manufacturing, and Time and Labor.
• Integrate with third-party applications through open, standards-based architecture

User Interface and Configurability

• Use web-based graphical interface
• Create client extensions to meet your specific business needs
• Design personalized views for each user or workgroup
• Define, update, and view project security settings

WHAT WORKS GREAT…

• Project Templates is a great way to create projects and tasks.
• AutoAccounting – generates accounting entries for project transactions based on pre-defined rules to hidden from end users.
• Web ADI – creating APIs for almost all data elements was brilliant; adding Web ADI integrators for all of them is going to make it perfect.
• Burdening and Allocations – great way to calculate and allocate indirect costs. I wish Allocations allowed more flexibility to define Expenditure Type and Expenditure Organizations within one Allocation Rule.
• Cross-charge – several ways to share resources within or across operating units
• Mass Adjustments – a superb way to execute high-volume expenditure adjustments in a single request.

… AND WHAT IT COULD DO BETTER

• Projects and Budgets Upload what is the status of Project Connect? Why not create plain Project Upload and Budget Upload Web ADI integrators?

• Project Maintenance Maintaining projects and their options could be a drag. Yes, there are APIs to create and update projects, tasks and budgets, but in order to use them requires a custom code. Many companies rely on manual project maintenance by their users. Similar to Quick Project Entry function, which is used to quickly set up projects, why not create a Quick Project Update function, which would update them? It would be great, for instance, for updating project dates, task dates and transaction controls dates when the project duration changes. Or you may need to change burden schedules, price rule schedules, or any other project or task-level attributes. You get the idea…

• Project Administration. This one is similar to the one above, but it is more related to similar changes to you need to do across several projects. Project Administration currently allows you to change project owning organization for one project, or all projects owned by the same organization. It would be nice to have better selection criteria in the existing functionality to choose what projects need to be transferred from one organization to another. You could add selection criteria like project type, customer, project manager, project classification, etc. Also, it would be great to be able to change additional project attributes like Key Members, Customers, or Project Classifications.

• Project Allocations is a great feature, as I described above. But it could use a little more flexibility in creating rules and defining new transactions. Being able to define only one Expenditure Organization and one Expenditure Type per rule makes it very difficult to define flexible accounting rules for allocation transactions. Even using the current allocations client extension does not help.

• AutoAccounting is another great feature, but there are several limitations, which sometimes make it frustrating to use. For example:

• Lookup Sets. I understand their role as mapping tables between project attributes and chart of accounts values. And having no validation in lookup sets provides great flexibility to map anything you want. However, no validation also creates a maintenance nightmare. Just imagine a business with several hundred to several thousands departments. Typically, there are several lookups sets, which map HR department names to GL company, division or department values. Imagine you change the names of those departments in HR several times a year. Keeping lookup sets up to date is a full time job! Why not build parameters into lookup sets similar to AutoAccounting Rule parameters? You could store lookup values based on IDs, not values. That way, if HR organization names change in HR, so will their representations in the lookup sets in Projects.
• Clearing Accounts could use more parameters to be able to create more robust rules for the “clearing account” functions.
• Error Reporting. Many of us spend endless hours trying to figure out why a costing process fails with “Invalid AutoAccounting” error. Provide better error messages for AutoAccounting errors.

• Expense Adjustments Provide a way to “transfer” expenditures between Expenditure Organizations, and between Expenditure Types. It is a major headache, especially with transactions imported into Projects (timecards, expense reports, supplier invoices) to not to be able to change these two parameters.

• Find Expenditure Types Having a search window in the Expenditure Types form with Expenditure Type, Expenditure Category, Revenue Category, UOM and Expenditure Type Class as search parameters would be very helpful.

• Reporting Has anyone looked at some the standard reports lately? For instance the IMP: Expenditure Types, or AUD Project Configuration, and many others are total clusters.

Related Links

• Oracle Project Costing Data Sheet with an overview and summary of key features.
• Oracle Project Costing 11i User Guide
• Oracle Projects Review by It’s a Feature!

Please provide your comments about what works and what does not work for you in Oracle Project Costing. You can also contact me at marian.crkon@itsafeature.com if you have any questions.