The Feature

Favorite Fusion Features – General Ledger

June 14, 2006 on 10:06 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | 1 Comment |  Print |  Email

By now you probably know what this is about. The time has come to think about what you want in Oracle Fusion. If you are an expert user with real-life, hands-on experience and have ideas on how to improve the applications; if you had to customize a module to get the features you need, or additional functionality would save you time and money, submit your strategic requests via the OAUG Enhancement Request System (ERS) today! As an Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) member and/or Oracle Applications user, Oracle wants your feedback on strategic improvements to current Oracle E-Business Suite functionality for their initial Fusion releases.

Alternatively, if the option above does not work for you, then let’s also try something different. Let’s keep a weblog of improvement tips, enhancement requests and your best features in Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications you want to have in Oracle Fusion. Let’s have discussions about what enhancements and features make most sense, and then log Fusion Requests before the Oracle’s June deadline. There won’t be any wrong questions or bad ideas (or at least, we’ll let the “group intelligence” decide). Your involvement can be as easy as providing comments with your ideas to this post.

Boy, what can you fundamentally change in GL? By now we know that 4Cs are coming in Release 12. And a couple of people had few more ideas. Below is a list of improvement tips and enhancement ideas based on Oracle General Ledger 11i.10 as submitted by Oracle users at the OAUG Enhancement Requests portal. Use the portal to provide you own enhancement requests, or submit comments to this post to do the same.

Note: I believe the idea of Fusion Requests is to submit enhancement requests on top of the existing releases, not to request the existing features. Somebody correct me if I am wrong. I suppose it never hurts to reiterate what your “best features” are.

• Allow Separate Sequential Numbering by Balancing Segment. Submitted by Gerard Fuller. In several European countries (example Germany) the law requires us to maintain separate sequential numbering sequences by Legal Entity. Most organizations model legal entities by the Balancing Segment in General Ledger. We therefore need to be able to maintain and assign separate sequential number sequences by Balancing Segment. Currently this is only possible by Set of Book and Journal Category. Set of Books is too high level and prevents distinguishing between entities (i.e. Balancing Segments). Using Category requires us to create as many categories as we have legal entities, and assign them. This is quickly unworkable once we have more than a few entities per set of books.

• Data Integrity between Submodules and GL. Submitted by Cyndie Winrow. Each individual transaction is posted only once, eliminating data redundancy and the need to reconcile multiple ledgers.

• Carry Forward Encumbrances at Year End. Submitted by Cyndie Winrow. In Oracle, the carry forward process does not create journals, and not at period activity, but rather creates a view for inquiry and reporting with designated amounts as beginning balances. I believe that this functionality eliminates the need for “period zero” as currently used in PeopleSoft, unless there are other uses for it of which we are unaware.

• Interfund Balancing Capability. Submited by Cyndie Winrow. Allows set up for assignment of default natural account (nacct) segment values for fund balancing that can be specified to balance multiple journal sources and categories.

• Financial Statement Generator (FSG). Submitted by Cyndie Winrow. Used to generate financial reports based on data in general ledger. FSG is an integral part of the general ledger application. Many standard reports are provided in the general ledger application, such as trial balance reports, account analysis reports, and budget to actual reports. FSG gives great flexibility in allowing for the creation of customized reports. It is an easy-to-use tool and can be utilized and maintained without substantial technical resources. Define your reports with reusable report objects, making it easy to create new reports from components already defined. Design custom reports. Schedule reports to run automatically. Produce ad hoc reports. Print reports to tab-delimited files for easy import into client-based spreadsheet programs.

• Reporting Segments (Attributes) Off the Accounting Flexfield. Submitted by Cyndie Winrow. Used for required reporting to regulatory and appropriations agencies.

Which features would you like to become your favorite features in Oracle Fusion? Granted, it may take two years before you get them, if ever, but this is your opportunity to provide your own improvement ideas and enhancement requests. The voting to determine “best features” starts in July 2006.