The Feature

Favorite Fusion Features – Project Billing

June 10, 2006 on 11:05 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Which features would you like to become your Favorite Features 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 is requesting your feedback on strategic improvements to current Oracle E-Business Suite functionality for their initial Fusion releases.

Alternatively, if you want to get involved but don’t know how, if you are not an OAUG member, or none of the available options works 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.
Below is a list of improvement tips and enhancement ideas based on Oracle Project Billing 11i.10 as provided by the Feature authors and readers. Items with a link have an existing OAUG Fusion Request already created. You will need an OAUG login to see the details.

• Agreements Upload. Provide a Web ADI interface using the existing Agreements APIs to upload and baseline project agreements and funding.

• Events Upload. Provide a Web ADI interface using the existing Events APIs to upload bill and revenue events. Same as above, the new API is great, but a WebADI upload integrator is still needed.

• Find Agreements Function. The Agreements form (PAXINEAG) needs a Find window with Customer, Agreement Number, Agreement Type, and Project Number as parameters.

• Validation of AutoAccounting Lookup Sets. We use them as mapping tables between project attributes and chart of accounts values. Having no validation in lookup sets gives you great flexibility to map anything you want, however, it also creates a maintenance nightmare. 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 for instance, HR organizations change in HR, so would their representations in the lookup sets in Projects.

• Revenue and Receivable AutoAccounting Functions. The Revenue and Receivable Account functions in AutoAccounting could use more parameters in order to create more robust and flexible rules for the revenue and receivable accounts.

• More Details in AutoAccounting Errors. Error Reporting during the revenue and invoice generation processes could be use more details. The “Invalid AutoAccounting” error doesn’t explain it.

• Billing Rates Upload and Maintenance. Bill Rate Schedules could use a new API and WebADI upload integrator. You maintain hundreds of rates in a typical rate schedule (e.g. by job title), and maintaining them can be a challenge.

• Billing Rates Schedule as Project Quick Entry Field. Add Bill Rate Schedule as an available Quick Entry field in project templates.

• Revenue Reporting. There are no revenue reports (similar to the Expenditure Detail and Expenditure Summary in Project Costing) that would show revenue details. New reports by revenue type, revenue category, etc. would be cool.

• Unbilled Expenses Reporting. It would be useful to have a report that would show unbilled billable expenses, which are yet to be billed (similar to Potential Labor Revenue report).

• Recurring Revenue and Billing Events. Many billing contracts specify recurring monthly billing amounts, which need to be billed on a specific date. It would be nice to be able to submit a recurring billing events, which would become invoices when you generate draft invoices (similar to recurring AP Invoices).

• Inactive Project Manager Notification. Project Billing Accountants need a better way to be notified about Project Manager becoming an invalid employee. Currently, they find it out the “hard way” by not being able to print MGT: Invoice Review report, or when interfacing project invoices to AR.

• Better Handling of Terminated Employees. Project Billing, just like other Oracle Applications except of Human Resources, does not support date-tracking of employee record changes. This is causing challenges in Projects when you need to retroactively make someone a Key Member, define employee bill rates overrides, or search for inactive employees in the inquiry forms after they were terminated in HR. Similar to the HR forms, it would be great to change the effective date in selected Projects forms.

• Project Type Changes. It would be very beneficial if users could change the project type (e.g. from Fixed Price to T&M) even after there are expenditures and revenue generated in a project. People make mistakes, contracts change, and having to close and re-create projects is not always a feasible solution.

• Percent Complete Upload. Provide a Web ADI interface using the existing Events APIs to upload bill and revenue events. Same as above, the new API is great, but a WebADI upload integrator is still needed.

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