Take the Oracle Financials Product Strategy Survey

August 12, 2010 on 7:07 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press | Enter Comments | Print Print | Email Email

Oracle Financials Product Strategy is conducting a survey to gain insight into how customers are using Oracle Payments solution. This survey targets payments professionals (payment administrators, payables analysts, payables managers, cash managers, etc.) and explores payment processing in customers’ organizations.

Payment processing in the context of this survey means initiating a request to pay supplier invoices, payroll expenses and other external and internal financial obligations by check, ACH, WIRE and other electronic or traditional forms of payment — all the way through to the payment execution by your financial institution. The survey takes approximately 25-30 minutes to complete. The results of this survey will be used for determining which business functions are most critical for payments and where Oracle can consider improvements to the existing solutions.

Please complete the survey or forward it to the appropriate people in your organization to complete and submit no later than August 13, 2010. If you require assistance in accessing the survey, please contact julia.baeva@oracle.com.

Foresee Those Future-Dated Expense Report Items

November 14, 2006 on 10:18 am | by Marian Crkon | In Feature of the Week | 6 Comments | Print Print | Email Email

You can encounter this feature when using Oracle iExpenses, Payables and Projects 11i.10.

The Feature

Oracle iExpenses 11i.10 lets you enter, approve and pay expense report items with incorrect dates in the future. I was asked by my client today to look into expense report items rejected in the Payables to Projects interface and to my surprise, there were several project-related items in Payables with item dates in the future. The item date is entered by employees when entering their expense report line items. I believe the dates were in most, if not all cases entered in error [and against the expense reimbursement policy].

The Interface Expense Reports from Payables to Projects process checks for, among other things, the following conditions:

  • Expenditure Item Date is within an active employee assignment
  • Expenditure Item Date is within an active project (and task) date range
  • Expenditure Item Date is within an open or future PA Period in Projects
  • Expenditure Item is charged to a project in an active status.

Now, this validation happens online during expense report entry and approval, but it happens again several days, or weeks, later during the Payables to Projects interface process. This is after the expense report had already been entered, approved, imported into Payables, validated and accounted for in Payables, and in many cases, already paid, and after some of the original conditions may have changed. Since these are the invoice line item dates, not invoice dates, it is very difficult for Expense Reports Auditors, or Payables, to catch these. Furthermore, once invoices are validated and accounted for, they cannot be updated.

The Workaround

As of OIE.H or higher, you can use the Future-dated expenses feature. You can use the setup utility to define whether future-dated expenses should be treated as warnings or errors during expenses entry. This ensures that expenses are not entered into inappropriate accounting periods, which causes reimbursements billing to be delayed and accounting to be incorrect.

To set the future-dated tolerances, log in with Internet Expenses Setup and Administration responsibility > Expenses Setup > General > Options. On this page you can define future-date tolerances for each operating unit. Individuals can submit future-dated expenses according to the values you specify.

If you did not set these tolerance limits and want to see whether any future-dated items exist in your system, use the ad-hoc query below.

Future-Dated Expense Report Items

How To Convert Legacy 1099 Balances to Oracle Payables

September 10, 2006 on 10:29 pm | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | 1 Comment | Print Print | Email Email

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.

Favorite Fusion Features – Project Billing

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

Favorite Fusion Features – Payables

June 7, 2006 on 9:50 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Ideas and Opinions | 3 Comments | Print Print | Email 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 enhancement requests based on Oracle Payables 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.

  • Invoice Price Instead of PO Price on RTS Debit Memos. (OAUG login required) Submitted by Eric Guether. A Debit Memo is automatically created when a Return to Supplier (RTS) is made against a PO that has already been invoiced in the Payables module. The automated Debit Memo created by RTS is desirable (it’s a good thing). However, Debit Memos for PO returns to PCL are valued using the PO Unit Price. We would expect the Debit Memos to be valued using the Invoice Price.
  • Supplier Name has no translation (TL) table column in EBS. Submitted by Eric Guether. Our single global EBS 11i instance is American English with Japanese NLS. We are unable to maintain English translations of supplier names, addresses, contacts, etc. because EBS lacks translation tables for vendors.
  • New Suffix for Intercompany Payables Invoices. Submitted by Eric Guether. Starting in EBS 11.5.10, intercompany A/P invoices are auto-assigned the same number as its corresponding intercompany A/R invoice plus a new suffix, which is the ship-from org ID (seen only by IT people in SQL queries). Users prefer if the suffix were the org code that they are used to seeing through the EBS forms.
  • Vary the Accounting on Intercompany Payable Debit Entries. Submitted by Eric Guether. When an intercompany A/P invoice is created, the G/L account used for the debit entry is very limited — just one G/L account per inter-org relationship. Functionality should be added to allow the G/L used to vary by product, perhaps using the default Cost of Goods account for the invoiced item.
  • Integrate employee bank account information with Oracle Payroll and/or 3rd part payroll vendors. Submitted by Marian Crkon. Provide an interface to integrate employee direct deposit information (banks, bank accounts, addresses, etc.) with Oracle Payroll and/or 3rd part payroll vendors. Currently, customizations are required to keep the employee bank information in sync between Payables and Payroll.
  • Supplier Certification. Submitted by Howard McKinney. Provide addtional fields on the supplier record to track any necessary certification requirements that might be required, for example, a supplier may be required to carry insurance as a 3rd party provider of shipping services in the event of accident caused by the driver. Being able to track the insurance certificate information as well as entering an expiration date of the certificate would be helpful. Also have a form trigger or concurrent program that will place the supplier on hold if the certificate expiration date is met and no renewed certificate has been received.

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 own improvement ideas and enhancement requests. The voting The voting to determine “best features” starts in July 2006.

How to Get the Expense Report Template Details

May 8, 2006 on 10:13 pm | by Marian Crkon | In How To Guides | Enter Comments | Print Print | Email Email

Here is an ad-hoc query you may use to get the expense report template details from Accounts Payable, including the mapping of expense type names to GL accounts and project expenditure types. As of 11i.10, it is not possible to export this data from the Expense Report Templates form, nor there is any report that would provide this information. It is nice to have this listing in Excel when reviewing the expense types, making chart of account changes, or updating your accounting rules.

Expense Report Template Details Query

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