As you may have noticed

As you may have noticed, I am not actively blogging over hear at the moment. I have decided that i prefer the wordpress site so I am currently blogging over there. You can see it at http://davidhaimes.wordpress.com/.

Cool iPhone Video (and product)

I saw this on a Theresa's excellent Fin Apps blog, which I always read and you should too. It's a video for a new Oracle Peoplesoft iPhone App called Oracle iReceipts, the product is cool, but I think the animation is worth watching for it's own sake - very funny.

iPhone Apps are all the rage at the moment, but I do feel there are a lot of Apps created just for the sake of it and not well thought out. Reminds me of the dot com era where all companies were desperate to have a web presence but didn't necessarily know why they wanted it or what they wanted to get out of it. That said, managing my expenses with a mobile device, taking pictures of receipts and entering them real time is always going to be a Killer App.

Anyway, enough of me, here's the video...

Issues with posts migrated from Wordpress

For some reason when I try and view a post using the direct url, I am gettign the below error. I am investigating this and will try to get it fixed as soon as possible. This post will also help me to test if the new posts I create here have the same issue.

We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.

When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please:

Describe what you were doing when you got this error.
Provide the following error code and additional information.
bX-un82ty
Additional information
host: intercompanyfinancials.blogspot.com
uri: /2010/04/new-oracle-financials-blog.html

This information will help us to track down your specific problem and fix it! We apologize for the inconvenience.

Find help
See if anyone else is having the same problem: Search the Blogger Help Group for bX-un82ty
If you don't get any results for that search, you can start a new topic. Please make sure to mention bX-un82ty in your message.

New Oracle Financials Blog

There is a new Financials blogger on the block and her name is Theresa Hickman.  I have been fortunate to work with Theresa during her time managing the product management teams for General Ledger and Accounts Payable products and her time working in the financials strategy team, she's very knowledgeable,  dedicated and a big asset to Oracle.  Already she's doing some good stuff in her new role in Financials Product Marketing.  So check out her Financials Blog, where she covers Oracle product items and general finance topics such as latest news on IFRS.  She also has a twitter account @OracleFMS which is worth following if you even have a passing interest in finance topics.

If you have any other blogs of interest or tweeters, please share them with all the readers in the comments below.

One Laptop per Child - the perfect gift

[caption id="attachment_69" align="alignleft" width="340" caption="XO Laptop"][/caption]

Written by David Haimes

I blogged some time ago about the One Laptop per Child Foundation and how myself and others had taken part in the give one get one program last year. I think the XO laptop is an amazing machine and more importantly I fully support the goals of the foundation.

I got an email and a message to thank me for giving the laptop and as it suggests I will tell 100 people (I hope I have that many readers) and be taking my XO laptop to work this week so I can show people the machine and spread the word about the excellent work the foundation is doing - feel free to drop by my office to check it out. If you want to give then you can do this at www.amazon.com/xo

FSAH and AGIS Intercompany Implementation thoughts

Written by David Haimes

As Intercompany transactions are very likely to cross systems they are a good candidate for integration in a 'Hub' of some sort.

In R12 the Financials Services Accounting Hub (FSAH) allows integration of third party systems to Oracle and is incredibly powerful and flexible.

Let's use a simple example:

Company A and B both use two different Ledgers. A Sales Invoice is issued by Company A (to Company B) for $5,000

The accounting needs to be created as below, they need to be booked with the same accounting date in the same period.

In Company A

Debit Intercompany AR $5,000
Credit Intercompany sales $5,000

In Company B

Debit Expense or inventory (per content), $5,000
Credit Intercompany AP, $5,000

So there's a number of options that come to mind (in no particular order).

1) Using Oracle Accounting Hub you can account for transactions form third party systems, it uses the Subledger accounting engine to process accounting events defined for the third party system. If your invoice systems are third party applications, you could create 2 events (one for each company/ledger/party to the transaction) for the sales invoice and get the full accounting out of the single system integration.

2) Enter these transactions in AGIS, the specific accounting will be entered/generated and approvals from company A and B obtained before AGIS either books it direct to GL or generates the Invoice for company A and B if required.

3) It may not be ideal to force users to navigate to a different screen (or change some import process, EDI, XML feed etc) to issue Intercompany invoices from other invoices as in 2) above. So continue to enter in your regular sales invoice system but run a process which detects an invoice is Intercompany and cancels it, then generates a transaction for it in AGIS (via the Open Interfaces) or FSAH.

I don't think any one of these is right for all situations, detailed analysis of the particular implementation environment and requirements needs to be done to figure out the best approach. If you have any thoughts, better suggestions or experience then please share them in the comments.

Quiet Period Over

I was hoping that I'd find time to blog regular updates during the Open World week, but this proved a lot more difficult than I anticipated. There was simply so much going on during the days and evenings plus I had to continue with my day job; building Fusion GL and Intercompany Applications (that's the day job I can't blog a lot about). So to summarize my Open World, I saw a lot of people, talked a lot about Oracle, presented an Intercompany Session, spent some time on the DEMO booth and was exhausted at the end of it all.

I was going to attempt to write a review of the week, but there's so much to say and so many people to remember to give a mention that now is not the time. I will focus on one particular area, the DEMO grounds; working here is IMO the hardest job at Open World

Is oracle.com cool again?

After last year's Oracle Open World I asked if Oracle was cool again and that post was picked up by eye on oracle and created quite a bit of debate. Now we are approaching Open World again and I see Oracle has put it's mix social network front and center taking over the oracle.com home page with the Oracle Listens campaign. Already @monkchips thinks it's cool.

Not as cool as google? I don't want to go there again. In fact there is a huge amount of buzz on twitter from many people, Oracle and non Oracle alike. I like the cynical take by @jknoll

I don't think Oracle has run out of ideas, I just think they are admitting that customers and partners might have some equally good ideas that we should listen to.

I'm browsing through the ideas and there's an amount of noise as you might expect, but there seems to be a new idea submitted about every five minutes. That amount of feedback is immense.  Credit to the Oracle marketing team for driving this, I see Justin is answering a lot of the ideas right now and other Oracle folks are jumping in too.  Expect to hear a lot more about this next week.

My opinion is this is a bold move and Oracle has convinced me its cool again this year. Do you agree or think it is just a gimmick? Make your voice heard in the comments.

Got my OOW badge

I collected my badge here at Oracle HQ, so I can avoid the crowds at the Moscone. Now what I don't have is a ticket to the Party on Wednesday Night, which is held on Treasure Island with UB40, Seal, Elvis Costello and some Country artist who's name I don't recall (sorry - but I only dislike two kinds of music; Country and Western). People may not know this, but Oracle employees in general do not get a ticket to the party even if we have DEMOgrounds or Speaker ribbons on our badges. So there's normally a load of Oracle folks asking customers for and spare tickets. The past few years friends have sorted me out, but this year I have no leads...I will be in the DEMOgrounds Wednesday and Thursday mornings so you can drop by there to chat or contact me if you want to arrange to meet some time.

I plan to do updates via twitter and post here on the blog regularly throughout the conference so stay tuned.

Also check out the official Open World Blog, they're getting great content on there this year and I'll be watching that closely.

Financials Sessions at Oracle Open World 2008

A lot of people are asking when various sessions are, readers of this blog are probably interested in Oracle EBS financials, Helle posted on Oracle Mix a couple of useful links. I recommend looking at this pdf which lists all the financials sessions including demogrounds, apps lounges, presentations etc.

My session is listed there, I look forward to seeing some of your there.

Thursday 25th, 3:00 p.m.

Moscone West 2006

Are Intercompany Processing and Reconciliation Currently Pain Points for Your Enterprise?

David Haimes, Oracle; Helle Hennings, Oracle

I blogged last year about the meet the Experts Lounge, well this year it has been renamed to Applications Lounge. I haven't been asked to attend this year, so if you want to ask me any questions or provide feedback you'll have to come to the session above, find me at the DEMOgrounds, the Blogger Meetup or follow me in twitter, or use this blog all year round - remember customer interaction is not just for Oracle Open World, it's for life.