Legal Entity Configurator - Why?

In Oracle Ebusiness Suite 11i, the Legal Entity is tied closely to a set of books and operating Unit, so your Legal Structure has to be defined in the way you set up your apps partitions (OU, Set of Books etc.). In R12 financials breaks away from that with the introduction of the Legal Entity Configurator allowing you to model your Legal Structure separately from the partitions in your ERP system. Then you mark certain items with an owning LE, rather than use the OU or set of books to derive the LE. So let's see what this buys you.

Can I assign an Operating Unit to Multiple Legal Entities?

The short answer is sort of. Which is not much help to anyone, hopefully you will have a few moments to read on and I can explain myself. This post assumes that you understand the relationship between Legal Entities and Ledgers which I discussed in an earlier post.

In R12, a new Legal Entity Configurator was introduced in financials and Legal Entities defined here are are assigned to Ledgers and/or Balancing Segments (Company Codes). However it is not possible to assign a Financials Legal Entity to an Operating Unit, you can only define a Default Legal Context (DLC) to an Operating Unit. This assignment can cause confusion as it is only possible to assign one DLC, but I can use more than one LE in that Operating Unit. The key word in DLC is default.