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.

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.

Fixed Assests Intercompany in R12

[caption id="attachment_182" align="alignleft" width="258" caption="Fixed Asset?"][/caption]

Something I often forget to mention is the enhancement of Intercompany functionality in Fixed Assets (FA) that has been provided in R12. So here is my attempt to explain it, based on an old email discussion with the FA team, I wouldn't describe myslef as an FA expert, but if there are any comments or questions I might be able to find an FA expert to get an answer. :)

In 11i FA stores reference accounts in two setup entities; Book Controls and Categories. The intercompany Payables and Receivables accounts were stored directly on the book, only the natural accounts segment were stored for these two accounts. The Account Generator definition would combine the natural account with other sources to get a full account combination. Out of the box, those sources were a default ccid which is also on the book and a ccid from the asset assignment. So the balancing segment is derived from the asset assignment, the natural account from the values on the book, and other segments from the default account.

The intercompany would kick in for two transaction types "Transfer" and "Unit Adjustment". However, other transactions could result in intercompany impacts, but they would not be generated in FA so GL would do the balancing when the accounting was posted there.

So in R12 FA uses the AGIS Intercompany balancing feature, which is

Intercompany Session at Oracle Open World

The content catalog is available so you can go and search for sessions.

There's an Intercompany session (S299151), it is not scheduled yet and as I am one of the presenters I can tell you it definitely isn't written yet, next week I'll get started on that with my copresenter from strategy, Helle.  the details of the session are below.  If you have any suggestions about what we should cover, how we might cover it or anything else for the session it would be great to hear from you - add them to the comments and let's see if we can try and tailor the presentation to the audience a little.

Session ID:	S299151
Session Title:	Are Intercompany Processing and Reconciliation Currently a Pain Point for Your Enterprise?
Session Abstract:	Having problems reconciling your intercompany activity? Would you like better documentation and visibility into your various intercompany activities? Are acquisitions or changing legal structures making intercompany processing more expensive and time-consuming? Attend this session, which discusses and demos capabilities of Oracle Advanced Global Intercompany System in Release 12 and implementation options such as using this application as a standalone hub for all your intercompany activity across multiple ERP instances from multiple vendors.
Track:	APPLICATIONS, Oracle E-Business Suite
Focus Areas:	Not Applicable
Session Type:	Conference Session
Product Area:	Financial Management
Duration:	60 minutes
Room:	Rm 2006
Speaker(s)/Company:	David Haimes, Oracle.; Helle Hennings, Oracle

Financial Services Accounting Hub (FSAH)

Financial Services Accounting Hub or FSAH (pronounced F-saa apparently) is a great product and is not only for Financial Services companies either, I understand we'll sell it to anyone.

From a (very) high level perspective it allows you to use Oracle SLA and GL to perform the accounting for third party applications. Companies the Financial services industry tend to build a lot of highly complex applications (e.g. loan systems, trading systems) in house, but they want the final accounting of transactions form these disparate system to end up in the same place and it will be nice if they can re-use the same accounting rules too.

Why Product Development Should Blog - Part 2

In part 1 I talked about how a conversation on my blog took a frustrated customer with problems to a situation where they got sales to quote them for another Oracle product. Part 2 is a more personal branding issue.

Generating Consulting Opportunities

I contacted a reader of my blog who'd added some comments and I got the reply below:

<company X> is using Oracle as well, but they are not fully implemented across the globe. I'm noticing that we are having a hard time with intercompany transactions as they relate to foreign currencies.

I was researching the issue on google and I came across your blog. I think your blog is a great tool for questions, but I think I have too many question to ask on your blog. I was wondering if you did any consulting work?

Happy as I am in my job, especially now I'm working on GL too, it's always nice to have other options. Of course this might lead to Oracle Consulting getting some work from this person, which would be nice too.

What is also really important to note is the research started with Google; not the user documentation, not support, not metalink or OTN, straight to google. I had a similar experience yesterday, I needed to know the IP address of my netgear wireless router. I didn't go and dig out the instruction manual that came with it (not sure if I still have it), I didn't go to netgear.com and start to navigate through that, I just googled it and I had the answer in seconds (192.168.0.1 for the record) and I have no idea what the source of the information was, I just know it worked. So if you have information about how best to use your products, you better get those tips and tricks out there so google can find them. I call it Help 2.0, but it seems other people have thought of that term already.

UPDATE: I now have added part 3 in this series.

Speaking Our Customers' Language

Eddie Awad discussed an interesting oracle Press release in his blog and the reaction of the Wall Street Journal Tech Blog too it. Eddie mused that as he is not a network techie it doesn't mean much to him, this is intentional. The pres release was made at a network industry conference and was aimed at that particular group of people who would understand it.

Since Oracle went on it's acquisition spree a few years ago, it has started to focus on industry specific applications more and more. Examples are the purchase of retek, a retail industry software vedor and Portal which produces telecom billing applications. May of these indusrty verticals are organized in their own business unit and we don't just want the Apps, we need the experts in that industry to help us build hte best apps, market, sell and support them. This focus on industry verticals is not unique to Oracle, for example most accountancy firms organize their business so partners specialize in an industry. One of the main reasons for this is

Defining Intracompany Balancing Rules

Written by Rohit Kathuria and David Haimes

In order to take advantage of the automatic Intercompany balancing during GL posting and SLA Accounting you first need to define the accounts you want us to use.

Intercompany and Intracompany Accounts in R12 are defined in two different Set Up Pages, the Intracompany Balancing Rules are what we had in 11i for Intercompany Accounts (confusing I know) - this is where you will find the rules you had in 11i of you are upgrading from 11i. If you don't want to take advantage of the Legal Entity Configurator product and define Legal Entities and map them to your accounting structure, you can still go ahead and use the intracompany rules. If you start to map your Legal Entities to Ledgers and/or Balancing Segment Values (BSV) then you will want to be sure you complete the job, so there is no ambiguity in your setup. Consider the example below

Virgin Beta Experience

The other weekend I flew back from Las Vegas to San Francisco on Virgin America, there has been no end of hype about their new planes and the software so I was interested to what it was all about. It all runs on a linux box hidden in the belly of the plane, I know this to be true because I got to watch it boot on my screen while we were backing away from the gate- that didn't feel right somehow. They call it "Red(beta):An interactive environment" and invite you to touch anywhere to begin; an offer I couldn't refuse.

8 Things or OraBlog Tag Round 2

Jake over at Oracle AppsLab has started a game of tag, which involves writing 8 things about you people might not know and then tagging 6 friends to do the same, creating some sort of blog network monster. This is like when you go to a training class and they decide to chuck a ball around and whoever catches it has to introduce themselves and then throw the ball to somebody else - anyone else been there? They usually say 'just tell us your name and one interesting fact about yourself'. There's always one guy (almost always male) who decides to give you his life story and his opinion on all sorts f things that you don't care about and certainly don't want to here his pearls of wisdom about. Oh, Now I'm being that guy... Here are my 8 things.

Why do I need another period ?

In R12 we introduced AGIS periods that control the transactions entered in AGIS, this is a feature that is often misunderstood. The usual question is - Why do I want another period? I'll give some ideas why you might want one, but if you decide you don't need one, don't worry we made it optional so you don't have to use it. If you decide to use it just pick one of your GL Calendars to use for your Intercompany periods, if you never enter a calendar in the system options periods will not be enabled and you can enter transactions whenever you want with no interference from the system.

So, I ask again - Why do I want another period ?

Alas poor 2007, we knew him so well

Goodbye 2007, its been good, but all good things come to an end. I'm working at home and I'm looking out from my desk to where the San Francisco fireworks will be in about seven hours time. That big green tower wasn't there this time last year, which might spoil the view a bit, but I feel very lucky to live in the heart of a great city.

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="346" caption="View from my home office"][/caption]

For me it's been a big year, my second child was born in early January and then another baby I've been helping nurture for some time; Oracle Ebusiness Suite Release 12 was sent out into the world that month too. One thing I really enjoyed was the field training for R12 financials, we did a number of sessions in HQ and then one on the East Coast and one in Nice, France. The Nice session would have been a great opportunity for me to visit Europe maybe take time off and visit my family in the UK too, small problem was our 4 week old baby at home. So I flew in, did my half day presenting and flew out again, I spent 32 hours on the ground and 36 hours traveling. People thought this was tough, but with a 2 year old boy and a 4 week old baby, I saw 16 hours on a plane as a chance for some 'me time' and I got the best sleep I have had in 2007. Delivering the sessions was a great learning experience for me, I met consulting, sales and support staff as well as Oracle partners, all of whom impressed me with their detailed knowledge of 11i and gave me insight into the issues they and our customers face and also reminded me that we made huge strides with R12. It also helped me realize that I needed to get out more, get out from the bubble of development that is.

Although R12 was the big release,

Top 5 posts of 2007

So this is the time of the year when every media outlet takes a break from creating real content and creates top lists of anything they can think of from the past year and why should I be any different? Letterman has a whole team of writers that help him do this all year round and he reached a deal with them, when other show hosts will have to write their own monologues - poor things. I think I have proved in the short time I've been blogging that I am capable of creating a post with little real content, yet people still read them - so you only have yourselves to blame, by clicking on the more link that is coming up very soon you are just encouraging me.

Is Google Just an Oracle Wannabee?

I was surprised that my pondering if Oracle was cool again got so much attention, the piece from Tim DiChiara turning around my comment to ask if Oracle is as cutting edge and risk taking as google I think was intentionally provocative, but I'll bite.

So what do Google and Oracle do, where do they make money? Oracle sells software and associated services to enterprises, a company thinks Oracle software can improve the way they run their business so they pony up for the license fee. I see Google as more like a broadcaster, like TV and radio stations they provide content that attracts viewers who they advertise to. When internet habits change and traffic moves to other sites, google need to own those sites to keep their ratings up.

Is Oracle Cool Again?

I joined Oracle UK in 1997 when Oracle 8 was just out to a lot of buzz. I had written a College paper on Designer 2000, which in 1995 sounded futuristic; automatic code generation and reverse engineering of code was a hot topic around then. All in all it felt pretty good to be joining Oracle and many of my college friends were impressed, especially as I was joining product development. Things went well, I learned a lot, 8i came out, I was involved in building 11i which was on the latest tools and then I moved out to the US in 2000 at the height of the dot com boom.

Cleaning Out My Closet

I am moving up in the Oracle World. Yes, after 6 years on the 12th floor in Oracle HQ, today I moved up to the newly refurbished 16th floor in building 300 (that's the tallest emerald tower that says 'Oracle' on the top)



This will have a real impact on my life in a number of ways,

Intercompany Segments in the Vision Demo

One of the most common questions I get asked is

'Do we need to define an Intercompany segment in our chart of accounts?'

The answer is:

'We do not require an Intercompany Segment, but we still recommend defining one'.

Even if you do not have a great deal of intercompany activity at the moment, it is worth having one defined now as it is difficult to add one later.

Another question I have been asked is

'Can I define the same segment to be my balancing segment (aka Company Code) and my Intercompany segment?'