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.

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.

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.

R12 Intercompany Accounts Set Up

In R12 the Intercompany Accounts setup is broken out from GL and included in the Advanced Global Intercompany System (AGIS) product (Don't worry you don't need any additional license for this product). There is a separate set up screen for Intercompany and Intracompany Accounts. The same set up pages are available through the Accounting Set Up Manager as well as AGIS so you can pick your navigation path.

Intercompany Segment in Secondary Ledgers

I was recently asked - Do I need to define an Intercompany Segment in my secondary ledger if the primary it is attached to has an Intercompany Segment?

New Intercompany features in R12

R12 introduces the new product Advanced Global Intercompany System (AGIS), which takes forward the features provided by GIS in 11i GL and adds a number of important new capabilities. The major new capabilities are:

• Creation of Documentation (ie. Payables and Receivables Invoices) for AGIS transactions

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?'