Public Services

Monday, June 14, 2004

Understanding constraints (ceilings) in Oracle Public Sector Budgeting (PSB)

The objective of this post is to explain in more detail certain concepts relating to constraints. In particular I will be looking at thresholds and severity levels and explaining how they work.

According to the Oracle Public Sector Budgeting documentation, “Constraints are used to notify users regarding specific conditions for account ranges, elements, or position sets. For example, users can be notified if the total expense for a range of accounts exceeds a particular dollar amount.

Constraints (otherwise known as ceilings in most of the Government organisations I have implemented in) are used to place limits on budget estimates. In Oracle Public Sector Budgeting, estimates are prepared in budget worksheets and after these estimates are prepared they are checked against constraints or ceilings that have been put in place by the relevant authorities.

The screen shot below shows the constraint setup screen in Oracle PSB. 

One of the concepts I struggled to understand was severity levels and thresholds and how these worked together. I felt that the Oracle documentation was a bit weak in this area and did not clearly define how these two settings worked together. In the next couple of paragraphs I will attempt to clarify how these “parameters” work.

Essentially two types of ceilings exist, namely: -

Hard Ceilings (can also be referred to as absolute)

This occurs is the threshold is less that or equal to the severity level. In the diagram shown, lines two (“General Fund”) and three (“Finance FTE”) would be classified as hard ceilings.

If a ceiling is hard, when a budget worksheet preparer submits a worksheet for review, a constraint violation will be produced and the user will be required to amend the violation to the worksheet and then re-submit it. Essentially, the worksheet will remain stuck with the preparer until such time as he ensures the constraint violation is rectified.

Soft Ceilings (can also be referred to as advisory)

This occurs if the threshold > severity level. In the diagram shown, line one (“Budget Dept”) would be classified as a soft ceiling.

In this instance, when a budget worksheet preparer submits a worksheet for review a constraint violation will be produced, however, the authoriser will still be able to work on the worksheet and post it to the General Ledger. Essentially, a warning message will be produced that there is a constraint violation but this will not stop the worksheet going through all the remaining processes needed to post it to the General Ledger.

Note: If the severity level is left blank then it is assumed to be less than the threshold level.

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Transfer of Budget Worksheet, Revision and Dossier transactions to the Oracle General Ledger

Having implemented Oracle Public Sector Budgeting at two fairly large sites, I’ve gained a good understanding of how Oracle’s Budgeting solution fits together.  This post aims to outline the different methods used to post Budget data from Public Sector Budgeting and OPSF(I) in to the General Ledger.

I felt the best way to explain how Oracle Budget data is posted into General Ledger would be by using a table as displayed below. The table outlines how budgeting data for a particular area of budgeting is posted in to the General Ledger and also identifies what journal sources and categories would be utilised. One of the main reasons for me writing this post is I felt that these procedures were not clearly outlined in the Oracle Documentation and where it was outlined it was in different manuals. I also get the feeling that the three main mechanisms of getting budget data into the General Ledger, namely worksheets, revisions and dossiers, were perhaps developed by different development teams or at different time periods.

This table I have prepared will consolidate the methodology for posting budget data relating to worksheets, revisions and dossiers into one place. My hope is that this will help someone else implementing the same modules who may be going through the same struggle as I initially went through.

Methodology for transferring Worksheets, Revisions and Dossiers to General Ledger