OracleAppsBlog

A day in the life of an Oracle Applications Consultant

Finance

Sunday, November 29, 2020

Setting up Control Accounts and Restricting GL Manual Journal Posting

One of the options to consider when setting up the nominal segment within your Chart of Accounts is what your Third Party Control Account values should be. Before doing this its critical to understand what options are available and the impact of selecting these. Hence, I thought I’d put together a brief post explaining these.

The image below depicts where within the value set you would select the appropriate option and is followed by an explanation of the resultant impact.

Third Party Control Account Options

General Ledger journals can be entered directly in that module or be received from a Subledger. Since control accounts should accurately reflect the movements in a related Subledger its ideal that we only allow postings to these that are sourced from the Subledger. Hence, minimising the number of manual postings to a control account is recommended and makes Subledger to General Ledger Control Account reconciliation a lot simpler.

Whichever option is chosen below will determine the allowed journal source for a GL nominal account and the level of restriction to be applied:

1. Customer Control Account - only journal postings sourced from Accounts Receivable can be posted to this nominal.
2. No - either this is not a control account or you want to allow any type of journal to be posted to this account.
3. Restrict GL Manual Journals - journals with a source of Manual which are those entered directly into General Ledger will not be allowed. This provides more flexibility in that any Subledger can post to this account.
4. Supplier Control Account - only allow journal postings sourced from Accounts Payable can be posted to this nominal.
5. Third Party Control Account - only allow journal postings sourced from Accounts Receivable or Payables can be posted to this nominal.

Inherit Segment Values

Following any updates to a value set its important to point out that you should run the Inherit Segment Value Attributes program. This will propagate the attributes of a segment value to all account combinations that contain that segment value. Note that selecting the Create Execution Report option when running this program produces a report which lists each updated account for comparison including original and current attributes. Download an example of the Segment Value Inheritance Execution Report

Sunday, August 24, 2008

Batch Invoice Uploads into Oracle Payables

MS Excel to load invoice batches to Oracle Payables! Even Oracle ADI doesn’t do that, in fact few 3rd-party products do. What to do? Do as Kevin Ellis has done, develop your own in-house invoice batch interface. And if that isn’t enough to pique your interest, how about an interface for keeping your chart of accounts current between production legacy and Oracle systems? He has done that too and he has shared all in this comprehensive ORAtips cover story, discussing custom concurrent program and UNIX shell script development, Oracle Applications set-up and end-user considerations.

Download White Paper on Invoice Uploads into Oracle Payables

This article was originally published by Klee Associates, Inc., publishers of JDEtips and SAPtips. For training, consulting, and articles on JD Edwards or SAP, please visit their websites: www.JDEtips.com and www.SAPtips.com.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Oracle Financials Technical Interview Questions and Score Sheet

Over the last few years I’ve been involved in interviewing a number of Oracle Financials Consultants and have also in the past been sitting on the other side of the desk as an interviewee. The last time I conducted an interview it was more technical in nature and I decided to came up with a list of questions to ask the interviewee. These questions were focused along the lines of people, process and technology and I thought I would write a blog entry with the questions as I’m sure it will be useful for interviewers and interviewee’s alike. In addition to the questions I also developed a score sheet utilising the Kepner Tregoe decision making methodology, an approach I learnt when doing my Masters in Business Leadership (MBL). This score sheet allows the interviewer to develop an objective means of evaluating the answers to interview questions rather than a subjective one and can be modified to suit a number of different scenarios. I haven’t included any answers to the questions as in many cases there is no right answer, I prefer to see if someone understands the concepts and can explain them well. Having said that, if any one wants to come up with a suggested answer sheet I will gladly append it to the questions listing. Hopefully this question listing and score sheet will provide readers with a baseline/guideline that can be used in any type of interview.

• Download Oracle Financials Technical Interview Questions
• Download Oracle Financials Technical Interview Score Sheet

Technology Questions

General Ledger

• Explain the organisational concepts of business group, set of books, legal entity, operating unit and inventory organization and the hierarchical structure relating to these.
• What are the three C’s in relation to a set of books? 
• Explain the difference between a key flexfield and descriptive flexfield
• What is the difference between a cross validation rule and a security rule? 
• What is a value set and what are the different types of value sets that you will find within Oracle?

Accounts Payable

• Describe the Key Configuration decisions you would need to undertake when implementing the Accounts Payable module.
• Briefly describe the Supplier Invoice to Payment process within Oracle.

Accounts Receivable

• Describe the Key Configuration decisions you would need to undertake when implementing the Accounts Receivable module.
• Briefly describe/draw the Customer Invoice to Cash process within Oracle
• Describe the Key difference in setting up accounting for Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable
• What happens when you have a receipt in Oracle that can’t be applied to an invoice?

Fixed Assets

• Describe the key configuration decisions you would need to undertake when implementing the fixed assets module.
• Briefly describe/draw the asset additions process within Oracle.

Cash Management

• Describe the key configuration decisions you would need to undertake when implementing the cash management module.
• Outline the Statement to Reconciliation process within Oracle with particular reference to the different options you might want to consider when reconciling.

All Modules

Describe/draw the sequence of events you would undertake in closing the various financials modules.

People Questions

• Draw a typical structure relating to project implementation and describe the role each person would play within a project.
• Describe how to implement an effective training strategy within an implementation – include the timing of training relative to the project lifecycle.
• Within an implementation describe a Change Management strategy that you would put in place.

Process Questions

• Describe/draw the main phases of an implementation lifecycle and the key milestones and deliverables within each of these phases.
• Describe the key differences between a process and work instruction
• Within a project describe the different test phases that you might go through and what level of testing would be undertaken.
• Describe a typical process you would implement for managing Change Requests and Bug requests within your organization.

Friday, February 03, 2006

Oracle Navigation and ADI Tip Sheets

Last year I worked with Nici Aldridge on an IMSCAN document management and scanning solution for an Oracle E-Business Suite implementation. Nici is an Oracle Applications Consultant who does quite a substantial amount of Oracle Training - read her profile here. She shared with me some “tip sheets” she has produced for Oracle Applications Navigation and Oracle’s Application Desktop Integrator (ADI). These tips sheets are very short documents which are aimed at providing users with the basic information they need to get started with.

Other tip sheets are available for:

• Office 2000 - Generic Information for Office 2000
• Word 2000 - For those converting to Word 2000
• Outlook 2000 - For those converting to Outlook 2000
• PowerPoint 2000 - For those converting to PowerPoint 2000
• PowerPoint for Presenters - Suggestions for using PowerPoint effectively in PC-based presentations
• Visual Aids - Suggestions for choosing and using visual aids, including PC slides

Thursday, April 07, 2005

FSG YTD-Actual Problem and Resolution

This post contains the solution for a small problem we encountered when trying to produce an FSG report.

When trying to produce an FSG report in ADI the other day we noticed a problem with the YTD-Actual column in the report. We wanted to print the report as at December 2005 (i.e. the last month of the year) so that we could see what the budget figures looked like. When trying to print the report in this fashion the YTD-Actual column for Dec 2005 was displaying zero values even though we knew there should be data in the report. We tried printing the report from within General Ledger but still the same result, zero values in the YTD-Actual Column. We knew that there should be values in this column as January and February had already been closed and most of the entries for March had been processed. Even when performing a drill down to the detail in the General Ledger we could see that there were values present.

The problem was a simple one which we found the resolution for buried in point 30 of Metalink Note:108236.1 entitled FSG Functional FAQ. The solution suggested that in order for the YTD-Actual data to display in the report you should ensure that the GL periods upon which you were reporting should be open or closed. In our instance the periods from April to December were still Future Enterable and hence we resolved the problem by opening these periods and immediately closing them so that they now had a status of closed. Once this simple task had been performed we were able to see data in our report.