Overview of the Analyze Phase in Implementing Accounting Hub Cloud

This article provides an Overview of the Analyze Phase in the Accounting Transformation Implementation in Accounting Hub Cloud.

Analyze and Identify the Transaction Lifecycle of Source Systems

First, the number of custom subledgers to be created should be determined. In our example, we have separate third-party systems for commercial and individual loans, and a billing application. Depending on how your organization uses these third-party systems, we may want to register them as separate subledgers or just one subledger. Below is a quick comparison between the two:

Unified Subledger	Separate Subledgers
Share subledger accounting rules	Provides more security across applications
Lets you report across all data easily	less data in each processor, performance will be much faster
	accounting process can be run simultaneously for different applications
	much less likely to contend for database resources

For example, If the commercial and individual loan systems will be registered as a single, unified subledger, data for processing will be huge and this might impact system performance. On the other hand, this actually saves time, because we can re-utilize the subledger accounting rules. So considering these points, you will have to figure out whether it is a wise decision to go with separate or unified subledgers.

Another point that we have to keep in mind is that, we need to determine what source data is required to create subledger journal entries. You should not bring each and every transaction from the source system into Accounting Hub, rather, only transactions which need to be accounted for. You need to analyze the source systems and determine what transaction types to capture and what transaction types should be considered for accounting purposes.

In the loan system example, we have the following activities in your source system:

1. loan origination
2. loan interest approval
3. loan interest accrual reversals
4. loan scheduled payments
5. loan late payments
6. loan charge-offs

Some of the mentioned transactions will attract accounting entries, and some of them will not. Only the transaction types that needs accounting entries must be established as part of your event model under the source system that you're registering within the Accounting Hub Cloud. These transactions must be distinctly identified and registered as transaction types.

A transaction type and it's associated transaction data typically relates to a single document or transaction in the source system. Transaction types will become accounting events in the Accounting Hub Cloud, and for each of those accounting events, we must generate the accounting entries.

Next point that we need to keep in mind is to figure out how frequent do you want the data to come from the source system. This will depend on the immediacy and volumes of accounting requirements in your company. It should not be scheduled during the day when your database resources are being consumed at a high level.

Also, you will have to evaluate if you will bring each and every individual customer transaction from the source system, or just the summarized activity for a customer that you have managed throughout the day.

Analyze the Accounting, Reporting, Auditing, and Reconciliation Requirements for Transaction Types

This analysis should, at a minimum, answer a couple of questions, such as:

Under what condition does each of the subledger journal entry lines get created? Is it upon the loan approval or when the loan has been entered in the source system? You need to identify the event when the transaction should be picked from the source system.

What is the line type of each subledger journal entry line, debit or credit? You need to figure out if a transaction will use a debit line or the credit line. For example, the transaction "Loan Origination" will have a debit line for loan receivable account and a credit line for cash or bank account.

What description should be used for the subledger journal entry? This determines the description the subledger journal entry will have for each transaction type. This will be useful for reconciling the subledger journal entry to the source system.

How are the accounts derived for the entry? This determines how are the account segment values for each of the segment in your chart of account will be retrieved. What logic is needed to be applied to identify the account segment values of each transaction type.

What additional information may be useful for reconciling the subledger journal entry to the source system? You would need to identify what additional information needs to be captured that will be useful for reconciling the subledger journal entry to the source system. 

Aside from identifying the accounting transactions in your source system, you should also determine which attributes you need to include in journal entry creation. There are 10 attributes, called transaction identifiers, that you can use to capture transactional information from your source systems.

These transaction identifiers can help you easily reconcile journal entries. Specify which fields you want to map against those 10 transaction identifiers to, and when the accounting entries are generated, the system will populate the values of those transaction identifiers at the journal entry level. These transaction identifiers can be utilized for designing either the description rules or the account rules. Example transaction attributes may include:

1. Amounts (including entered and accounted amounts)
2. Dates (such as accounting date and transaction date)
3. Descriptions
4. Journal Ledger accounts
5. Customer Information
6. Transaction Type Information
7. Product Information
8. Salesperson
9. Loan Type

Carefully analyze, plan and model the custom subledger by visualizing the accounted journal entries. and identify the transaction attributes from the source system that can be used for accounting and reporting purposes, and model the source system to meet your business requirement in the Accounting Hub Cloud.

Transaction Identifier Example

From the above loan source system example, the transaction "Loan origination" is the debit line, and Cash is the credit line.

Observe that the Account column shows different values. Analyze whether the entire combination or each of the individual segments will follow a specific rule to retrieve the values. Those values could be based on the transaction attributes that were brought from the source system. This can be achieved with a mechanism called mapping sets.

For example, the value for the Line of Business segment (segment 2) can be based on the salesperson who is tied to that transaction line. Below, If the transaction was tied to Mr John Doe, the Line of Business Segment is 10. Additionally, the cost center segment can be dependent on the loan type. If the loan type is an adjustable rate, the value for the cost center would be "0000" and if the loan type is fixed rate, the cost center value is "2120".

When you have listed all the transaction attributes that are required to obtain the appropriate accounting entries from the Accounting Hub Cloud and visualized all these details, you will be able to retrieve the values for your chart of account segment and map them into the application. And based on that, the journal entry will be created.

Accounting Attributes

Next, we need to figure out, what are the accounting attributes that we need to assign for our source system. So the Create Accounting process basically utilizes the values of the sources assigned to accounting attributes and accounting rules to create subledger journal entries.

Each accounting attribute is associated with a level when you create the subledger journal entries. It could be the header level definition, or it may be the line level definition. Below are the mandatory accounting attributes and source assignments, these must be used whenever you are registering your source systems.

Accounting Attribute	Predefined Source Assignment
Accounting Date	Transaction Date
Distribution Type	Accounting Event Type Code
Entered Amount	Default Amount
Entered Currency Code	Default Currency
First Distribution Identifier	Line Number

Accounting Hub Cloud basically pre-defines transaction dates as accounting date. So whatever is your transaction date, that is identified by Accounting Hub as accounting date. The Create Accounting process will use this to derive the accounting date of the journal entries. There is another option that we have to keep in mind as far as accounting date is concerned, that is called accrual reversal accounting date source. This attribute is relevant to applications that must perform automatic reversal on accrual journal entries at a specified date or period. You can assign application and standard date sources to the accrual reversal accounting date on the Accounting Attribute Assignment page.

The First Distribution Identifier information is equivalent to the line number in the predefined source assignment. This basically links the subledger transaction distributions to their corresponding journal entry lines.

So these are the accounting attributes that we should always keep in mind, and they will always be associated to a predefined source assignment.

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Overview of Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud Rapid Implementation Approach

The rapid implementation approach is a new approach that has been introduced for the purpose of registering source systems quicker with the use of spreadsheet templates, where you will populate the details based on which the registration of the third-party systems will take place.

This is especially useful if you have numerous third-party application systems and you would like to register them into the Accounting Hub Cloud solution. It offers a simplified, streamlined source system registration and automation-ready transaction upload to Financials Cloud.

Steps in the Rapid Implementation Approach

1. Source System Registration. First, you need to figure out which are the third-party systems that you want to use for the purpose of registration into the Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud. And within the application, you have an option to download a spreadsheet template. You can populate the information into the respective sections of the spreadsheet template. And based on the data that you will enter, when you upload that into the application, the system will register a source system automatically.
2. Upload Transactional Data. You can upload transactional data for the registered Accounting Hub Cloud subledgers in a CSV format. Optionally, you can automate the process from uploading to create accounting journal entries with the help of web services as well. This actually increases control of financial and management reporting requirements because you have a streamlined, smooth approach to bring the transactional data from the various systems into the Accounting Hub Cloud solution.
3. Accounting Transformations. To generate the accounting entries against the transactional data that we are bringing from the various systems, we need accounting rules. And those accounting rules are basically designed with the help of a solution called accounting transformations. Accounting transformations will basically help you to set up your accounting methods which are containers for all the accounting rules and other related attributes based on the journal entry that's supposed to be created.

When you register a source system, you will need to establish an event model under that. Once a source system has been registered and an event model has been established, you will design an accounting method. All of them will be utilized. And then you will load the transactional data by using those components. 

Finally, these transactional data will be converted into journal entries and they are then posted into GL to update the balances in the Essbase cube. This allows your organization to run Financial Statements and reports using the Financial Reporting Center, the intended primary user interface for accessing all the journal ledger-related reports.

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Accounting Transformation Configurations in Accounting Hub Cloud

What is Accounting Transformation?

To use Accounting Hub Cloud, accounting rules need to be established with the use of accounting transformation. Accounting transformation is a mechanism that helps you to manage the creation of accurate, detailed, auditable accounting journal entries and reference information for transactions that were recorded from a third party system.  And finally, those journal entries are pushed and posted to the General Ledger application. 

Planning and Modeling Subledgers

The first thing that needs to be done is to plan and model the custom subledger applications that will be registered in Accounting Hub. You would need exists to have separate control over accounting and other business operation decisions for a specific source system. 


If you look at the example below, we are presuming that we have a third-party application system that processes loans and billing:

For loan processing, we might be using a separate application for dealing with commercial loans and a separate application for dealing with individual loans. In that case, we need to register them as two separate subledger applications. Within that, we are going to have to determine what type of transactions are recorded in those individual subledger applications. In the example, both of them have a Transaction Type of Fixed Rate Mortgage and Adjustable Rate Mortgage.

In the same example, we have another third-party point of sale system that handles customer billing. This needs to be registered as a separate subledger application. Within that, there are two different entities that are operating in the US and UK. This can be registered together as one subledger because they can possibly share accounting methods and accounting rules.

Implementation Process for Accounting Transformation

There are six steps that are involved in the entire implementation process, but can be summarized into 3 Phases: Analyze, Build, Implement and Test. So whenever you are implementing the solution, you will have to keep these six steps always in mind, and they will give you a summarized idea of the implementation steps that you need to follow within the accounting transformation process.

The Analyze Phase is where you will analyze and identify transaction life cycle within the third-party application for transactions or activities that must be accounted and then you will analyze accounting, reporting, audit, and reconciliation requirements for each of the transaction types that you manage within those source systems.

For an in-depth explanation of the Analyze Phase, check out a separate article: Overview of the Accounting Transformation Analyze Phase in Implementing Accounting Hub Cloud.

The Build Phase is where you will actually register the source systems into the application. And then you will configure the accounting rules, and assign accounting methods to the respective ledgers. Whatever source system you have registered, you will have to build your event model underneath it. An event model basically represents the transaction types that you are managing in your source system applications which have financial impact in the Accounting Hub Cloud to make them eligible for accounting. Event Model will then have Event Classes and for each event class, you must establish the logic to generate the accounting entries by setting up the accounting rules and by establishing an accounting method.

For an in-depth explanation of the Build Phase, check out a separate article: Overview of the Build Phase in Implementing Accounting Hub Cloud.

Implement and Test Phase is the stage where you will implement and test the accounting methods by assigning them to ledgers to create a complete definition of accounting convention for the transactions and activities of each source system. Here, you will upload your transaction data from the source system as a sample data for testing purposes to ensure that all the accounting is correctly generated. Once confirmed correct, you can start moving setups into the production environment, and then start uploading your transactional data on a day-to-day basis, and start generating accounting entries for them.

Soon to follow!

• Manage the accounting transformation accounting methods
• how to create and process accounting entries,
• optional manual features of subledger accounting,
• advanced features of subledger accounting.

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Overview of Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud

What is Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud?

Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud provides the option to bring transactional data from external systems into the cloud with use of the Subledger Accounting engine. Accounting Hub is a very useful solution if you want to utilize a single, rule-based accounting engine for various external applications that records your organization's day-to-day transactions.

These external applications (called Source Systems) are typically industry-specific applications that are either purchased from third parties, or they have been homegrown within the organization. Typically, these source systems are not be capable of generating rule-based accounting entries. Examples of such source systems could be core banking application, insurance policy administration system, billing applications, loan processing applications, and a point of sale (POS) system.

Rather than having a separate accounting rule logic for each source system, you can also register these systems in Oracle Cloud and use Accounting Hub for account derivation and have a unified accounting engine repository where you can maintain and apply your accounting rules, bring the data from all the external transactional applications, then push the accounting entries into the GL application.

Advantage of using Oracle Accounting Hub

With the help of Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud, you can:

1. Get the flexibility and control that you need in the implementation, expansion, and maintenance of user-defined subledgers to adopt in a flexible business environment.
2. Configure accounting rules to meet your corporate and statutory requirements. 
3. Automate and control the processes that transform source system data to recording detailed auditable journal entries.

You can also use the modern reporting tools that are available in Oracle Cloud to reconcile the accounting journal entries. This will actually reduce the workload during the period-end processes. And you can also gain insightful information for your day-to-day business, for corporate performance, and for making business decisions.

Oracle Accounting Hub also helps you integrate and align information from virtually any source system into Oracle Financial Cloud services. It gives customers the freedom and flexibility to choose the tools they want we use to run their business as they start their transition to cloud-based computing. This capability provides a smooth transition to cloud computing for our Oracle Financials Cloud customers because they can continue their financial operations on existing systems while centralizing the critical information for management decisions, audit, and compliance to a central cloud service for easy access across the globe.

How does Oracle Accounting Hub Work?

For Example, you have an external Point-Of-Sale (POS) application where you actually manage your day-to-day transactions. We will register this POS system as a User-defined Subledger application within the Oracle ERP Cloud and import its transactions. With the use of the Accounting engine, we are going to generate the accounting entries of these transactions based on the rules that we have configured. And finally, these accounting entries are posted to the General Ledger application. From there, we can utilize the balances for complying with the management reporting requirements, audits and reconciliations, and to comply with statutory reporting requirements as well.

Accounting Hub Cloud Components

General Ledger. Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud comes along with Oracle General Ledger, where you will post all your actual balances. Oracle General Ledger provides journal entry import and creation, real-time balance storage, and accounting controls, intercompany balancing, and the period close functionality. It also comes along with a calculation manager, which helps you to define allocation rules using complex formulas. It helps you to automatically generate the allocation journals based on those allocation rules and helps you in also utilizing the in-house journal approval solution. And finally, you can also utilize the GL for your year-end process management as well. When journals are posted, the Essbase Cube, a multi-dimensional table that holds journal balances, is updated and you can generate reports of your organization's financials data.

Financial Reporting. Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud uses various Financial Reporting tools built in Oracle Cloud. Financial reporting is dependent on the data that is stored in the Essbase Cube, which will help you in faster and easier access to your balances by using various reporting tools.

Every time a transaction or journal is posted in the journal ledger, the balances cubes are updated at the same time with pre-aggregated balances at every level of summarization in your account hierarchy. This is leveraged by reports for quick processing. And you can extract the data in a much faster way because it is stored in a pre-aggregated format.

It helps you to slice and dice the data across dimensions. So you can easily move the definitions from rows and to columns, columns to rows. You can place them in terms of the page level. So it exactly works like a work table. And apart from that, you also get the flexibility to drill up and down and across on any parent level within the scope of your journal accounts.

Tools like Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence (OTBI) and the BI Publisher allows you to use seeded Financial reports across your enterprise in multiple formats. It gives you the flexibility to extract your balances in various formats including PDF, Excel, PPT, Word, etc. So that gives you a lot of flexibility because different stakeholders would like the data to be in their respective format so that they can utilize in a proper way.

Accounting Transformations. To transform the transactional data into Subledger accounting Entries, you need to use the accounting transformations. Accounting transformation is a mechanism that helps you to manage the journal entries for the transactions that would have been recorded in a third party system.

You will actually transform the transactional data that is imported from those third party applications into actual journal entries. And finally, those journal entries are pushed and posted to the journal ledger application.

For more information on Accounting Transformations, check out a separate in-depth article: Accounting Transformation Configurations in Accounting Hub Cloud.

Outbound Integration. You can also manage outbound integrations with Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft General Ledgers if you're already managing your transactional activities in any one of these two applications. You can even get the final posted balances from the GL of these applications into the Oracle Accounting Hub platform.

Configurations needed for Oracle Accounting Hub Cloud

1. You will need to Register Source Systems into Oracle Cloud using the Rapid Implementation Spreadsheets
2. Create the needed Accounting Transformations.
3. Upload the transactional data using various mechanisms such as a file-based data import or a web service

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Overview of Subledger Accounting in Oracle Fusion Applications

This article will show an Overview of Subledger Accounting in Oracle Fusion Applications.

What is Subledger Accounting?

Subledger Accounting (SLA) is an Engine that transforms Subledger transactions into Journal Entries in General Ledger. It caters to seeded Subledgers such as Receivables and Payables, and also to Custom Subledgers created by Accounting Hub.

How does Subledger Accounting Work?

Below illustrates the whole process flow from the Subledgers to General ledger:

The transactions from the Fusion Subledgers applications (such as the AR, AP, Cash Management, Projects, Assets Modules) and Custom Subledgers will get processed by running the Create Accounting process. 

The Create Accounting process creates the journals in the Subledger Journal Tables by looking at the Accounting rules that are embedded into the Accounting Method. 

Once reviewed and ready, SLA transfers them to the GL interface and from there the import process kicks in and creates the Journals in the General Ledger. These GL journals are usually summarized and normally, the relationship between the Subledger Journal and the GL Journal is many to one. Inside the General Ledger, you have to run the posting process. The posting process makes those journals official and sends information to the Essbase balances cube. 

Essbase is a multidimensional database created by Oracle Hyperion that uses that integrates with Fusion GL.  It is a reporting product used for analytics, generating financial reports, etc. Along with Essbase, there are other reporting tools such as Smart View and Financial Reporting Studio to generate financial reports, balance sheet reports, et cetera.

What are Accounting Methods?

Accounting methods (sometimes called Accounting Conventions) group the subledger-generated rule sets together to define a consistent accounting convention across all accounting event classes and accounting event types that are part of one or more source systems. An accounting method is basically attached to the primary or secondary ledger. 

In different countries, different conventions are being followed. For example in US, they follow US GAAP. In some countries, they are following IFRS. And in some countries, they have their local GAAP requirements. You can use the convention to design the rules to comply with the respective country-related GAAP requirements.

Components of Accounting Methods

The accounting method primarily includes elements such as journal entry rule sets, journal line rules and account rules. Optional elements are description rules and supporting references, which can also be utilized for reconciliation purposes. Now to set up the journal line rules, account rules, description rules, et cetera, we can also utilize some other additional options, including conditions, mapping sets, custom formulas, and so on.

Check out some quick videos about Subledger Accounting in Oracle Fusion Applications below:

• Create Receivables Account Rule in Oracle Fusion Applications
• Create a Description Rule in Oracle Fusion Applications
• Creating a Journal Line Rule in Oracle Fusion Applications
• Create Subledger Journal Entry Rule Sets for Receivables in Oracle Fusion Applications
• Duplicate and Modify Accounting Methods for Receivables in Oracle Fusion Applications

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Create Accounting for Receivables in Oracle Fusion Applications

From the Springboard, navigate to:

Create Accounting Execution Report

Confirm the created Journal in the Manage Journals screen

Below is a quick demonstration of Create Accounting for Receivables in Oracle Fusion Applications

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Overview of Managing Receivables Activities in Oracle Fusion Applications

Managing Receivables Activities screen allows your organization to generate accounting for transactions that are not customer invoices, customer credit memos, customer payments, etc. Receivable activities can be used to generate accounting for a refund, a customer discount, an adjustment. This can also be configured from the Rapid implementation Spreadsheet.

To navigate to the Managing Receivables Activities screen:

1. Navigate to the Functional Setup Manager
2. Select the Financials setup
3. Select the Receivables functional area
4. Select the Managing Receivables Activities Task (if it is not shown, select the "All Tasks" selection from the drop-down menu).

From here, you can see the activities that can be set with default accounts:

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General Ledger Accounting Cycle

1. Open Period
2. Create Journals Manually / Import Journals from SLA / Reverse Journals
3. Post Journals to Update GL Balances and the Cube
4. Review GL Balances and Reconcile Balance Sheets
5. Run Revaluation for Foreign Currencies and Translate Balances (i.e. from UK to US)
6. Perform Consolidations 
7. Review GL Balances and Reconcile Balance Sheets
8. Run Financial Reports
9. Close Period

Overview of General Ledger Periods Cycle

Accounting periods (or called GL Periods in Oracle Applications) is one of the most important aspects in a General Ledger. It defines how the transactions will be grouped together based on dates (usually their actual transaction dates) and also defines the accounting calendar. This concept applies to both Oracle Fusion and Oracle E-Business Suite. Below is a simple diagram depicting GL Period Cycles:

A quick sample is below:

Period Month	Period Status	Remarks
May 2018	Permanent Close	Can never be re-opened and Posting not allowed
June 2018	Soft Close	Can still be re-opened in case of Omission/Incorrect Data. Need to have Financial Statements re-stated.
July 2018	Open Period	Allows transactions, Receiving and Posting
August 2018	Future Enterable Period	Allows transactions and Receiving but no Posting
September 2018	Never Opened	No transactions and receiving allowed

Below is a quick checklist to follow when closing periods from a GL Perspective:

1. Import data into the Interface from other sources (Subledgers, Third-Party Applications, etc.)
2. Transfer transactions from the Interface into the General Ledger
3. Verify that all Journals are already Posted
4. Perform Allocations
5. Perform Revaluation for Trade Accounts containing foreign currency transactions
6. Reconcile Account Balances
7. Translation of Balances to the Parent Currency
8. Consolidation of Subledgers to the Corporate Ledgers
9. Run Analytics and Financial Analysis
10. Close the Period and Open the Next Period

Some companies never do a permanent close in case they need to do some corrections.

What they sometimes do is they only close out the all the periods of a certain calendar year when the external auditors are satisfied and provide a clean audit report for the said year.

It all depends on your accounting policies and strategies that fit your legislation and accounting methods.

Below is a quick demo on Opening and Closing Periods in Oracle Fusion Applications:

More details on Opening and Closing Accounting Periods posted on the Oracle Documentation.