Exciting updates with Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close (FCC) 24.10 release. After waiting impatiently for months, Enhanced Organization by Period is here! Organization by Period feature already existed in FCC by turning Ownership Management functionality on. However, with the 24.10 release, there are so many new features and functionalities available that can assist our clients with their monthly closing process. As you continue reading, you’ll discover how the latest features of Oracle can optimize your monthly consolidation and close process, enhance efficiency, and provide valuable insights for streamlining your financial operations.
Enhanced Organization by Period: highlights and requirements from the FCC 24.10 release
- Separate Calculation status and Approval status for primary and shared entities
- Enhanced locking for ownership.
- This feature is only available for Dense/Spart Application. If your application has Account for Dense dimension, this feature will not be available. You need to first convert your application to DSO application, where Movement and Period are your Dense dimensions and Account is a sparse dimension.
How to enable Enhanced Organization by Period
- From the home page, click “Application” -> “Configuration”
- Click “Enable Features”
- Click “Enhanced Organization by Period” and then click “Enable”
- Note: for Current applications, there is no impact on the application until you turn this feature on.
Enhanced Organization by Period features
- Inactive Consolidation Method now has a new behavior; 0% is the default range setting for this method.
- Calculation Status has been split into Calc Status and Node Status. By having calc status vs node status, the application can now show a different status for data that is the same for all instances of shared entity and data that is specific to each distinct instance.
- Calc Status will be part of Consolidation Dimension “Entity Input” and “Entity Consolidation.”
- Node Status will be part of Consolidation Dimension “Parent Input,” Proportion,” “Elimination,” “Contribution,” and “Contribution Input.”
- Shared entities can now have their own approval unit, instead of having a single approval unit for all instances. Clients can turn on Ownership on their alternative hierarchy where shared members are part of the hierarchy.
- Ability to lock Ownership data separately vs. the old method that locks the entity and ownership at the same time.
- To lock entity, there is a new dependency; the Ownership screen must be locked first before locking approval unit. When unlocking ownership data, the entity unit must be unlocked first.
- New Configurable task – “prior period data update.” Because of additional instances of shared entities, this configurable task updates and populates Parent Currency/Entity Total data.
- When enabling Enhanced Organization by Period, this process will run automatically.
- Review in Jobs to make sure this process has completed successfully. If it has not, this can be run from Configure: Consolidate Screen.
- New Configurable task – “Locking and Unlocking Status Update” – which updates the lock status for ownership data based on the data lock status in the approval process. This task is only available if “Enhanced Organization by Period” is turned on for the application. When running this task, it is launched as a job. This job may take a long time based on the amount of data that is in the application.
- New Calculation Status accounts
- FCCS_CSTATUS – stores value for Common data
- FCCS_NSTATUS – stores value for Node data.
- ProportionalizeTopEntityMember Substitution Variable is not applicable for Enhanced Organization by Period applications. This substation variable changes the behavior of how data rolls up to the “Entity” member - the highest member in the Entity dimension - and allows data to translate to parent currency or consolidate to Contribution/Contribution Total.
- A new Data Status form will be added to the application, and any customized Data Status forms will be renamed to Data Status_customized.
- If the current application is not enabled for Ownership Management, then Ownership Management must be enabled first and validated prior to enabling Enhanced Organization by Period.
Two additional new reporting features in Oracle FCC
Consolidation reports: with the current version, consolidation reports will support Year-to-Date Journals. If a Year-to-Date Journal is posted to the application, the consolidation report will show this adjustment.
Intercompany Matching report enhancement: We’re super excited about this feature, as many clients have asked for this, especially former HFM clients who have converted to FCC.
- Ability to display account in the row and ability to display intercompany members with ICP prefix.
- Accounts in Rows unchecked – Original reports
- Accounts in Rows checked – New functionality
About Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close
For many organizations, managing the financial consolidation and close process is a burden that takes time and resources that could better be used for analysis and decision-making. Financial Consolidation and Close is a purpose-built business process available in the Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM for both effectively and efficiently managing the consolidation and close, end to end. No matter what the size of company, organizations can have 100% confidence in their financial consolidation, close and reporting processes. Financial Consolidation and Close helps ensure that processes are dependable and correct, timely and transparent, streamlined and efficient, and compliant and auditable.
Other consolidation solutions are often either overly complex and require features and functionality that are not needed or are too basic and require customization and building of unused features. Financial Consolidation and Close allows configuration of the features and functionality required without having to work around features not required. The out-of-box content is not just an unsupported ‘starter template’ from an app store. Instead, it’s a framework that can be tailored quickly to specific needs, yet still remains upgradable to new releases by Oracle. The framework has financial intelligence built right in. By leveraging the new framework, customers get the benefit of an ever-growing library of prebuilt dimensions, calculations, reports, dashboards, and KPIs that are designed to fit their consolidation and reporting processes. This maximizes the value of their investment because Oracle continues to provide value throughout the life of the solution.
Well-designed close and consolidation solutions are not isolated ‘data islands.’ Instead, they rely on information from, and pass information to, operational and financial systems from around the enterprise. Some of these systems will reside on premises while others may be in the cloud. Financial Consolidation and Close is architected to thrive within hybrid deployments. For example, the solution includes a range of data management options that provides organizations with flexibility to choose what is right for them. In some cases, basic flat-file imports may be the tool of choice. In other cases, organizations may prefer more highly automated data transformation and load processes from source systems (on-premises or in the cloud). Finally, there are certified adapters, and the ability to configure rich integration using the secure RESTful API. In all cases, Financial Consolidation and Close has the right tool for the job. Contact Alithya to speak with us about how you can address your business needs and benefit from Oracle Financial Close and Consolidation. For more details about Oracle EPM Financial Consolidation and Close, read the full Oracle Data Sheet.