Author: Michael Bowpitt, ERP Practice Lead, Namos Solutions
Introduction
Everyone appreciates an early Christmas present – so I know its a little late but I’ve reviewed the latest Oracle update and I thought the following were the ones worthy of a mention. They are by no means the only ones in the Financials Cloud update – but these are the ones I feel will have the most impact for the most people. So sit back and unwrap (OK I’ve rung that metaphor a bit now – so I shall move on). Oracle update their Cloud products every three months – and these updates are pushed out to customers. Some of these updates are long waited for changes that make a material difference to your working life – others may feel smaller and it maybe that they don’t seem to make much difference – but they all make the product better for us all.
Below are the latest updates to the ERP Cloud suite, if you have any questions about any of them please get in contact.
Record-To-Report | General Ledger
Tax Registration Number Masking – This feature allows for a random number to be generated and mask the real tax identifier, ensuring that transactions comply with EU GDPR when transacting with companies or individuals in the EU & EEA. This feature does not require any configuration or prerequisite setups from an implementation consultant or application administrator.
Record-To-Report | Budgetary Control
Budget Creation and Synchronisation using Spreadsheet for both Budgetary Control and General Ledger – This feature is very useful for organisations having control budget as well as scenario budgets. The budgets can be uploaded for Budgetary Control and General Ledger with one file, offering efficiency and reducing maintenance. This feature does not require any configuration or prerequisite setups from an implementation consultant or application administrator.
Order-to-Cash | Advance Collections
Collections Strategies by Transaction Type – Collections Strategies can now be based on the transaction type that is assigned to a transaction. Strategies are used in Collections to determine what collections tasks (Phone Call, Dunning Letter, Review) should be performed and when. Prior to this update, a strategy assigned to a customer would contain the same tasks for the delinquent transactions. This feature offers greater flexibility as it allows different strategy tasks to be assigned according to the Transaction Type, which will be useful where the Transaction Type represents a different revenue stream that requires an alternative collection method (e.g. goods vs services). This update is enabled by default and can be used by creating a strategy group with transaction level tasks for each transaction type. This feature requires an implementation consultant or application administrator before use.
Order-to-Cash | Cash Management
Mass Reconciliation of Bank Statement Lines and System Transactions – This will be a game changer for those users that have to perform a high volume of manual reconciliations to complete their bank statement reconciliation. From the Manual Reconciliation screen, users can now export selected unreconciled bank statement lines and system transactions for a given bank account into an Excel spreadsheet. Transactions on this spreadsheet can be sorted and filtered to enable grouping of transactions with statement lines. The data from this spreadsheet is then copied into the FBDI template “Cash Management Bank Statement Reconciliation Data Import”, from which a CSV file is generated and imported through the ESS job Load Interface File for Import, with the import process Autoreconcile Bank Statements. No setup changes are required to enable this feature. The Transactions Available for Reconciliation spreadsheet is downloaded by clicking on Export from the Manual Reconciliation UI, which submits an ESS process. The grouped bank statement data is copied into the import spreadsheet which can be downloaded from the File-Based Data Import (FBDI) for Financials user guide. This feature does not require any configuration or prerequisite setups from an implementation consultant or application administrator.
Procure-To-Pay | Procurement
Route Approvals for Purchasing Documents Based on Supplier Type – An interesting new addition to approvals. Approvals can often be a complex configuration object that can lead to complications and many changes in process design. This new feature offers the ability to have approvals based on supplier type and as supplier type is an object that can be configured with custom values, this could simplify solution designs. This feature does not require any configuration or prerequisite setups from an implementation consultant or application administrator.
Procure-To-Pay | Accounts Payables
Simplified Workflow Rules Configuration – You can now specify custom values for the start approver name in addition to the available list of values for rules using Supervisory Hierarchy or Job Level Hierarchy. You now have flexibility to specify either transaction attributes that indicate a user (for example, Invoice Line.Project Manager Name) or specify the user name of a specific user (for example, John.Brown). You can also specify the manager of transaction attribute users or specific users. For example, Manager of Invoice Line.Project Manager or Manager of John.Brown. Businesses do not need to anything to enable this feature.
Additional Tax Identifiers in Intelligent Document Recognition – While this is not strictly a 21D update, it is a really useful feature that has been implemented by Oracle recently. Previously for non-PO invoices, IDR would try to identify the supplier based on the supplier address. This did not always provide good recognition due to address placement, formatting etc. By adding tax numbers as an additional registration attribute, the recognition for non-PO invoices could potentially be improved quite dramatically, as the tax registration number must be unique for suppliers in Oracle Cloud. This feature does not require any configuration or prerequisite setups from an implementation consultant or application administrator.
Procure-To-Pay | Expenses
Expense Report Risk Indicator in Expense Audit – When an expense claim is with the audit team they will be able to see what level of risk the expense claim is posing, so for example if you had multiple violations and missing receipts it would be a high risk, but say if it was just a randomly selected report that had no violations it would have a low risk. this could benefit audit teams and make their job more efficient, it will allow them to effectively prioritise the expense reports that will need more time and may need to be looked at more urgently. This feature does not require any configuration or prerequisite setups from an implementation consultant or application administrator.
Project Management | Projects Portfolio Management
Expanded Project Access Configuration for the Project Management Work Area – This feature is quite desirable in terms of providing access to junior team members, as Currently a Project Manager has wider access to projects and Project Administrator has almost same privileges as that of Manager except approvals. So there is often a business requirement to provide restricted access to other Project team members, which was feasible only by creating a Custom Role. With the above feature in place, Application administrators can define the data security policies and assign them to project roles to configure project access based on Project Status and business needs. This feature requires an implementation consultant or application administrator before use.
Additional Accounting Sources for Creating Project Contract Revenue Accounting – This feature is much awaited because we have limited sources available in Project SLA to derive the Revenue accounting. So in the current Release these sources were added for the Project Cost event classes which would help in deriving the Revenue account based on Customer need. This feature does not require any configuration or prerequisite setups from an implementation consultant or application administrator.
Supply Chain Management | Inventory Management
Collect Country of Supply from Receipt for Intrastat Reporting – For Intrastat reporting, the ship from site was picked from the supplier site, but now during receipt the Ship-from Site field can be updated if the supplier shipped from another location/country. This feature does not require any configuration or prerequisite setups from an implementation consultant or application administrator.
Well that is all for this year – we can all look forward to the ’22 updates.
About Namos Solutions
Namos Solutions are an award-winning Oracle OPN Modernised Partner specialising in the implementation and support of ERP, EPM and HCM business solutions, both in the Cloud and on-premise.
Although based in central London, we work wherever our clients need us to be. Many leading organisations located all over the world trust and rely on our expertise to deliver industry-leading business solutions. Namos customers can currently be found in the UK, Europe, Middle East, Asia Pacific, North America and Africa.
For more information, please visit www.namossolutions.com or email info@namossolutions.com.
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