New Features in General Ledger Release 11
Global Consolidation System (GCS)
The Global Consolidation System (GCS) improves upon General Ledger's consolidation functionality by offering greater clarity and control. GCS provides "one-stop shopping" for consolidations by providing a basis for the standard consolidation business flow, including account mapping, data preparation, data transfer, elimination, summarization, and reporting.
You can use GCS to consolidate multiple companies whose accounting information is maintained in multiple sets of books.
Consolidation Workbench
The Consolidation Workbench provides a central point of control for consolidating an unlimited number of subsidiaries to your parent, while keeping you informed about each subsidiary's consolidation status. You can perform most consolidation steps from the Consolidation Workbench window.
The Consolidation Workbench gives you feedback on the state of the consolidation process, so you always know your current position in the consolidation flow. You can also create mapping sets which you can use to consolidate multiple subsidiaries in a single step. Finally, you can create consolidation hierarchies and display them with a graphical consolidation hierarchy viewer.
Note: If the Consolidation Hierarchy Viewer is not available when you install General Ledger, contact Worldwide Support about the availability of the patch that includes the Consolidation Hierarchy Viewer.
Consolidating Summary Balances
You can now consolidate summary balances as well as detail balances. Consolidating summary balances can greatly improve consolidation performance since General Ledger must transfer much less data to your parent.
Consolidation Drilldown
You can review consolidated balances on-line and drill down to the subsidiary balances that make up the consolidated totals. If you consolidate multiple levels of subsidiaries, you can drill down from one level to the next. At the lowest level of your consolidation hierarchy, you can drill down from the subsidiary balances to the subledger detail.
Centralized Transaction Approval (CENTRA)
Use CENTRA to enter, review, and approve (or reject) manual intercompany transactions across your multi-company organization. CENTRA can be used to record transactions across sets of books, even if your sets of books use different charts of accounts, currencies, and calendars. When you enter a transaction that crosses sets of books, CENTRA will automatically create the appropriate journal entries in each set of books.
Both subsidiaries involved in an intercompany transaction must approve the transaction before it can be posted in each set of books. For example, one subsidiary enters and submits the transaction, while the second subsidiary reviews and approves (or rejects) the transaction. This centralized process automatically creates an audit trail of your organization's intercompany activity that can greatly simplify your process for reconciling intercompany accounts.
Journal Approval
You can now require that manual journal entries be approved before posting. You create an approval hierarchy and define authorization limits for each user. General Ledger will automatically route journals to the appropriate user, based on your approval hierarchy. This provides an additional level of control before balances are updated.
The approval process is based on the Oracle Applications Workflow engine. General Ledger provides a default approval workflow template for Journal Approval. You can tailor some Journal Approval workflow components to meet your organization's unique business structure.
Mass Maintenance
You can move balances from one account to another, or merge balances from multiple accounts into a single account, while maintaining financial integrity between General Ledger and its subledgers. You can also automatically create new accounts based on existing accounts. For example, if you add a new cost center, you can automatically create all needed accounts by copying the accounts for an existing cost center.
Once you've moved or merged balances, you can drill down to your subledger details from an account inquiry on the move/merge target account.
Drilldown to Originating Journal Entry
You can now drill down from an account balance to the associated journal lines to the complete journal entry. This enables you to view both sides of the journal entries that affect your account balances.
Enhanced Multiple Organization Drilldown
You can now drill down to your subledgers independent from their multiple organization setup. The Account Inquiry window ignores the setting of the MO: Operating Unit profile option. As a result, when you drill down to subledger details, General Ledger will show you all of the transactions that comprise an account balance, regardless of which organization originated the transaction.
AutoPost Enhancements
You can now define multiple AutoPost criteria sets which you can schedule independently. For each criteria set, you can now choose to select journals by journal category and journal effective date, as well as by journal source, balance type, and period.
AutoCopy MassAllocations/Mass Budgets
You can quickly create new MassAllocations and MassBudgets by copying existing definitions, then making any necessary changes.
Secured Reversing and Posting
General Ledger now offers function security to control which users can post and reverse journals from the Enter Journals window. Previously, a profile option allowed you to control who could post, but not reverse, from the window.
FSG Report Title Enhancement
You can now enter your FSG report titles at the report level, rather than the row set level. This feature allows you to use the same row set to define multiple reports that have different report titles.
Prior Period Journal Notification
You can choose to have General Ledger automatically notify you when you try to enter a journal for a prior period. General Ledger will ask you to confirm that you really want to enter a prior period journal.
Performance Improvement
We have improved General Ledger performance by:
- Improving performance of the Summary Account Creation process
- Allowing MassAllocations requests to run in parallel rather than sequentially
Cross-Currency Rates
You can now enter daily conversion rates between any two currencies, regardless of your functional currency. These rates are also available when entering cross-currency transactions in Payables and Receivables. In addition, you can enter inverse rates independently rather than have General Ledger calculate them from the entered rate.
Daily conversion rates are now shared across all of the sets of books within an Applications instance. You no longer need to maintain the same rates in multiple sets of books. Also, General Ledger provides a new open interface that you can use to load daily conversion rates from an automated process.
Oracle Financial Analyzer Integration Enhancements
This release of General Ledger, combined with Release 6.1 of Oracle Financial Analyzer (OFA), provides the following new features:
- Summary Balance Transfer: You can now transfer summary balances as well as detail balances from General Ledger to OFA. Therefore, you can aggregate balances in General Ledger before transferring them to OFA. This allows you to analyze your financial information at any desired level of detail. After the transfer, you can further aggregate summary data using hierarchies and models.
- Average and Encumbrance Balance Transfer: You can now transfer average and encumbrance balances from General Ledger to OFA for analysis and reporting.
- Functional and Statistical Balance Transfer: You can now load both functional and statistical balances into a single OFA data cube.
- Data Cube Enhancements: You can now create OFA data cubes with nearly 10 quintillion cells, increased from 2 billion in prior releases. In addition, you can now create data cubes using up to 10 dimensions, increased from 6 in prior releases.
- Improved Sparsity Handling: OFA now handles sparse data, or data that is not evenly distributed, by combining sparse dimensions into composites. Composites enable OFA to clear sparsely-populated sections of data cubes, freeing disk space and system resources.
- Budget Writeback: You can now download budget data from General Ledger to OFA, modify the data in OFA, then upload all of your changes back to General Ledger. This feature handles functional, statistical, and summary type budget data. OFA can upload and post the budget data to General Ledger automatically, without you having to manually run a budget upload process in General Ledger.
- Autoload: General Ledger can now automatically load data and structures into OFA after the General Ledger extraction process has completed.
- Public Sector Support: The Financial Analyzer Integration now supports budgetary debit and credit accounts.
Multiple Reporting Currencies
Use Multiple Reporting Currencies (MRC) to maintain your transactions and account balances in multiple currencies. Amounts for each reporting currency are maintained in a separate reporting set of books. From any of your reporting sets of books, you can:
- Perform online inquiries and produce any of the standard General Ledger reports, in your reporting currency.
- Use the Financial Statement Generator (FSG) to create custom reports in your reporting currencies.
- Consolidate a reporting set of books directly to a parent set of books, bypassing the need to separately translate the balances in your subsidiary's primary set of books.
If you currently use Dual Currency and Weighted Average Rates, we recommend that you switch to MRC as soon as practicable. While General Ledger still supports those organizations that currently use Dual Currency and Weighted Average Rates, MRC will completely replace Dual Currency in a future release. If you are a new customer, do not use the old Dual Currency feature. Use MRC instead.
See: Multiple Reporting Currencies Overview.
Support for the Euro
Oracle Applications and General Ledger include specific features to support the new pan-European currency, the Euro. General Ledger comes with a predefined currency for the Euro, with a currency code of EUR. For more information, see Oracle Applications and the Euro.
Other Changes
Several other miscellaneous changes have been made to General Ledger:
Journal Reversal: General Ledger's Reverse Journals window now includes an alternative region for displaying journal or batch descriptive information.
New FSG Output Option: FSG includes a new output option, Tab Delimited, for producing tab-delimited output that does not include embedded commands that are specific to GL Desktop Integrator (GLDI). The previous Spreadsheet output option is now used only for GLDI report output. The previous Standard output option has been renamed to Text.
Owners' Equity Accounts Translation: General Ledger includes a new profile option, GL: Owners Equity Translation Rule, that controls whether owners' equity accounts are translated using the Period-to-Date or Year-to-Date rule.
Entering Budget Rules: When you enter budget rules, you can now specify whether the rule should be applied to non-adjusting periods only or to all periods.
