This appendix describes the way the upgrade affects your existing Oracle Projects products, and highlights the impact of these functional changes on your day-to-day business. It is arranged by alphabetically by products in the Projects product family.
This appendix covers the following topics:
An Applications upgrade alters both the technical and functional aspects of your Oracle E-Business Suite system. In addition to changes to the technology stack and file system, an upgrade also initiates specific changes that affect the way your existing products work after the upgrade and the way they look and feel. These functional changes have an impact on the way you use the products as you conduct your daily business.
Note: This appendix describes some of the ways the upgrade changes your existing products. We assume that you have read about the new features and products delivered in this release, which is included in the product-specific Release Content Documents (RCDs) and TOI on My Oracle Support.
The discussions of the functional aspects of the upgrade in this chapter are arranged by products within the Projects product family.
Your Projects applications specialists should be completely familiar with the information in this section and should have made appropriate plans to accommodate the associated changes before you begin your upgrade.
Oracle Daily Business Intelligence for Projects provides reporting in secondary global currencies, support for contingent workers, additional drill-down capabilities to transaction pages and improved summarization programs. The changes enable users to drill down directly into project details in Oracle Project Management. Contingent worker support allows companies to perform useful utilization analysis for both employees and contingent workers. Support for additional global currency enables multi-national corporations to view their project intelligence reports in another global currency.
Note: See Oracle Applications System Administration Guide for more information.
The functionality achieved through the PRC: Update Project Intelligence Data concurrent process has been split between two concurrent processes so that it fits into the request scheduling time slots. Incremental updates of the base summary tables are performed by PRC: Update Project and Resource Base Summaries, where as the incremental update of project intelligence reports data is performed by PRC: Update Project Intelligence Data.
To ease the implementation for customers using the reporting capabilities of Oracle Project Management, as well as Oracle Daily Business Intelligence for Projects, both applications now share common concurrent programs:
PRC: Load Project and Resource Base Summaries
PRC: Update Project and Resource Base Summaries
PRC: Refresh Project and Resource Base Summaries
You can now use the new and modified programs with the Request Set Generator making scheduling easier. Instead of submitting individual programs, Oracle Projects strongly recommends you use request sets generated by the Request Set Generator.
This section outlines changes made to Oracle Grants Accounting.
Note: See Oracle Grants Accounting User Guide, Oracle Project Costing User Guide, Oracle Projects Implementation Guide, Oracle Projects Fundamentals, and Oracle Subledger Accounting Implementation Guide for more information on the changes discussed in this section.
Supplier cost integration now uses new functionality introduced by Oracle Payables and Oracle Subledger Accounting. The following changes may impact your implementation.
If you use Cash Basis Accounting for the primary ledger, supplier invoice payments rather than invoice distributions are interfaced to Oracle Grants Accounting.
Oracle Payables prepayment invoices are captured as cost commitments and are no longer interfaced to Oracle Grants Accounting as actual cost.
The expenditure item date on supplier cost transactions is revalidated and in some cases rederived during transaction import.
Interface processing interfaces all distributions with a supplier invoice expenditure class to Oracle Grants Accounting even when invalid distributions exist in the same batch.
You can create project-related expense reports in Oracle Internet Expenses or Oracle Payables. However, you can no longer create them as Pre-Approved Batches in Oracle Grants Accounting, and they are no longer interfaced to Oracle Payables.
Supplier cost adjustment uses new functionality introduced by Oracle Payables and Oracle Subledger Accounting. The following changes may impact your implementation.
In Release 11i, adjustments made to supplier invoices were interfaced to Oracle Payables, which created and interfaced accounting entries to Oracle General Ledger. In this release, Oracle Grants Accounting creates accounting for adjustments made to all supplier cost transactions and interfaces the accounting to Oracle General Ledger. Note that transactions are no longer interfaced to Oracle Payables from Oracle Grants Accounting.
Most adjustment restrictions that existing in Release 11i have been removed or eased in this release, so that supplier cost adjustments are prohibited until you enable the Allow Adjustments option on supplier cost transaction sources.
Adjustments made in Oracle Payables take precedence over adjustments made in Oracle Grants Accounting. The supplier cost interface automatically creates a reversing entry for the most recent adjustment made in Oracle Grants Accounting whenever an item is reversed in Oracle Payables.
In some circumstances, Oracle Grants Accounting creates accounting entries only in the primary ledger for purchasing receipt accruals when exchange rate variances exist.
In some circumstances, Oracle Grants Accounting creates unmatched reversing expenditure items when transactions are reversed in Oracle Payables. You need to routinely monitor your system for unmatched reversing expenditure items as they require manual adjustments in order to correctly account for the reversal.
Oracle Grants Accounting does not create accounting entries in a secondary ledger when combined basis accounting is in use. If automatic entries to the secondary ledger are required, you must make adjustments in Oracle Payables rather than in Oracle Grants Accounting.
In Release 11i, Oracle Grants Accounting accounted cost and revenue through a set of interface processes. In this release, Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a common accounting engine that replaces the existing accounting processes in the different subledgers and allows you to determine the accounts, lines, descriptions, summarization, and dates of journal entries. Oracle Grants Accounting supports the integration with Oracle Subledger Accounting.
You can also add detailed transaction information to journal headers and lines. Detailed subledger accounting journals are available for analytics, auditing, and reporting. They are summarized, transferred, imported, and posted to Oracle General Ledger.
During the upgrade, Oracle Grants Accounting creates default accounting definitions that allow the system to continue using existing AutoAccounting rules without additional setup steps. You may choose to create your own accounting definitions using Accounting Methods Builder.
As part of the Oracle Subledger Accounting integration, existing interface cost processes and tieback processes have been replaced with new processes that raise Oracle Subledger Accounting events, generate accounting entries, and interface them to Oracle General Ledger.
With the integration to Oracle Subledger Accounting, you now have the option to define account derivation rules within Oracle Subledger Accounting that will replace the default accounts generated by the Oracle Projects AutoAccounting feature. This changes how you can view accounting information of transaction lines. You can view the default accounting created for specific transaction lines from the details window on Expenditure Inquiry. However, to view the actual accounting that was interfaced to Oracle General Ledger, you must either use the View Accounting option from the Tools menu on Expenditure Inquiry or by using the inquiry pages provided by Oracle Subledger Accounting.
Oracle Grants Accounting is integrated with Oracle E-Business Tax. This module provides the ability to define tax setup centrally. The Projects Tax Default Hierarchy used by Oracle Grants Accounting is migrated to centralized tax setup to ensure a consistent user experience across applications.
Note: See Oracle E-Business Tax Implementation Guide and Oracle E-Business Tax User Guide. See also the section on E-Business Tax in Appendix A for information about the Projects Tax Hierarchy migration.
This section outlines changes made to Oracle Project Billing.
In Release 11i, you generated revenue and accounted for it using this set of interface programs:
Generate Revenue for Single/Range of Projects
Interface Revenue to General Ledger process
Journal Import process
Tieback Revenue to General Ledger process
After the upgrade, the revenue generation process is unchanged. However, new concurrent programs replace the existing ones as part of the integration with Oracle Subledger Accounting. You run the following programs instead of the Interface Revenue to General Ledger process:
Generate Revenue Accounting Events
Derives the debit accounts and amounts (UBR/UER, Gain/Loss) using Auto Accounting rules.
Create Accounting process
Creates journal entries and optionally transfers them to Oracle General Ledger.
The Tieback Revenue to General Ledger process is now obsolete.
Note: See Oracle Project Billing User Guide and Oracle Projects Fundamentals for more information.
In this release, the Generate Intercompany Invoices process continues to use AutoAccounting to generate the Revenue account, and the Interface Invoices to Receivables process to generate the Receivables. The Interface Cross Charge Distributions to General Ledger process, which creates accounting events for cross charge transactions, is renamed as Generate Cross Charge Accounting Events.
Additionally, when cost reclassification is enabled, you must run the Tieback Invoices from Receivables process followed by Generate Cross Charge Accounting Events process. The tieback process creates the account events necessary to create provider cost reclassification journal entries. Subsequent submission of the Create Accounting process will create accounting entries for provider cost reclassification.
Note: See Oracle Project Billing User Guide for more information.
With the integration with Oracle Subledger Accounting, you can define account derivation rules within Oracle Subledger Accounting to replace the default accounts generated by Auto Accounting in Oracle Project Billing. To view the actual accounting that was interfaced to Oracle General Ledger, you must either use the View Accounting option from the Tools menu on Revenue Review, or use the inquiry pages provided by Oracle Subledger Accounting.
Note: See Oracle Project Billing User Guide for more information.
In Release 11i, all MRC columns could be defined as part of custom folders. As a result of the migration of MRC to the Oracle Subledger Accounting model, Oracle Projects has eliminated all MRC-related reporting columns from inquiry windows such as Events, Revenue Review, Invoice Review, and Funding Inquiry.
In this release, Oracle Projects is integrated Oracle E-Business Tax, which provides you with the ability to define tax setup centrally. The Projects Tax Default Hierarchy is migrated to a centralized tax setup to ensure consistent user experience across applications.
Note: See Oracle E-Business Tax Implementation Guide and Oracle E-Business Tax User Guide for more information. See also E-Business Tax in Appendix A for details about Projects Tax Hierarchy Migration.
This section describes the changes made to Oracle Project Costing.
Supplier cost integration functionality in Oracle Project Costing has been modified to use new functionality introduced in this release by Oracle Payables and Oracle Subledger Accounting. The following describes changes that may impact your implementation.
Note: See Oracle Project Costing User Guide for more information on these new features. See also Oracle Projects Implementation Guide and Oracle Projects Fundamentals.
If purchasing receipt accruals are used to account for project-related expense cost, receipts are always interfaced from Oracle Purchasing to Oracle Projects and only invoice variances and payment discounts are interfaced from Oracle Payables to Oracle Project Costing.
If Cash Basis Accounting is used for the primary ledger, supplier invoice payments rather than invoice distributions are interfaced to Oracle Project Costing.
Oracle Payables prepayment invoices are captured as cost commitments and are no longer interfaced to Oracle Project Costing as actual cost.
The expenditure item date on supplier cost transactions is re-validated and in some cases re-derived during Transaction Import.
Interface processing has been enhanced to interface all distributions with a supplier invoice expenditure class to Oracle Project Costing even when invalid distributions exist in the same batch.
Project-related expense reports can be created in iExpenses or Oracle Payables, however, they can no longer be created as Pre-Approved Batches in Oracle Project Costing and they are no longer interfaced to Oracle Payables.
Supplier cost adjustment features now use new Oracle Payables and Oracle Subledger Accounting functionality. The following changes may impact your implementation.
In Release 11i, adjustments made to supplier invoices were interfaced to Oracle Payables and Oracle Payables, which, in turn, created and interfaced accounting entries to Oracle General Ledger. In this release, Oracle Project Costing creates accounting for adjustments made to all supplier cost transactions and interfaces the accounting to Oracle Subledger Accounting. Note that transactions are no longer interfaced to Oracle Payables from Oracle Project Costing.
Most adjustment restrictions that existed in Release 11i have been removed or eased. The result is that cost adjustments are prohibited until you enable the Allow Adjustments option on supplier cost transaction sources.
Adjustments made in Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Payables take precedence over adjustments made in Oracle Project Costing. The supplier cost interface automatically creates a reversing entry for the most recent adjustment made in Oracle Project Costing whenever an item is reversed in either Oracle Purchasing or Oracle Payables.
In some circumstances, Oracle Project Costing creates accounting entries only in the primary ledger for purchasing receipt accruals when exchange rate variances exist.
In some circumstances, Oracle Project Costing creates unmatched reversing expenditure items when transactions are reversed in Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Payables. You need to routinely monitor your system for unmatched reversing expenditure items. They require manual adjustments in Oracle Project Costing in order to correctly account for the reversal.
Oracle Project Costing does not create accounting entries in a secondary ledger when combined basis accounting is in use. If automatic entries to the secondary ledger are required, you must make adjustments in Oracle Payables rather than in Oracle Project Costing.
In this release, Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a common accounting engine that replaces the existing accounting processes in the different subledgers and allows you to determine the accounts, lines, descriptions, summarization, and dates of journal entries. You can also add detailed transaction information to journal headers and lines. Detailed subledger accounting journals are available for analytics, auditing, and reporting. They are summarized, transferred, imported and posted to Oracle General Ledger. Oracle Project Costing supports the integration with Oracle Subledger Accounting.
During the upgrade, Oracle Project Costing provides Oracle Subledger Accounting with default definitions that allow the system to continue utilizing existing AutoAccounting rules without additional setup steps. You may choose to create your own accounting rules in Oracle Subledger Accounting in order to take advantage of additional flexibility provided by the application.
As part of the Oracle Subledger Accounting integration, existing interface cost processes and tieback processes have been replaced with new processes that raise Oracle Subledger Accounting events, generate accounting entries, and interface them to Oracle General Ledger.
With the integration to Oracle Subledger Accounting, you now have the option to define account derivation rules within Oracle Subledger Accounting that will replace the default accounts generated by Oracle Projects AutoAccounting. This changes how you can view accounting information of transaction lines. You can view the default accounting created for specific transaction lines from the details window on Expenditure Inquiry. However, to view the actual accounting that was interfaced to Oracle General Ledger, you must either use the View Accounting option from the Tools menu on Expenditure Inquiry or by using the inquiry pages provided by Oracle Subledger Accounting.
Oracle Project Costing multiple reporting currency functionality has migrated to reporting currency functionality in Oracle Subledger Accounting. Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a single repository where you can view amounts in reporting currencies. As a result, Oracle Project Costing no longer needs to separately support MRC functionality. This affects MRC support for costs and capital projects in the following ways:
Oracle Project Costing has eliminated all MRC-related reporting columns from inquiry windows such as Expenditure Inquiry.
All MRC implementation options are now obsolete.
All MRC-related upgrade concurrent programs are now obsolete.
You cannot view MRC amounts for transactions accounted outside of Oracle Project Costing.
Reporting currency accounting journals for both cost and cross charge transactions are created in Oracle Subledger Accounting by the Create Accounting program. You do not need to run separate programs for maintaining reporting currency journals.
This section describes the changes for Oracle Project Management.
If you are using web-based budgeting and forecasting, note the following changes:
Period Profiles
All project-specific period profiles are obsolete. Each project’s plan version now has one or two of new seeded period profiles. You can also choose to create new period profiles and associate them to plan versions. You do not have to refresh the periodic data as the project progresses.
Budgets Time-Phased by Date Range
Time phasing by user-defined date ranges is no longer supported. All existing budgets time-phased by date range are converted to time-phased or non-time phased, depending on what has been implemented and how the budget data has been entered. You can now plan for buckets of grouped periods containing more than one period.
Flexible Budgeting Options for Data Entry
The Top and Lowest Task planning level is no longer supported. Instead, you can choose the lowest planning level to be Lowest Task to plan at any level of the financial structure.
Plan Amounts Calculation and Rate derivations
Oracle Projects automatically calculates the cost or revenue amounts based on the Effort (Quantity) entered for a labor resource. Prior to this release, all amounts were entered manually. In this release, data is modified accordingly to meet the rules of amount calculation to be based on Effort (Quantity) entered.
Budgeting and Forecasting Integration with Microsoft Excel
In prior releases, Oracle Projects provided 24 spreadsheet layouts (accessible from Desktop Integrator > Projects > Financial Plan) as part of Budgeting and Forecasting Integration with Microsoft Excel. In this release, all the 24 spreadsheet layouts are obsolete. Oracle Projects has reduced the number of default spreadsheet layouts to four. Oracle Projects will associate one of the four default Microsoft Excel spreadsheet layouts with each plan type based on the plan class (Budget or Forecast) associated with the plan type.
Changes to the Budget and Forecasting Pages are accessed
Project Performance Reporting now serves as the basis for viewing the budgets data by either the work breakdown hierarchy or the resource breakdown hierarchy.
Planning Resource Lists
Web-based budget and forecasting are automatically upgraded to use planning resource lists based on the new Resource model.
Note: See Projects in Appendix F for more information.
The feature for forecasting based on staffing plans in Oracle Project Resource Management has been fully integrated with the enhanced Budgeting and Forecasting feature.
Note these changes to workplan management:
Enable Financial Structure
The financial structure in a new template or project is not enabled by default. After you enable the financial structure, it does not have the default task. This change puts the behavior of the financial structure in synch with workplan structure.
Workplan Task Level Effort
The task-level workplan planned effort has been moved under a default task assignment of the PEOPLE resource class in order to make the existing workplan transaction model compliant with new Planning Transaction model.
Program Management
The subproject association feature is now available in a self-service application as Program hierarchy. Note that a program hierarchy can be still be created in the Oracle Projects forms-based application using subproject association. There is no change from the forms side.
This section describes the changes to Oracle Property Manager.
Payment and Billing terms now contain the tax-related information through the Tax Classification Code instead of the Tax Code/Tax Group values as in previous releases. Tax information is consolidated using the E-Business Tax application.
The new rule-based tax engine is designed to fully replace and substantially enhance the existing tax code-based tax calculation. Tax calculation is accomplished using the Global Tax Engine and tax codes and the defaulting hierarchy approach are migrated and supported in E-Business Tax.
This release introduces Oracle Subledger Accounting for managing accounting across subledger transactions. During the upgrade, accounting options and their settings, and the existing accounting entries in the Oracle Property Manager data model, are moved to the new accounting data model to ensure a continuous business operation between the two releases. All accounting lines related to the transactions are also migrated. Oracle Property Manager has been enhanced to fully support Oracle Subledger Accounting.
In order to consolidate legal-entity data into a central repository, Oracle Property Manager has incorporated Legal Entity stamping on its Payment and Billing terms. The legal entity can now be associated with the ledger when it is set up.
In an accounting setup that contains only one legal entity, a ledger represents the legal entity. The operating unit does not have a direct relationship to the legal entity, but will have a direct relationship to a ledger. Because the operating unit cannot always determine a unique legal entity, both the legal entity and the business entity are now explicitly defined on the transactions.
This section describes the changes to Oracle Projects Foundation.
In Release 11i, both the Project List and Alternate Project Search pages displayed financial amounts from Project Status Inquiry. In this release, these pages display financial amounts only from project performance reporting.
In Release 11i, resource lists, which could be of one or two levels, were used for budgeting and reporting. In this release, there are separate structures for budgeting and reporting:
Self-service budgeting uses planning resource lists
Project performance reporting uses resource breakdown structures
A planning resource list consists of planning resources that are based on planning resource formats. A resource breakdown structure is a multi-level hierarchy of resources that is used for reporting the planned and actual amounts on a project.
The upgrade automatically converts all resource lists used in self-service budgets to planning resource lists and creates resource breakdown structures. The result is that self-service budgeting is now performed based on the planning resource list. The new resource breakdown structures have no impact on existing functionality. They are used only by project performance reporting.
Note: See Oracle Projects Fundamentals for more information. See also Oracle Project Management User Guide.