Considerations for Using Consolidated Line Item Activities Within Scenarios

Carefully consider your use of line item activities that represent consolidated data from other line item activities within the same scenario. When all of these line item activities are stored under the same Planning and Budgeting scenario ID, they share all the same attributes, such as time, ledger, calendar, and general ledger scenario. Because they have all these attributes and fields in common, when you complete your activity and export the data back to the budget ledger, all the data is stored with all these attributes at the levels in which you prepared them.

The following three tables illustrate an example of three line item activities within one unique scenario, and represent the data rows stored within the activity that the Planning and Budgeting system exports to the budget ledger. In all cases it is an annual budget for 2008 (as all activities for one scenario only contain one element of time – annual calendar). The three line item activities include a detail expense budget, a detail revenue budget, and a consolidation activity as a place to review all the line item data together, in one activity. The three tables represent the underlying data that the system stores with the three activities.

The first two activities budget at the same dimension levels, primarily at a detail level to synchronize with the storage and data retrieval method used by the PeopleSoft General Ledger or third-party general ledger application.

The third activity—the consolidation or income statement—summarizes the majority of its dimensions (with the exception of operating unit). The system tracks net expense and revenue amount details by operating unit, and does not include department and product details, which are unnecessary in this calculation. The intent of the third activity (in this case) is to track, report, and provide an overview of the data as the budget process progresses; it may also be used for future strategic planning. However, it is not the intent of the third activity to transmit information to the General Ledger, as the general ledger system does not store information at the roll up or summarized dimension levels.

We can use the tables to illustrate another example. If (when you complete the budgeting preparation process) you export the data into the budget ledger, the system stores all the rows in all three tables under the same time, ledger, and scenario. Running a report against this budget ledger produces duplicated amounts, because the system stores the detail values and the summarized values in the same location.

We recommend that when you use multiple activities, especially those that are consolidation activities, you place a business process around each activity and define the purpose of the activity. For example, referring back to the three tables above, you may plan to only export back to your general ledger application (in your organization's financial system) the two detailed activities, expense and revenue. This is normal, as you typically prepare bottom-up budgets at the level in which they are tracked and stored in the source financial system. For the consolidated activity that you do not send back to the general ledger system, here are some suggestions:

• Disable the Export to GL flag on the Activity page for activities used as consolidated activities.

  Disabling this flag for a consolidation activity will prevent the budget data from being exported back to the General Ledger, although the activity data can still be combined with other activities in the Enterprise Performance Management budget ledger for purposes of tracking, reviewing and reporting the budget data.

• Never use the export process to send this activity's data back to the budget ledger in the EPM Warehouses.

  In this case, the activity may only be used for tracking, reviewing, and reporting as the budget process moves along. It is used as a consolidated view of the budget results that a select group of users or administrators of the budget will use.

• If you export the data back to budget ledger in the EPM Warehouses, be sure and take advantage of the Override GL Scenario option on the Export to General Ledger run control page.

  Then select the new GL scenario ID you want to use to store it in a different location in the budget ledger from the other data. The general ledger scenario field makes this third activity's data unique compared to the first and second activities, which require that their data be not only exported back into the warehouse, but also to the general ledger in the Financial system.