Supporting References
Supporting references are used to store additional source information about a subledger journal entry at the line level.
Supporting references are a powerful tool to capture transaction attributes in journal lines. You can use these tags to report on entries, reconcile entries back to source systems, or even maintain balances at the attribute level.
-
Define supporting references once and reuse by assigning sources of different event classes or source systems to the same supporting reference.
-
You can link one source per event class to each supporting reference. The subledger or source system uses the supporting reference name to store the source values. This standardizes supporting reference information, even if it comes from disparate source systems.
Supporting references can be defined using either of these options (located on tabs):
-
With Balances:
-
Select the With Balances tab in the supporting reference definition to have balances maintained when the supporting reference is associated.
-
For balance sheet accounts, supporting reference balances are carried forward to the first period of the accounting calendar's year.
-
For Profit and Loss accounts, supporting reference balances are set to zero in the first period of the accounting calendar's year.
-
A limit of thirty supporting references with balances can be defined. You can consider adding more source assignments to predefined supporting references, rather than creating a new one.
Supporting references with balances establish subledger balances for a particular source and account for a particular combination of supporting references plus the account combination.
For example:
-
If a journal line contains a supporting reference that includes two sources, Customer Type and Customer Name.
-
Balances are created for the account combination, plus customer name and customer type.
-
-
Without Balances:
-
You can assign up to 30 SR without balance to each journal line.
-
Consider using a journal entry header or line description if:
-
No balance is maintained for a supporting reference.
-
No supporting reference details are needed for reports.
-
Note: Caution: Using supporting references instead of descriptions may impact accounting engine performance. -
Examples of how you may want to use supporting reference balances are to:
-
Facilitate reconciliation back to the subledgers and source systems by tagging journal entries with the transaction and reference attributes.
-
Create balances by dimensions not captured in the chart of accounts.
-
Reporting using dimensions not captured in the chart of accounts.
-
Enrich Oracle Fusion Business Intelligence Applications reporting on subledger journals.
-
Profit and loss balances by dimensions not captured in the chart of accounts.