Considerations for Using Account Hierarchies

Before setting up hierarchies, you may want to consider the different hierarchy requirements for financial reporting, allocations, cross-validation rules, revaluations, chart of accounts mapping, and data access sets that use the primary balancing segment value access set type.

Financial Reporting and Allocations: You can use the same hierarchy for both reporting and allocations purposes, or you can have different hierarchies for reporting and for allocations purposes. Hierarchies that are used in financial reporting and allocations must be published to Oracle Essbase. You can select which hierarchies to publish. Any hierarchy that's published to Essbase can't have a single child value roll up to multiple parents. If you have this requirement, you have to define multiple hierarchies.

Cross-Validation Rules, Revaluations, and Chart of Accounts Mappings: You need one hierarchy for each segment that's used for cross-validation rules, revaluation, and chart of accounts mapping. Data Access Sets by Primary Balancing Segment Value: You need one hierarchy for the primary balancing segment if you plan to use parent primary balancing segment values in the data access set. These parent values must be selected from the trees that are associated with the segments of your chart of accounts. Hierarchies used for cross-validations, revaluations, chart of accounts mapping or data access sets, in the case of the primary balancing segment, have to be defined within the same hierarchy. The hierarchy must then be associated with a chart of accounts instance. You can only associate one hierarchy with a chart of accounts instance, per segment.

You can optionally publish this hierarchy to Essbase to use the same hierarchy for reporting and allocations. Note the restriction that any hierarchy that's published to Essbase can't have a single child value roll up to multiple parents. If you require the same child to roll up to different parents within the hierarchy, then create a different hierarchy for reporting and allocation rules.

If you use the same hierarchical account relationships for financial reporting, allocations, cross-validation rules, revaluations, chart of accounts mappings, and also data access sets by primary balancing segment value, in the case of the primary balancing segment hierarchy, define one hierarchy. However, if you need multiple hierarchies, define the hierarchies using multiple trees.