Best Practices
The following sections provide business information that helps achieve accurate and error-free movement of data between Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing and Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable:
Note: For information on how to configure settings specific to the integration, refer to
Configuring the Integration. Refer to the product specific documentation for information on how to complete product specific configuration tasks.
One-Time Configuration Settings
Some one-time configuration settings must be coordinated manually to ensure proper results from the movement of data between the two applications.
General Ledger Configuration
Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable is the source of truth for all General Ledger information. Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing is considered to be the sub-ledger. It is assumed that the General Ledger has already been configured to accommodate your business needs.
Distribution Codes
Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing uses distribution codes to map sub-ledger transactions to the General Ledger Accounts. As part of your Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing configuration, it is assumed that you have properly mapped your distribution codes to the General Ledger chart of accounts.
General Ledger Divisions for Non-Integrated Transactions
If some of the transactions created in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing must not be integrated to your General Ledger, you must configure a separate General Ledger Division for these transactions. You must then configure the integration product to distinguish which General Ledger Division must be integrated with the General Ledger (it ignores all others).
General Ledger Integration
Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable accounts are structured using account segments. These are set up in your existing Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable Flexfield according to your business practices. Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing distribution codes must be configured to mirror the segments in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable. The segment positions are separated by dots '.' in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing according to the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable segments defined in the Accounting Flexfield.
Create your Accounting Flexfield in the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable General Ledger (if it does not exist) then set up your Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing distribution codes to map to the General Ledger account structure using dot separators.
There is a dual use of the word “account” for the Oracle E-Business Suite general ledger accounts and the Oracle Utilities Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing customer billing accounts. A customer billing account is a collection of information associated with a customer that is used in the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing payment and billing process, and does not relate to the Oracle E-Business Suite accounting definition of account (General Ledger Account). The Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing distribution code is used to map to the Oracle E-Business Suite general ledger account.
This section includes information on:
Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable General Ledger Settings
Configure General Ledger settings in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable according to the following guidelines, keeping in mind that Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable is the source of truth for the general ledger:
• Journal Import Process: Schedule the Journal import process to create journals from Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing information inserted into Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable interface tables by the integration software. When you configure Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable to run this process automatically at a preset time, ensure you have matched this timing with the timing of other actions completed by Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing and the integration product. Alternatively, you may use the Standard Request Submission (SRS) within Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable to run the Journal Import process manually.
• Accounting Entry Definition: If not already configured, pre-configure an Accounting Flexfield definition in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable to indicate the staging table where incoming accounting entries must be stored. Ensure that all mandatory fields on the staging tables are mapped.
• The integration software relies on other Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable configuration information including: Calendars, Ledger, Journal source, Journal Category. These are usually already configured as part of your implementation. If these do not already exist, configure them for the integration software to run correctly.
Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing General Ledger Settings
The Configure General Ledger settings in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing according to the following guidelines, keeping in mind that Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable is the overriding source for the general ledger:
• Schedule the GLASSIGN and GLS batch processes to run at an appropriate time of day. These processes get sub ledger information in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing and all information that has not been posted to the General Ledger, making them ready to extract, transform and load to the General Ledger. When you configure Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing to run this process automatically at a preset time, ensure you have coordinated this timing with the timing of other actions done by Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable and the integration product. (Alternatively, you may use the standard user interface within Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing to run these batch processes manually).
• Ensure that Distribution Codes are configured in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing to properly reflect the General Ledger accounts that must be debited and credited for each type of financial transaction created.
General Ledger Settings in Integration Layer
As part of the technical configuration, you must configure the following information:
• The E-mail address of the person who must be notified if the integration software detects and logs an error while performing the integration.
• The Ledger ID, Ledger Source, and Ledger Category to use for journals in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable that came from Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing through the integration. These are configured from the Integration Lookup table.
• The Ledger Category passed to Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable can also be dynamically assigned base on the Financial Transaction (FT) Type Flag of the entry coming from the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing. The new DVM CCB_EBS_CategoryName must be configured. If the DVM is not configured or the value is not found in the DVM, it will get the default value form the Integration Lookup table.
Note: This enhancement is only available if patch 25758196 is applied.
• If you enter an Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing GL Division name in the Integration configuration table (INTEGRATION_LOOKUP_TABLE), then only financial transactions associated with this GL Division are extracted for integration to Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable GL.
If all Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing financial transactions must come across the integration, then do not specify any General Ledger Divisions in the integration product configuration table.
Accounting
The following shows the basic accounting debits and credits that can be achieved through the configuration indicated above:
Accounts Payable (AP) Request and AP Data Integrations
This section covers:
Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable AP Settings
The Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable Payables Open Interface Import (APXIIMPT) process must be run to read the data from the AP Invoice Interface tables and create invoices corresponding to the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing AP Requests. This process can be run manually or scheduled to run at a pre-determined time.
Configuration needed for AP Request and AP Payment integrations includes:
• Payables Open Interface Import (APXIIMPT): Schedule this process to create AP Invoices for the Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing information inserted into Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable interface tables by the integration product software. When you configure Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable to run this process automatically at a preset time, ensure you have matched this timing with the timing of other actions done by Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing and the integration product. (Alternatively, you can use the Standard Request Submission (SRS) within Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable to run the Payables Open Interface Import (APXIIMPT) process manually).
• Payment Terms Code: Create a new payment terms code for processing the payments for Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing customers. These codes are used to define defaults such as when payments must be made based on the invoice date, which status must be paid, any applicable discounts, rebates and other pertinent payment information.
• Invoice Source: Create an Invoice Source so that all the invoices that come from Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing are identified with this source in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable system.
Note: Refer to the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable User documentation for specific guidelines on configuring these settings.
Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing AP Settings
Configure Accounts Payable settings in Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing according to the following guidelines, keeping in mind that Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable is the overriding source for the general ledger account information.
• CIS Division: The Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing CIS Division characteristic value for AP Operating Unit must match the AP Org Id in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable.
Note: Refer to the Oracle Utilities Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing User documentation for more information on the configuration settings referenced in this section.
AP Settings in Integration Layer
The integration product extracts the AP Requests that have not been processed yet from Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing. After the necessary translations and transformations on the Supplier/Invoice data extracted from Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing are applied, the data is loaded into the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable AP Invoice Interface tables.
This integration product requires you to configure the following:
• E-mail address of the person who must be notified if the integration software detects and logs an error while performing the AP Request and AP Data integrations.
• Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing characteristic type holding the Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable AP Org ID.
• The AP Invoice information required by Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable including Vendor, Vendor Site, Invoice Source, Payment terms, Payment Method, and AP Org ID.
• By default, the AP Request integration process uses a hyphen “-” as a delimiter when passing the GL accounting string to Oracle E-Business Suite Financials for General Ledger and Accounts Payable AP Invoice Interface tables. Your implementation can modify this to use the delimiter that is passed from Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing as required by your business processes. Most of the time, Oracle Utilities Customer Care and Billing passes the GL Account with dots as the delimiter.
Accounting
The following shows the basic accounting debits and credits that can be achieved through the above AP configuration: