Configure Calendar

Setup of calendar in Merchandising is required for maintaining accounting periods, and is also used for integration and some operational reporting as well. The dates and periods defined in the calendar are the basis of scheduled batch programs and end of period inventory and financial calculations. Recording of all transactions and, thereby history, is based on the calendar. A consistent calendar facilitates proper analysis and time-based performance comparison.

Merchandising supports two options for calendars, both of which contain 12 months in a year; a Gregorian calendar, as well as a standard retail, or 4-5-4 calendar. In addition to weekly and monthly calendars, RMS also facilitates "half yearly" time periods for which budgeting and reporting can be done in the stock ledger.

As part of the install options, you will have selected your calendar type as either 4-5-4 or Gregorian, as well as what is the current date and what day your week starts on: Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Additionally, as one of the system options, the first month of your fiscal calendar has been defined. If you are running a 454 calendar, then based on these options, the calendar configuration will have been loaded into the solution using the National Retail Federation (NRF) calendar as a model. This includes adding an extra week every 7 years to account for leap years in the 12th period to make it a 4-5-5 quarter^Foot 1. The first date loaded into the calendar is 31-Dec-2006 and 30 years are loaded by default. If you are running a Gregorian calendar, then the calendar is loaded using that model with the first date being 01-Jan-2007 and 30 years are loaded by default.

It is strongly recommended that any updates to calendar are made very early in your implementation before data that use the calendar begins being tracked in the solution. This is because updates can result in major restructuring of data that would impact stock ledger and year over year comparisons. The most calendar common updates - other than adding periods - is to change which month is the first month of the year or to change how leap years are accounted for in a 454 calendar. Any changes made to the calendar will require coordination with the Oracle Cloud Operations team to re-run the scripts used to build the full calendar, in a cloud services implementation.

Calendar Maintenance

If there are updates required to the calendar information that is loaded, such as how you want to handle the leap years, those can be done leveraging the Calendar Maintenance functionality. Calendar updates are done through a spreadsheet download and upload processes, which are accessed through the main Merchandising task list under Foundation Data > Download Foundation Data and Foundation Data > Upload Foundation Data.

To modify the calendar, select the template type of Administration from the Download Data screen and then the template Calendar Definition. Click the Download button and when prompted, choose to either open the .ods file that is generated or save the file and open it separately in the spreadsheet application of your choice.

Once opened, there will be 3 sheets that can be modified - Calendar, Half and Half TL. The Calendar will show all the past and future months defined in the system along with first day, year, month sequence and number of weeks in the month. Existing calendar months can be deleted or updated, and new months can be added in this tab. The Half tab shows Half No, Half Name and Half Date. This tab supports addition, update and delete of definitions related to Half.

Lastly, Half TL tab will show the Half with their translated name and number in other languages, as applicable for your implementation. This tab allows for the addition of new rows, removal of existing rows, and update to existing.

Adding a Calendar Month

To add a new Calendar Month, select the Calendar tab and in a blank line in the template, select the action type of Create and enter the first date for the 454 month. The date must be entered in the 'DD-MON-YYYY' format. Next add the 4-5-4 year, the month belongs to in YYYY format. Add the sequence number of the month in that year (1-12) and lastly the number of weeks in that month. This value could be 4, 5 depending on the system followed by you company ensuring that each quarter has 13 weeks. Every 7th year, however, to overcome the leap year anomaly, a quarter with 14 weeks needs to be set up by having two months in a quarter with 5 weeks or one month with 6 weeks.

Adding a Half

To add a new Half, select the Half tab and in a blank line in the template, select the action type of Create and enter the Half No. Half number is combination of year and half number (1 or 2). For example, half numbers for the year 2019 will be 20191 and 20192. The year for which half number is created must exist in the Calendar tab. Next enter Half Name and Half Date descriptions in the primary language (as defined in the Merchandising system options). These columns are mandatory to be added and can be descriptive and up to 120 characters. Next, select the Half TL tab, navigate to a blank row and select the action type of Create and the Half No. for which the translation applies. Next select the language in which the translated name will be entered. Finally, enter the translated name. The translated name can also be up to 120 characters long. This is an optional step.

Updating a Calendar Month or Half

If you would like to update any details a similar process will be followed as that described above for creating new Calendar Month or Half. First, download the Calendar spreadsheet, and then navigate to the tab where you would like to make your updates.

The following columns can be updated in each tab:

Calendar - First Day, 4-5-4 Year, 4-5-4 Month, Number of Weeks
Half - Half Name, Half Date
Half TL - Half Name

In the tab where you are going to make your updates, select the action type of Update, and then correct the value in the spreadsheet. Once your updates are complete, save and close the spreadsheet.

Deleting a Calendar Month or Half

If you wish to delete a Calendar Month or Half, update the action column to select Delete in each of the tabs where it occurs. A Half cannot be deleted if the data for that Half has already been processed in the system or that Half exists in any other related tables.

Uploading Changes

For all actions defined above, once all the updates have been made to the data in the spreadsheet, save the file and close it. Then, return to the Merchandising screens and select Foundation Data > Upload Foundation Data from the main task list. In this screen, you'll again select the template type Administration and the template Calendar. This will generate a process description automatically, but this can be updated if desired. Lastly, you'll select the Browse button and navigate to the directory where you saved the updated spreadsheet.

To review the status of the upload and check whether any errors occurred, select the Foundation Data > Review Status task from the main task list. For more information, see "Download/Upload Data from Spreadsheets" in the Oracle Retail Merchandising Do the Basics User Guide.

Depending on the updates made to the calendar, such as how far into the future they were made, some dates may not be updated until the next time the end of day process runs. For example, the calculated last day of the half may be changed as a result of the updates, but would not be reflected until the next day based on how end of day processing updates dates.

Footnote Legend

Footnote 1:

Merchandising also supports accounting for this extra week in other months resulting in a 5-5-4 or a 5-4-5 configuration in the impacted quarter. As well, the extra week can be added as a 6th week in the month resulting in a 4-6-4 period.