Financials Pre-Requisites

If you are integrating to a financials system, such as Oracle Cloud Financials, there are certain data elements that are typically managed in the financials solution that must be loaded into Merchandising prior to creating suppliers and locations. These include currency rates, payment and freight terms, sets of books, and org units. Transfer entities, although not managed as part of financials integration, are also included in this section as there are similar setup dependencies. Additionally, other information also needs to be configured to ensure that financial data from the Merchandising stock ledger can be sent to the General Ledger.

The sections below indicate the key areas to be initialized in Merchandising to ensure that data can be set up in Merchandising and that your financial integration will be configured properly. See the RFI Implementation Guide for more details on all these data elements.

Currency Rates

Although the currencies themselves are loaded as part of seed data, exchange rates are not loaded, but at least one rate will be needed for each currency that is relevant for your implementation, including stores, warehouses, partners, and suppliers. It is recommended that you remove any currencies not relevant for your business to avoid importing unnecessary exchange rates. See "Manage Currencies" for more details on manually loading exchange rates.

Generally, an external source provides the exchange rates for both Merchandising and your financials solution. So, as an alternative to loading these manually, you can also initialize these through the financials integration. For Peoplesoft and Oracle Financials, Merchandising has out of the box integration to import currency rates. See the "Initial Loading of Currency Exchange Rates" section in the RFI Implementation Guide for more details.

Payment and Freight Terms

Before creating suppliers and partners, you will need to make sure that you have loaded the applicable payment and freight terms into Merchandising. You will also want to ensure that these are the same payment and freight terms used by your financials application. Similar to currency rates, Merchandising also has integration for payment terms if you are using Peoplesoft as your financials application. However, for other solutions and for freight terms, these are manually managed between the two solutions. See "Manage Freight and Payment Terms" in the Oracle Retail Merchandising Finance User Guide.

Transfer Entities, Sets of Books, and Org Units

Before you start creating locations and suppliers, you'll need to configure your transfer entities, sets of books, and org units in Merchandising. Sets of books and org units are used as part of the financials integration, but they must be manually configured into Merchandising. All implementations require at least one set of books and one org unit be configured into the solution. Transfer entities are required if you've set the Intercompany Transfer Basis to Transfer Entity, but otherwise are optional. If using, these must also be set up prior to creating stores, warehouses, and any external finishers. You will also need to define a relationship between transfer entities, sets of books, and org units as part of this setup. Instructions for managing all these entities are found in the "Manage Financial Administration Data" chapter of the Oracle Retail Merchandising Finance User Guide.

Suppliers

Suppliers are usually initiated in financials and integrated into Merchandising, rather than created within Merchandising manually. If you are using this method to manage your suppliers, then it is recommended this is how suppliers be initialized in Merchandising as well. This is because the financial integration utilizes a cross-reference table for supplier IDs used between solutions. More information on this can be found in the RFI Implementation Guide in the "Supplier Information Integration" section.

General Ledger Configuration

Once locations and hierarchies have been established in Merchandising, you will need to configure how stock ledger data will be mapped to the General Ledger (GL). There are two components of this: GL Setup, which contains key information by set of books used in the GL mapping, and GL Cross References, which are used to map the various stock ledger transactions to GL accounts. The GL Setup also provides for defining clearing accounts for each set of books into which transactions which are missing mappings at the time of month closure can be posted. The details on how to configure these components can be found in the Oracle Retail Merchandising Finance User Guide. Once the cross-references have been established, you can use the validation service that exists as part of the financials integration to validate your configuration, if you are configured to use RFI. For more details on this, see the Requesting Chart of Accounts Combination Validation section in the Oracle Retail Financials Integration Implementation Guide.

If you are not using RFI for financials integration, then financial accounts are validated based on those stored in Merchandising. The GL Chart of Accounts Subscription can be used for importing those details.

Domain Value Maps

If you are using the Oracle Retail Financials Integration (RFI) to integrate with PeopleSoft, Oracle Financials (EBS), or Cloud Financials, there are cross-references that also must be set up as part of the implementation called Domain Value Maps. This is applicable for the following entities: freight and payment terms, org units, sets of books, country codes, currency conversion types, currency codes, language codes, states, and VAT codes. These cross references are generally a one-time setup upon initial conversion, but the following will need to be manually managed between solutions if updates are made post implementation - freight terms, payment terms, and org unit IDs.

For more details on this, see the Oracle Retail Financial Integration for Oracle Retail Merchandise Operations Management and Oracle Financials Implementation Guide section on "Working with Domain Value Maps (DVMs)".