Overview of Optimized Maintenance for Account Balances

To only maintain account balances for preexisting income statement accounts in a new fiscal year from the first accounting period with posted activity, opt in to the Optimized Maintenance for Account Balances feature.

This improves efficiency and performance in managing journal postings, opening accounting periods, and running translations. It curtails unnecessary growth in the number of records with the Oracle General Ledger balances tables and balances cubes to avoid the negative impact on all product features that work with this data.

This feature maintains income statement account balances for both standard and average (if enabled) balances, and it applies to the following types of ledgers in your system:

Primary
Secondary
Reporting Currency

Caution: Once this feature opt in is enabled, it can’t be reverted. This is a permanent setting.

Background

In General Ledger, financial transactions in the form of posted journal entries, and other financial balances-updating features such as translation, are stored and summarized as account balances data for balance sheet and income statement accounts.

These account balances, both standard and average (if average balance tracking is enabled), are maintained with each accounting period that’s opened for a ledger. The previous period’s balance is rolled forward, and the current period’s posted activities are added to derive the ending account balances for the period.

The volume of account balances records grows as each accounting period is opened, even when no new accounting activities are posted to existing account combinations. Posting to new account combinations also contributes to this increase.

The size of the General Ledger balances tables and cubes will continue growing as new accounting periods are opened for a ledger. This has a direct impact on the various General Ledger operations that are applied to these objects, such as posting a journal entry, opening a new accounting period, processing an allocation, generating a revaluation, running a translation, inquiring on account balances, and reporting on such financial data.

To ensure the best performance for the General Ledger, managing the growth of these objects can be very helpful. As such, if the unnecessary increase to their size can be avoided, this is something that will be quite beneficial.