Oracle EBS: Document Sequencing

Ah, the document sequencing, the audit thingy. What is the purpose of giving a sequence to the transactions or the documents that you create? Well it has been a practice to assign the number to anything which occurs more than once, by numbering them you can identify the order of its generation. It acts like a chain and if a number goes missing, the link is broken and you can see that there was a deletion or removal of the transaction. Sequence numbering can also be seen in our business processes like organization assign employee number or employee code to their employees in order to identify them. Our vehicles have registration numbers. Even the database have a number primary key for the records it holds. BUT that is just to uniquely identify them. Here the purpose of sequencing is to maintain the Audit Trial of the transaction or as Oracle says in its documentation, to maintain the completeness of the transaction.

How?

System generates its own number in a sequence. Like first transaction will have 1 and then second will have 2 and so on and so forth but there are scenarios where more than one person is working on same category and the method of sequence is Automatic then it might have a sequence, I haven’t seen it as yet but it is.

It is very simple to generate a unique Voucher Number, for a document created in EBS modules. The document, also called Categories, can be viewed in the Sequence Assignment window, this window can be found at System Administrator or General Ledger module, provided you have the rights for Defining and Assigning Document Sequence. But before you do, make sure that the profile option Sequential Numbering is set to either Partially Used or Always Used. Personally I haven’t seen much difference in both of options because if you use Always Use, the system won’t let you move forward if there is no sequence assigned to the category and if you use Partially again the system won’t let you move forward.

Any question so far? I don’t think there should be otherwise I have given my email address in the end, you are more than welcome to contact me with your concerns.

Moving forward…

There are two steps for Document Sequencing:

1. Define
2. Assign

I use General Ledger responsibility for defining and assigning the Sequence but most of the people I know use the System Administrator responsibility. Its your choice which one to use. I am writing about the General Ledger method.

Let’s do the first step: DEFINE
Navigation: GL>Setup>Financials>Sequence>Document>Define

The Document Sequence form will open.

1. Enter the Name of the Sequence. For Example XYZ_JV_SEQ_2009. It is 30 character field, so you can have a naming convention that will help you identify the sequence along with period and category.

2. Select the Application for which the document belongs to. For example General Ledger, Payables, Cash Management etc.

3. Enter the Effective From Date. This date is very tricky as you have to be very careful while selecting it. You must first the renewing period of your sequence. If you renew your sequence every year then the From Date will be the beginning of the year, like 01-Jul-2009. It all depends on the organization’s policy.

4. Enter the Effective To Date. This will be the end of the year if you are following a yearly sequence renewal.

5. Select the Type of number generation. In R12.0.4 there are three options

• Automatic: The number will be generated automatically, but might not be gapless if there are more than one user working on same document category
• Manual: The user has to manually enter the document number
• Gapless:The sequence will be gap less even when there are more user working on the same category, but it requires memory as the application will reserve the sequence number and will not generate it until the document is successfully committed.

6. Check Message if you want a popup displaying the number being assigned to the document. This is useful when the user is tagging application number to the hard copy of the document.

7. Enter the Initial Value of the sequence that you want. Usually its 1 but you might want to have it like 20090000001. The maximum you can enter is 28 characters till 1000000000000000000000000000.

8. Save the Record

This is done. You have defined the Sequence. Now you have Assign the sequence to the document category

Let’s do the second step: ASSIGN

Navigation: GL>Setup>Financials>Sequence>Document>Assign

There are two tabs in this form: Document and Assignment

Document Tab: You select the information related to the document.

Assignment Tab: You select the information related to the sequence assignment of that document.

1. Enter the Application name for which you want to assign the sequence, it should be same as selected in the Definition of sequence

2. Select the document Category for which the sequence is being assigned. These categories depend on the application selected.

3. Select the Ledger. I don’t think this need any clarification

4. Select the Method. This is another interesting feature. It not the method of sequence generation but the method of document generation. For example, when you enter a journal voucher, it is a Manual method of document generation, but when you reverse the journal voucher, it is generated automatically. There are three options available here:

• Null: This is selected by default. If the category is generated both manually and automatically.

• Automatic: The document is generated automatically. If you will select this option then manual document will not have document assignment and the system will give error.

• Manual : The document is generated manually.

5. Enter the Start Date. It should be same as the Define Sequence Effective from date.

6. Enter the End Date.

7. Select the Sequence for the document. The defined document sequence should be listed there if the Start date matches the effective from date.

8. Save the Record.

That’s about it. But remember this sequencing steps applies to General Ledger, Payables and other application whose document categories are seeded.

If you have any questions or need some clarification on this topic or any other financial topic, I am available right here

:)

That’s all. Take care. Happy implementing.

-Atif

Oracle EBS: Banks

The concept of Banks in Oracle Apps is same as Customer or Suppliers i.e. Banks are treated as Party or a Shared Entity. Banks are shared among following modules:

• Payables
• Receivables
• Treasury
• Payroll
• Cash Management

Technically Banks are owned by Cash Management.

The hierarchy of banks is as follows:

• Bank
  • Bank Branch
    • Bank Account
      • Payment Document or Check Book

Banks are used in Payables for Payments and in Receivables they are used for Receipts. Then these payments and receipts are automatically transferred to Oracle Cash Management for reconciliation depending on the configured options for reconciliation and Receipt Methods.

The Bank setups are changed in R12 as compared to R11i. The two major changes in Bank setups are:

• The concept of Account Owner in Bank Account Setup.
• And secondly you have to configure Cash Management Responsibility whatsoever to setup a bank.

This account owner refers to Legal Entity. You can see the use of this concept where there are more than one legal entity working on a single instance. But even if you are using a single Legal Entity, you still have to give the right to Legal Entity in order to setup a bank account.

Here are steps for setting up a bank account:

1. Create a Cash Management responsibility and give the attach the following profile option
   1. GL: Ledger Name
   2. MO: Operating
2. Log in the application using “SYSADMIN” user ID
3. Click on “User Management” Responsibility
4. Go to “Roles & Role Inheritance”
5. Search for “Cash Management” in the Application search field
6. Look for the Cash Management responsibility you create in Step.1 and Click on Update icon
7. Click on “Security Wizard” Button. (Click “Save and Proceed” if required)
8. On the next form click “Run Wizard” icon against the field CE UMX Security Wizard
9. Click on “Add Legal Entity” button
10. Search and attach the legal entity.
11. Give the Bank Access Grant
12. Save the records

By doing this you are now able to setup a Bank Account

That’s All for now :)

Oracle EBS: Key Business Flows

Every business has some Processes, every process has some Flows to meet some requirement or an outcome. These processes and flows can be divided to departmental level. Every department in an organization has some Process Flows and upon execution of these flows the department meets some desired outcome.

Number of departments involved in a process depends on the nature of the process and its flow. Keeping in mind the process and its flow an automated application is designed, developed and implemented to help the department(s) fasten up the flow and efficiently execute it. If the application caters a whole process then it can be called as an ERP application.

These departments and processes can categorize in to two stages:

1. Front Office
2. Back Office

Oracle Application or E-Business Suite is one of these automated application which cater different processes with the help of different applications of module.

We can also call a “process” as a “cycle”. Oracle Applications caters different business cycles with different applications or, in terms of ERP, different modules.

Here is a list of how a standard business process catered by Oracle E-Business Suite, and each process has different Business Cycle.

1. Plan
2. Source
3. Make
4. Market
5. Sell
6. Support

Each business process has a cycle and for each cycle there are set of Oracle Application. Here is the hierarchy of how I’ve defined the Process, Cycle and Oracle Application:

• PROCESS
  • Cycle
    • Oracle Application

So here’s the whole thing:

• PLAN
  • Concept to Release
  • Forecast to Plan
    • Demand Planning,
    • Order Management and
    • Advanced Supply Chain Planning
  • Plan to Replenish

• SOURCE
  • Procure to Pay,
    • Purchasing
    • Inventory
    • Payables
    • iExpenses
    • Cash Management
    • General Ledger
    • Assets (optional)
  • Inventory to Fulfillment

• MAKE
  • Demand to Build
  • Inventory to Fulfillment

• MARKET
  • Campaign to Order

• SELL
  • Campaign to Order
  • Click to Order
  • Order to Cash
    • Order Management
    • Inventory
    • Receivables
    • Cash Management
    • General Ledger
  • Contract to Renewal

• SUPPORT
  • Contract to Renewal
  • Request to Resolution

Back Office Cycle in particular includes:

• Benefits to Payroll
• People to Paycheck
• Project to Profit
• Accounting to Financial Reports

I’ve explained P2P and O2C cycle in detail here. I haven’t gone through the various other cycles and I regrettably accept my knowledge’s limitation in this regard.

That’s All :)

Oracle EBS: Using Query Mode

“Query” means question. There is a language used in Oracle called Procedural Language/Structured Query Language (PL/SQL).

Oracle uses this language in user forms to find records. It’s one the method of finding records. Others are by click Find(Torch) button and second is View>Find but sometimes these option are unavailable and you have to use the query mode.

I like query method the most out of the three. I think it’s a fast way to find the record if you know that it exists on the form where you are querying it.

Anyways, How does it work?

To toggle on the query form click F11on the form you want to search or query the record. If the form fields turns Blue, it indicates that you’ve entered the query mode. Enter the query and execute it by pressing CTRL+F11. You can see the instructions on the lower right side of the screen. To exit the query mode you can simply click F4 which is also used to close the forms.

How to enter a query? or What should we type to search a record? or What is the syntax of any query?

Well the simplest query or the one way of entering query that I usually use is %Record%Name%

Yes, you use the percentage sign in between words or the keywords, but that not all to it. There are different meanings of placing the % sign.

Let’s take an example of the list of records and what will happen of placing the % sign.

• Oracle E-Business Suite
• Oracle General Ledger
• Customers in Oracle Receivables
• Suppliers in Oracle Payables
• Query Mode in Oracle

Suppose the above mentioned words are records in a form. You want to query the record that starts with the word Oracle. The query will be Oracle%

Results will be: Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle General Ledger.

if you want to find the records with oracle in between them and where ever it is used then the query will %Oracle%

Results will be all records as every record has Oracle in it.

and if you want to find records that ends with oracle then the query will be %Oracle

Results will be : Suppliers in Oracle Payables and Query Mode in Oracle

This query mode find is sometimes Case Sensitive. By sometimes I mean on some forms. I will note the forms with and without case sensitive search and will list them here.

That’s All :)

Oracle EBS: Diagnostics – Examine

This option lets you view or find the internal IDs of the record of particular application.

It is useful when you want to integrate the Oracle Apps with any other application.

For example: Integrating Journal Entries in General Ledger,

Payables Invoice and Suppliers in Payables

Receivables Invoice, Receipts and Customers in Receivables. Etc.

This integration is called “Interfacing” in Oracle Apps. Oracle has provided “Interface Tables” of the feature which can be used with other applications.

Examine can be use to find or know what is the ID generated by Oracle Apps for particular record, so that that ID can be used for interfacing.

How to use it?

Navigate to the Oracle Apps form for which you want to know the ID, say, you want to know the supplier’s site ID. The easy way to know it is to navigate to Invoice Entry form and enter the supplier’s name and site for which you want to know the ID. Once you’ve selected the desired supplier and its site, highlight the site field or just click on it and go to Help Menu> Diagnostics> Examine. The system will ask for the password which is usually “apps” but I think it is advisable to change it and the DBA should change it when s/he installs the new environment.

Anyways, if you know the password, enter it. A window will appear with three fields,

• Block: Portion or Part of form. Sometimes the form is divided into regions, like Payables Invoice is divided into Header, Lines, Prepayment, etc. All the Tabs are different regions.
• Field: Fields available in that particular region
• Value: This is what we are looking for, Value broadly consist of two things “Display Name” and “ID”. If you’ve selected or pointed your cursor on the site field, then examine field will display VENDOR_SITE_CODE and if you enter VENDOR_SITE_ID in field, then the internal value of this particular site will be displayed. It will be a numeric value which is used for in interfacing. Similarly you can view other IDs of the records as well. Like if you type Terms_ID then the system will display the ID for Payment Terms attached to the invoice.

Happy Examining.

That’s All :)

P2P and O2C: Procure to Pay and Order to Cash Cycles

Oracle has developed this ERP solution which truly covers these both cycles as well as many others. Oracle EBS comprises of the Standard Core Business Management applications like General Ledger, Payables, Receivables, Purchasing, Order Management, Inventory, Discrete Manufacturing, Process Manufacturing , HRMS and many more. The application I’ve mentioned are so integrated that it handles the beginning to end of both Assets and Liabilities. When I say Assets I am referring to applications like Order Management and Receivables, and when I say Liabilities I am referring to Purchasing and Payables and both of these Assets and Liabilities are finally pushed and calculated in Oracle General Ledger.

The base or the heart of Oracle EBS is Oracle General Ledger. Let me call GL an intrinsic.

Procure to Pay:

First let’s see what the heading itself means? Procure to Pay means Procuring Raw Materials required to manufacture the final or finished Goods to Paying the Supplier from whom the material was purchased. But this is not just two steps. It involves many steps. Let’s see the steps and Oracle Application involved in performing those steps.

1. Oracle Purchasing: You enter Suppliers of different materials and products you want to purchase to manufacture a finished good that your organization plans to sell.
2. Oracle Purchasing: You prepare a Request for Quotation (RFQ) and send it to different suppliers to get the best and/or economical price for the product.
3. Oracle Purchasing: Suppliers sends their quotations and you upload those quotations in Oracle Purchasing to get the best three quotes and further to get the one best quote.
4. Oracle Purchasing: You prepare a Purchase Order(PO) against the best RFQ to buy the goods from the supplier who quoted the suitable price and sends the PO to that supplier
5. Oracle Purchasing: The supplier receives the confirmation of purchase from PO and ships the ordered goods. You receive the goods enter a Goods Received Note (GRN) in Oracle Purchasing.
6. Oracle Inventory / Oracle Assets: It’s up to you whether you want to receive the goods at your head office or you Inventory directly. In either case you move the received goods to your different Raw Material Inventory from Oracle Purchasing to Oracle Inventory and the Item Count increases. If the item is Asset Type then it will move to Oracle Assets at the time of Invoice creation in Oracle Payables.
7. Oracle General Ledger: Once you move the goods to Oracle Inventory, it sends the Material Accounting to Oracle General Ledger.
8. Oracle Payables: After this the supplier sends you the invoice for the purchased goods and you Enter or Match the invoice against the PO from Oracle Purchasing in Oracle Payables. As said before, if the item is Asset in nature then it will move to Oracle Asset.
9. Oracle General Ledger: When you enter the invoice it means that you have created a Liability against that supplier and also you have recorded the expense incurred or asset purchased. Oracle Payables sends the invoice accounting to Oracle General Ledger.
10. Oracle Payables: You pay the invoice and settle the Liability.
11. Oracle General Ledger: The liability is settled and your cash movement account is updated.
12. Oracle Cash Management: As you pay the invoice Oracle Payables sends the payment information to Oracle Cash Management for Bank Reconciliation. Once reconciled, Oracle Cash Management sends the updated Bank/Cash accounting entry to Oracle General Ledger.
13. Oracle General Ledger: Your cash at bank is updated with actual balance.
14. Oracle Process Manufacturing(OPM) / Oracle Discrete Manufacturing(ODM): You start the manufacturing of your final product. Both OPM or ODM requests the different raw materials from you inventory organizations and manufactures a finished good.
15. Oracle Inventory: As the raw materials are issued to OPM and ODM the inventory sends the issuing material accounting to General Ledger and decreases the Item Count from the Raw Material Store. As the finished good is prepared, Oracle Inventory receives the finished good in Finished Good Store and increase the Item Count.

Now the final product is ready to be sold in the market and from here the O2C cycle starts.

Order to Cash Cycle:

Order to Cash means Customer’s Order Placing to Vendor’s Cash Receiving. When your final product is ready to be sold, you market it. The customer gets fascinated with the marketing campaign and decides to buy your product and from here starts the O2C cycle.

1. Oracle Order Management: Customer places the order.
2. Oracle Order Management: You enter the customer order
3. Oracle Inventory: Check the available unit and the quantity ordered by the customer.
4. Oracle Order Management: You ship the product to customer site and decreases the Finished Goods inventory.
5. Oracle Receivables: The customer receives the product and you invoice the customer.
6. Oracle General Ledger: You record your revenue and receivables.
7. Oracle Receivables: The customer pays and you receive the cash/check.
8. Oracle Cash Management: Oracle Receivables sends the customer receipt for Bank Reconciliation. After reconciliation, Oracle Cash Management send the actual bank balance or Oracle General Ledger.
9. Oracle General Ledger: You have the actual bank balance.

This is how the P2P and O2C cycle works, but this is not the only way, obviously there are many other applications with different cycles. This is one of them.

That’s All :)

Oracle EBS: Responsibilty

General Perspective

As the name itself suggests understanding that responsibility means “Being responsible”, but how does it fits in an ERP application? Hmm. Good question. What I think about this is that when an employee agrees to serve an organization, he is assigned some task and “responsibilities”, these responsibilities varies depending on his role in the organization. He has the access to some documents and files whereas some of the information is not provided to him or maybe that information is irrelevant to his role and designation and he doesn’t need to know it. Similarly if the organization is using some automated system then that employee is assigned with the rights relevant to his role. He has to perform certain functions and prepare certain reports in order to carry out his responsibility.

Oracle Perspective

In Oracle, Responsibility is almost the same as described above, the only major difference is that here responsibility is referring to an Oracle application or EBS module with certain level of access to documents (Reports, Request), information(Forms, Tabbed Regions) and tasks (Menus and Functions) that employee can perform on that module or application. Another definition of Responsibility can be that “An application assigned to an employee to perform his tasks and responsibilities”.

Responsibilities are made up of or composed of following:

• Application i.e. General Ledger, Payables, Assets etc.
• Menus
• Request Group
• Exclusion of Menus and Functions
• System Profile Options (which are assigned through another form)

Responsibilities are created and assigned through another responsibility called “System Administrator”. When a fresh instance is installed, a default User ID is available in the instance as “Sysadmin”. This User ID has the System Administrator responsibility as well as another responsibility called “User Management” through which we can create User IDs. Generally the System Administrator responsibility is owned by the Oracle Application Administrator or if I may say this responsibility is owned by MIS department. They are responsible for creating, updating and changing responsibilities as well as creating User IDs and assigning rights and accesses.

The flow of creating responsibility and user is

1. Decide the Roles in organization,
2. Assign Task to these roles,
3. Decide the Rights of the role according to the tasks,

After doing this HR exercise, In Oracle Application

1. Create Menus according to the Rights,
2. Create Request Group according to the Rights,
3. Create Responsibilities and attach particular Applications, Menus and Request Groups
4. Create User IDs and attach responsibilities accordingly.

How responsibility works in a business process?

Let’s take an example of an organization’s finance department to see how Responsibility works. The hierarchy of department is Manager, Supervisor and User. Manager looks after the function of the whole department, the supervisors and users are assigned with the task of Payments and Receiving. There is a Payables Supervisor who looks after every payment related transaction and a Receivables Supervisor who looks after every Receiving. Similarly there is a Payable User and Receivable User. Payable users are assigned with the task of recording organization’s liability and setting it off, or in other words, payables user is responsible for recording or entering Payables Invoices and making Payments but cannot create Supplier or Bank or Open/Close accounting periods. The supervisor of Payable can enter invoices, make payments as well as he can also open suppliers and bank and also has the access to Payables accounting calendar. To assign the employees with their tasks we will be creating two Responsibilities of Payables application, AP Supervisor and AP User. AP Supervisor responsibility will be having the rights to Invoices, Payments, Suppliers and Banks. AP User responsibility will only have the function of Enter Invoice and Payments. Every employee will have a User ID in Oracle Application; We will assign both the responsibilities to the respective User IDs.

That’s All:)

Oracle EBS: Key Flexfields

First let’s break the term to define it in more detail. “Key” means important, For Example somebody says General Ledger is the key module in Oracle EBS or he played the key role in winning this game, etc. So “Key” means important. The term “Flexfield” is composed of two words, “Flex” and “Field”, Flex means flexible. Field is self explanatory term and is referring to the input field in any software.

Key Flexfields are used by some modules like for example Oracle General Ledger uses Accounting Flexfields, Oracle Assets uses Location, Category and Asset Key Flexfield, etc. To see which application uses which use the Segment Setup Window. In General Ledger the navigation is

GL>Setup>Financials>Flexfields>Key>Segment

On Application field click (B)Torch and press the initial letter of the application, Like “i” for Inventory.

Now what or how can any field is flexible? Well there are Three types of flexibilities you get from KFF.

1. Every KFF needs segments. The number of segment depends on the requirement. This segment is one form of flexibility. For Example: One organization decides the COA Structure or Accounting Flexfields as Company-Branch-Department-Natural Account. Another organization decides it COA as Company-Branch-Department-Product-Account.
2. Each segment has a value set. This value set is another form of flexibility. Both of these flexibilities are ONE TIME. Once you have decided the segments and value sets of any KFF structure, it is freeze.
3. The third type of Flexibility in KFF is related to Security. You can define multiple security rules on segment values for multiple responsibilities. How? We will find out later.

So this is the flexibility Oracle has in Key Flexfield. Or what I understand from the term key flexfields.

In General Ledger Segment provides the flexibility to define particular information to level of details required by the user/organization. Technically, it is column divided into further columns, those further columns are called segments. There can be 30 Segments in General Ledger, each can have 25 character length, but in actual the length supported by the application is of 240 characters.

That’s All :)