Standard Reports in GL,AR,AP,PO

Download the training docs which has the details of Standard Reports in GL,AR,AP and PO.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ZT2D0VWX

White papers on oracle general ledger(GL)

Download the White Paper collection on General Ledger. Great help to guys who doesn't have a metalink id.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=TKV860E3

oracle general ledger(GL) Practices

Download GL Practices from the following link. These practice include Creating Set of Books, Journal entries etc. on Vision Demo Database. Good for learners and aspiring Functional consultants.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=7TXUMWZ1

Oracle Apps 11i : Creating Journals through Oracle GL

This tutorial will describe the procedure of creating journals through oracle GL - Create a new batch with multiple Journal entries, Enter Journals to a Batch and to Enter Journal Lines.

Create a new batch with multiple Journal entries

Create a Journal batch

The following are the steps for creation of a journal batch:

1. Navigate to the enter journals window.

2. Choose New Batch.

3. Enter an optional Batch name to identify the batch on general ledger and journal entry reports. You cannot have duplicate batch names in the same accounting period. If you do not enter a batch name, General Ledger will create a default name from the source, combined with a unique batch ID and the system date.

4. Enter the accounting Period for which you want to post the entries in your journal batch. General Ledger defaults to the latest Open period.

a. Note: If you enter a period prior to the current accounting period and the user profile option Journals: Enable Prior Period Notification is set to Yes, General Ledger will display a message indicating that you are entering a prior period journal. You must confirm that this is what you want to do.

b. Additional Information: Balance Type is a display–only field. It displays Actual when you are entering actual journals and Budget when you are entering budget journals.

5. (Optional) Enter a description for the journal batch.

6. Enter a Control Total if you want to verify the total debits for your journal batch against the batch control total. You can also enter a control total at the journal entry level.

7. Choose Journals to add journals to the batch.

Figure -2 The Journal batch creation screen.

Enter Journals to a Batch

One can enter a journal to an existing batch or can create a new journal. The following are the steps:

1. Navigate to the Enter Journals window.

2. Enter or query the batch for which you are entering journals. To enter a journal without entering batch information, choose New Journal and proceed to Step 4.

• To enter journals for a new batch, choose New Batch and enter the batch information.
• To add journals to an existing batch, query the batch and choose

Review Batch.

3. Choose Journals.

4. Enter a unique Journal name for the entry. If you do not enter a journal name, General Ledger automatically assigns a name using the following format: Source Journal ID Date.

If you did not enter a batch name before entering journals, General Ledger uses the name of the first journal in the batch to create a default batch name.

5. Enter the Period for the journal entry. If you entered a period at the batch level, you must use the same period for each journal entry in the batch. If you did not enter a period at the batch level, choose any Open or Future Enterable period for your journal entry. Note that you can only post journals in Open periods.

6. Accept or change the default Effective Date for the journal entry.

7. Enter a Category to describe the purpose of your journal entry, such as accrual, payments or receipts. All lines in a journal entry share the same journal category.

General Ledger defaults the journal category if you defined the profile option Journals: Default Category.

8. Enter an optional Description for the journal entry. General Ledger uses this as the default description for each journal entry line. You can change the journal entry description as necessary.

9. Enter a Control Total if you want to verify the total debits for the journal lines against the journal control total.

10. Accept the default Currency (the functional currency for your set of books), or change the journal currency to enter a foreign currency or statistical journal.

11. (Optional) If you have average balance processing enabled and your set of books is a consolidation set of books, select Standard or Average as the Journal Type.

In a consolidation set of books, you can create journal entries that affect either standard or average balances. The balances are not linked. In a non–consolidation set of books, you can only create journal entries that directly affect standard balances. Average balances are calculated automatically from your standard balances.

12. Enter a Reference description to further identify the journal entry on general ledger and journal entry reports.

13. (Optional) If you are entering an inter-company transaction within a single set of books, you can specify the clearing company. Note: You can define relationships in the inter-company Accounts window which General Ledger then uses to automatically determine a clearing company. The clearing company you manually enter in the More Details window may not override the relationships defined in the inter-company Accounts window.

14. Enter a reversal Date, Period, and Method. You can then generate a reversing journal entry to that effective date and period. You can also reverse a journal entry without assigning a reversal period. Reversal Method can be either:

Switch Dr/Cr: General Ledger creates your reversing journal by switching the debit and credit amounts of the original journal entry. This method is often used when reversing accruals. Change Sign: General Ledger creates your reversing journal by changing the sign of your original journal amounts from positive to negative. This reversal method is often used when reversing journals to correct data entry mistakes.

15. Return to the Journals window and enter the journal lines.

16. Save your work.

To Enter Journal Lines

The following are the steps for entering the line information in a journal:

1. Navigate to the Enter Journals window.

2. Enter your batch and journal information. Alternatively, you can set up a default category and accept all default batch and journal information to enter lines directly.

3. Enter a Line number for each journal line to control the sequence in which the journal entry lines appear online and in reports. After you enter the first journal entry line number, General Ledger automatically increments the numbers for the following lines. You can change the line numbers as necessary.

4. Enter an Account for the journal line.

5. Enter the Debit or Credit amount for the designated account.

Note: If needed, you can enter debits and credits as negative amounts.

General Ledger Implementation Considerations - Sets of Books (Ledger for 12i) and Chart of Accounts

Set of Books (Ledger for 12i):
Set of books determines the functional Currency, Chart of account structure, and accounting Calendar for each company or group of companies, which are known as the 3 C's.

You need to create and set up one or more sets of books. The number of books you set up depend on various factors, such as:
Ø Whether you have multiple subsidiaries using different calendars, charts of accounts, and currencies requiring multiple sets of books
Ø Whether you have multiple subsidiaries that share the same calendar, chart of accounts, and currencies that allow them to share the same set of books
Ø Your organizational requirements or government reporting requirements.

General Ledger provides you with the flexibility to manage your financial information within any company structure. One can maintain multiple companies with similar or different accounting structures, and consolidate their results for meaningful financial reporting.

Chart of Accounts:
Chart of accounts uses Key Flexfield (Accounting Flexfield) that, comprises of Segments, Value sets, Values and Code Combination ID.

Defining the Chart of accounts:
Planning the Chart of accounts structure is the most important activity involving the structure, segments, segment validation and additional features. Analyze the organizational structure and the dimensions of the business before designing the Chart of accounts. By carefully evaluating the business needs, design the chart of accounts to take advantage of General Ledger’s flexible tools for recording and reporting the accounting information.

The account structure can comprise 30 segments with a maximum character length of 275 for the entire String. Each string of multiple-segments is called a code combination and stores a code combination ID based on which balances are maintained in GL. An accounting chart normally consists of Company code, Line of Business, Cost center, Natural Account, Intercompany and Future.

How to define Key Flexfield Structures like Chart of Accounts:
Ø Define descriptive information and validation information for each segment.
Ø Determine the appearance of your key flexfield window, the number and order of the segments, and the segment descriptions and default values.
Ø Freeze flexfield definition and save the changes once set up or when the structures/segments are modified. On saving, Flexfield compiles automatically to improve on–line performance.
Ø Compile the flexfield every time when the changes are made to this form, including enabling or disabling cross–validation rules and when the changes are made to the shorthand aliases window.
Ø Oracle Applications submits one or two Concurrent requests to generate database views of the flexfield combinations table.
Ø The flexfield changes immediately after freezing and recompiling. However, the changes affect other users only after they change responsibilities or exit the application and sign back on.


Determine the Chart of Accounts Structure That Best Suits Your Organization:
Ø Examine the organization structure to identify how performance and profitability are normally measured
Ø Also multiple organizational structures may be needed to allow views of the organization from multiple perspectives. Summary accounts can be used to roll up details.
Ø Visualize each segment of the account as a unit dimension of the business. Combine units that are based on similar dimensions to avoid using multiple segments that measure the same dimension.
Ø Identify the functions, products, programs, funding sources, regions, or any other business dimensions that are to be tracked
Ø Determine the reporting needs.

Consider the following questions before defining the COA structure:
Ø What information will better help one to manage one’s organization?
Ø What are the different ways in which one can look at one’s operations?
Ø What kinds of reports do managers ask for?
Ø What reports one prepares now with some difficulty?
Ø What reports are provided by other financial information systems?
Ø What statistical reporting does one want to perform?
Ø Is project reporting needed?
Ø At what levels of detail does one produce reports?

To Determine Your COA Segment Needs:
Ø Determine the segment that captures the natural account, such as assets, liabilities, expenses, and so on.
Ø Define a separate Accounting Flexfield segment for each dimension of your organization on which you want to report, such as regions, products, services, programs, and projects.
Ø Group similar business dimensions into one segment. This allows a more simplified and flexible account structure For example, you only need one segment to record and report on both districts and regions. Because regions are simply groups of districts, you can easily create regions within your district segment by defining a parent for each region with the relevant districts as children. Use these parents when defining summary accounts to maintain account balances and reporting hierarchies to perform regional reporting.

Designing Simple Forms Personalizations for Functional Consultants

Forms Personalization: I kept reading about this amazingly new feature called 'Forms Personalization' but what really bothered me was almost all the articles / whitepapers had the targeted audience as ‘Admin / Developer’ who have some ‘knowledge of Oracle Developer, PL/SQL, Coding Standards and API’s’.

This really caught my attention and I spent about 2 hours trying to figure out what can a Functional Consultant like myself get out of this new feature. Good news is that you don’t need to have any technical knowledge to design some simple personalizations. So in this article, I have tried to explore some easy to design personalization’s which the Functional Consultants can easily build and test.

Why personalization’s are handy – Since Oracle Apps is a pre-built product, most of the clients would like to remove/ rename, change default values of some of the fields, buttons, tabs etc. Traditional method of getting all the above ‘extensions’ done was to ‘customize’ the form (by customizing the custom.pll) which was generally protected during upgrades / patching. Luckily most changes traditionally done using cutom.pll can be accomplished using Forms Personalization.

Functional Folks - How to quickly get started – The ‘personalize’ menu can be found at Help -> Diagnostics -> Custom Code -> Personalize. To prevent unauthorized users from changing the look and behavior of forms, please use the following profile options:
Utilities: Diagnostics = Yes / No
Hide Diagnostics = Yes / No

Four sections to define a Personalization – There are four sections in the define forms personalization form:
Rules Header – This is where you enter the rules and rule descriptions in plain English. You can sequence these rules using a number and enable/ disable any one rule by using the Enabled checkbox.
Conditions – Consists of Trigger Event: the event within the form that causes invocation of the rule, Trigger object: the context for the trigger event, such as a
particular block or item, Condition: an optional SQL fragment that, when it evaluates to TRUE, allows the rule to execute.
Context or Scope - The Scope is evaluated based on the current runtime context to determine if a Rule should be processed or not. The Scope can be at the Site, Responsibility, User, or Industry level. Each Rule can have one or more Scopes associated with it.
Actions – Determines what the personalization does when the condition and context are true. Various types of actions available include ‘Property’, ‘Message’, Builtin’ or a ‘Special’. Based on the type, additional definition

Real world examples you can try – One of my banking client wanted the Journal Enter form to be customized for the following business rules:

1. Change the ‘Journal’ prompt to display ‘Voucher’
2. Journal description should always be in UPPER CASE
3. Do not display the Budget field, as budgets were not implemented
4. Note to display warning to change Period for prior period Journals.

The following screenshots explain how these four business requirements were implemented using Forms Personalization:

1. Change the ‘Journal’ prompt to display ‘Voucher’:




2. Journal description should always be in UPPER CASE:



3. Do not display the Budget field, as budgets were not implemented:



4. Note to display warning to change Period for prior period Journals:



Journal Entry Form after Personalizations:

When opening the form, the following note gets displayed:



Journal Entry Form after Personalization (Note - Voucher, Budget not displayed and Description in Upper Case: