Accounting and Finance Shared Services have typically been
formed in large multinational organizations with the objectives of cost
efficiency, standardization and operational effectiveness towards the customers
within the organization. Some of the business processes handled by F&A SS
are:
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Procure to Pay
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Order to Cash
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Record to Report
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Financial Planning, Consolidation, Budgeting and
Forecasting
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Treasury and Cash Management
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Audit and Control
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Analytics on the financial data
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Financial closing and Financial statement
preparation
Over the periods; instead of merely being a cost center, shared
services are emerging as strategic business partners- offering innovation and
value addition to various business functions. The extended objectives of the
F&A Shared services include extensive analytics and reporting.
My previous blog had stated the Oracle Fusion capability for
Procure-to-Pay cycle. It can be accessed here.
The General Accounting- Record to Report Cycle,
Consolidation, Reporting and Analytics- requirements of a Multinational,
Multi-GAAP organization; using best-of-breed or legacy applications for
sub-ledger transactions; can be catered by Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub (FAH)
and Fusion General Ledger from Fusion Financials suite. The Financial Reporting
Center of FAH involves embedded multi-dimensional Essbase cubes and offers
state-of-the-art reporting and analytics which enables multi-dimensional
analysis of various transactional and accounting data.
FAH can integrate and utilize the capabilities of number of
reporting tools like Oracle BI Publisher, Oracle Hyperion Financial Reporting
Studio, Fusion Edition and Oracle Business Transactional Business Intelligence.
Drill down up to journal and transaction level is possible from any of the
reports generated out of FAH which enables strong audit trail and control.
To record the transactions from Oracle/Non-Oracle
applications and convert it into accounting entries, FAH offers a highly
configurable rule transformation engine that generates the accounting entries,
validates and transforms it into accounting journals. The rules can be
configured based on the attributes of the transaction. For example Tax Accounts
could be determined based on the country of transaction.
Different rules can be configured for different divisions
complying with the local accounting regulations. FAH also captures additional
attributes of the transaction for reference and reporting purposes.
Some of the salient features of Fusion reporting are:
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Fixed format reports and local statutory reports
can be created using Oracle BI Publisher and Financial Reporting
Studio/Workspace.
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Interactive financial reporting and drill down
can be achieved either by Oracle BI Publisher, Oracle transactional Business
Intelligence, Account Monitor and Account inspector
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Seeded BI reports are delivered in OTBI
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Live and interactive reporting with multiple
output options like HTML, Excel, PDF; available in Smart View
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Drill down of the report information upto
detailed journal and sub-ledger transaction level using Account Inspector
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Bursting option available with BI Publisher to
split the report and email or print them as per output option selected
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Functionality to embed charts and graphs in the
report
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Drag and Drop report grid and dimensions
FAH also offers features for Budgeting and Budget Reporting,
Consolidation and Inter-company processing. The advantage of FAH for an Account
and Finance Shared Service specifically lies in its fitness to be integrated
with diverse sub-ledger applications and providing robust accounting platform
along with impressive reporting and analytics solution.