What is in Oracle Financials? – Enterprise Resource Planning – Simple Guide

The financial applications of the Oracle ERP suite of applications are the General Ledger and the sub-ledgers. The financial applications discussed in this book include the following (the common shorthand abbreviation is shown in parentheses):

General Ledger (GL)
Accounts Payable (AP)
Accounts Receivable (AR)
Fixed Assets (FA)
Projects (PA)

In addition, the Inventory (INV), and Purchasing (PO) applications can make journal entries into the General Ledger, but these applications are more properly classified as manufacturing or distribution applications.

The General Ledger provides the capability for multiple sets of books and supports complex enterprise organizations. The General Ledger hosts the sub-ledgers and provides the definition of the chart of accounts structure, a fiscal calendar, and a currency. Because the GL and FA applications can support multiple sets of books and the other financial applications can support multiple organizations, you can set up separate and fully functional accounting systems for each of your business organizations.

General Ledger

The General Ledger (GL) application is the foundation for a full-featured accounting system. The GL receives journal entries from the Oracle subledgers and has an open interface for incoming journal entries from non-Oracle systems. We discuss this application in detail in Chapter 11, “Using Oracle General Ledger.” Although not strictly part of the GL application, the Application Desktop Integrator (ADI for GL enables you to perform reporting, journal entry, and budgeting functions while using an Excel spreadsheet interface. The GL application provides you with the following major business functions:

The capability to create, change, approve, reverse, and post manual and electronic actual, statistical, and budget journal entries
The capability to create and update budgets
The capability to establish budgetary control and online funds checking
Accounting for multiple companies
Consolidation of multiple sets of books
Financial reporting writing through the Financial Statement Generator (FSG) and the Application Desktop Interface (ADI)
Fiscal calendar and chart of accounts maintenance
Currency transactions, conversion, translation, and revaluation

Payables

Use Oracle Payables (AP) to control and process your payments for purchases of goods and services, employee expense reports, taxes, rents, and so forth. The release 11i version of this application provides two user workbench environments for invoice and payment processing. The manual invoice entry screens can be set up for high-speed data entry. The AP application is a subledger to the GL, and it is tightly integrated and shares data with the purchasing application. There are 20 general application steps and 27 specific AP steps to set up and configure the AP application in 11i, and we discuss the following features of AP in Chapter 12, “Using Oracle Payables”:

The capability to set up and maintain supplier records
Electronic and manual invoice entry
Expense report processing
The capability to create and maintain invoice holds and payment schedules
Cash disbursements for checks and electronic transfers
Accounting distributions
Two-, three-, and four-way invoice matching and validation with purchase orders and receipts
Sales tax and VAT processing
Expense and disbursements journal entries to GL
Foreign currency transactions
Bank transaction reconciliation

Receivables

Use the Oracle Receivables (AR) application to recognize revenue, process cash receipts, and collect money that is owed to you. A user workbench is provided for each of these three functions. In addition, there are manual and automatic versions of programs to support billing and cash receipt transactions. The AR application is a subledger to the GL, and it is closely integrated and shares data with the Order Management (OM) application. There are 53 setup steps to configure the release 11i AR application. You will find a discussion of these functions in Chapter 13, “Using Oracle Receivables”:

The capability to set up and maintain customer records
The capability to process cash receipt transactions
The capability to support collection activities with call history, statements, and dunning letters
The capability to create and maintain revenue and adjustment transactions
Accounting distributions
Revenue and cash receipt journal entries to GL
Foreign currency transactions
The capability to archive and purge

Fixed Assets

The Fixed Assets (FA) application can be set up to maintain asset records and process transactions using three workbenches for assets, mass additions, and tax. FA is a subledger to the GL. There are 32 setup steps to configure the release 11i FA application, and I discuss this application in Chapter 14, “Using Oracle Assets”:

The capability to create, maintain, and retire fixed asset records
Asset physical inventory
The capability to compute and maintain depreciation calculations
Depreciation and asset transaction journal entries to GL
Tax accounting
Capital budgeting
Asset listings and construction in progress reports

Projects

The Oracle Projects solution provides a suite of highly integrated applications enabling your organization the capability to capitalize on global opportunities, and I discuss this application in Chapter 15, “Using Oracle Projects.” Oracle Projects (formerly known as Project Accounting) enables your organization to set up projects and tasks and assign related expenditures. Costs can be burdened and translated to Revenue, Billing, and Capital items when required. One of the major benefits of using Oracle Projects is the capability for a project-oriented business to manage its projects with a proactive approach. Projects offers detailed online and standard reporting, including the following features:

Defines projects and tasks (WBS) and enables the control of posting transactions to projects
Cost and revenue budget entry and maintenance, tracks budget versions
Records transactions in detail and tracks expenditures via Timecards, Expense Reports, Usages, Commitments, and Supplier Invoices;
Interfaces these transactions between Oracle Applications
Allocation functionality from costs within the Projects application (input/output) or General Ledger accounts (input)
Capital project maintenance, CIP transactions, and the capability to interface assets to Oracle Assets
Tracks customer contracts as Agreements, which are funded by projects
Revenue and Invoice Generation with various methods, including Time and Materials, Cost Plus, and Percent Complete;
Fully integrated with the General Ledger (Revenue) and Accounts Receivable (Invoices) modules
Multi-currency support for your customer invoices and expenditures
Cross Charging, Inter Company, and Inter Project Billing
Detailed audit trail when data is interfaced between Oracle Applications
Reports cost and revenue