A few GL R12 Ledger FAQ

Here are a few questions about R12 I have been asked a number of times, and if a few people asked me, I am guessing that even more people are searching from Google, (or maybe even Yahoo or Bing) looking for answers.

1) What is a Ledger?  What happened to my Sets of Books?

Your 11i Set of Books is now an R12 ledger, any 11i sets of books you had will be a ledger after you run the R12 upgrade.

2) Why did you change the name?

I am not fully aware of the history of the decision, but a Ledger is a much better description and matches the business terminology more closely.  Also with the introduction of Ledger Sets in R12, we’d have had a clumsy  ‘Set of Books Sets’ term to deal with.

3) Does the new table gl_ledgers replace gl_sets_of_books table.

Yes.

4) So what about my custom reports that query gl_sets_of_books table or gl_sets_of_books_v view

No need to change those.  For backward compatibility we created a view gl_sets_of_books which references the gl_ledgers table.  gl_sets_of_books_v is also modified to reference gl_ledgers table.

5) What happens to the sob_id, are these primary keys preserved?

Yes, the sob_id from 11i will become the ledger_id you see in R12

6) I see Ledger_id in the gl_interface table, do I have to update all my feeder programs that write to that to populate ledger_id instead of sob_id?

No.  GL_INTERFACE is backward compatible, the sob_id column is still there and ledger_id is optional, if Journal Import does not find any value in ledger_id it will use the sob_id

I have not got into any of the powerful new functionality that is introduced as part of the Ledger Architecture, or discussed what you can do with Ledger Sets, those items are for another day.  If you want to read about those now you should look at the document below.

Oracle Financials and Oracle Procurement Functional Upgrade Guide: Release 11i to Release 12 (Part No. B31543-01)

My name is David and I used to be a blogger

So many bloggers are blogging less and spending more time pushing out 140 character packets of info on Twitter. I have no problem with Twitter, I blogged about it and hang out there now and then, but for me it is no replacement for blogging. My lack activity here has nothing to do with Twitter as it is for Justin from Oracle tech net (for the record, I think Justin tweets plenty of really good info), my silence is due to two factors.

1. Lack of time – busy job at Oracle, arrival of our 3rd and 4th children, spending summer in Europe, moving house…
2. I can’t discuss my day job – I have the pleasure of managing a development team building truly amazing and ground breaking Fusion products. Downside is we can’t talk much about it yet as it isn’t released.

Regarding the second point, I should still blog about R12, all the reasons I started this blog are still valid, but I find it increasingly hard to switch gears from Fusion to R12 (maybe something to do with age?).

As for lack of time this will always be a problem.  I have tried to respond to comments and keep up reading some of the other great oracle blogs, but only now whilst starting out on a 22 hour flight to India do I feel I have a little time to think about blogging… So when I next get connected I can hit publish and I am a blogger again.

Financial Services Accounting Hub(FSAH) is now called Financials Accounting Hub (FAH)

The Financial Services moniker was always misleading because there is nothing specific to the Financial Services industry in the product, now this has been fixed and the official name is Financials Accounting Hub. So that one is cleared up.

I have had a number of people asking for more details on this product, you can start with Oracle’s data sheet or the link above to the oracle.com FAH site. There is a nice article introducing FSAH and SLA on the Oracle Consulting Solutions site by Sven van Leemput, this is a a good read. There is also presentation on slideshare from capgemini and kpn telecom about their experience with the Accounting Hub, nice to see some practical examples, even if it is at a high level. I have not done a metalink search recently, but I am sure there is plenty of information there too for those with access to metalink and of course there are the OTN forums.

Anyone else have any good sources of information – please share them via the comments.

Now with threaded comments

I have enabled threaded comments on the blog, which should help make conversations easier to read and follow. Thanks WordPress for this feature. I’ve been surprised, delighted and more recently unable to find time to keep up with the number of comments on the blog.  Some stats:

I have 75 posts and 430 Approved comments

Average of almost 6 comments per post

Most active poster (after me) is Jake

Average of just over one comment per day since the blog started

Simplicity is the key to Usability

Reading Meg’s post on the Talented Apps blog I was inspired to write a quick blog post rather than leave a long comment. Meg talks about how we can strive to improve the usability of our applications, something that we need to continually work on. We did what we thought was the right thing with our AGIS out of the box in R12, but this was really just scratching the surface, there is always room for improvement and we need to constantly reduce the complexity we present to users.

John Maeda has an excellent book and companion website on the laws of simplicity, which is a must read. I have lent the book out to a lot of people and I can’t remember who has it now, but if it’s you and you’re reading this – please return it! This book lays out a set of laws that all design should adhere to in order to reduce complexity and having these ideas in the front of your mind is going to help guide you in the right direction when working on designs.

It is a challenge to create a set of complex applications, but the real challenge is to keep the complexity hidden giving a simple user experience and this is where I believe applications vendors will provide most value going forward.  We simply need to reduce the complexity (and hence cost) associated with owning applications without sacrificing any functionality – this is not easy, but I like a challenge and fortunately the people I work with do too.

What a difference a year makes

Written by David Haimes

This blog turned one year old this week, so a short review of the year is in order.

I started this blog after Open World 2007, mostly as a way to put answers ‘out there’ to the questions I was being asked multiple times during the conference. I was hoping to do a couple of posts a week and have managed a total of 74, or 1.4 per week, which considering I have got a lot more responsibility at work than 12 months ago I’m pleased with. Most of all I enjoyed the conversations, there have been 400 comments including one from Charles Phillips (indirectly) but I didn’t hear form Larry when I posted a picture of his Yacht which incidentally gave me by far my highest day of hits, the majority coming from Digg.

What has pleasantly surprised me about blogging is how much I have learned in the past year from the comments on the blogs and from following the plethora of other excellent Oracle bloggers that a year ago I didn’t really know existed. I’ve also spent a lot of time on twitter, following a lot of interesting, entertaining, knowledgeable and helpful people many of whom are also bloggers.

So all in all a good first year and now I look forward to the next one and wonder what the stars have in store for me over the next 12 months…

http://flickr.com/photos/jpstanley/1520809494/

One Laptop per Child – the perfect gift

XO Laptop

Written by David Haimes

I blogged some time ago about the One Laptop per Child Foundation and how myself and others had taken part in the give one get one program last year. I think the XO laptop is an amazing machine and more importantly I fully support the goals of the foundation.

I got an email and a message to thank me for giving the laptop and as it suggests I will tell 100 people (I hope I have that many readers) and be taking my XO laptop to work this week so I can show people the machine and spread the word about the excellent work the foundation is doing – feel free to drop by my office to check it out. If you want to give then you can do this at www.amazon.com/xo

FSAH and AGIS Intercompany Implementation thoughts

Written by David Haimes

As Intercompany transactions are very likely to cross systems they are a good candidate for integration in a ‘Hub’ of some sort.

In R12 the Financials Services Accounting Hub (FSAH) allows integration of third party systems to Oracle and is incredibly powerful and flexible.

Let’s use a simple example:

Company A and B both use two different Ledgers. A Sales Invoice is issued by Company A (to Company B) for $5,000

The accounting needs to be created as below, they need to be booked with the same accounting date in the same period.

In Company A

Debit Intercompany AR $5,000
Credit Intercompany sales $5,000

In Company B

Debit Expense or inventory (per content), $5,000
Credit Intercompany AP, $5,000

So there’s a number of options that come to mind (in no particular order).

1) Using Oracle Accounting Hub you can account for transactions form third party systems, it uses the Subledger accounting engine to process accounting events defined for the third party system. If your invoice systems are third party applications, you could create 2 events (one for each company/ledger/party to the transaction) for the sales invoice and get the full accounting out of the single system integration.

2) Enter these transactions in AGIS, the specific accounting will be entered/generated and approvals from company A and B obtained before AGIS either books it direct to GL or generates the Invoice for company A and B if required.

3) It may not be ideal to force users to navigate to a different screen (or change some import process, EDI, XML feed etc) to issue Intercompany invoices from other invoices as in 2) above. So continue to enter in your regular sales invoice system but run a process which detects an invoice is Intercompany and cancels it, then generates a transaction for it in AGIS (via the Open Interfaces) or FSAH.

I don’t think any one of these is right for all situations, detailed analysis of the particular implementation environment and requirements needs to be done to figure out the best approach. If you have any thoughts, better suggestions or experience then please share them in the comments.

Quiet Period Over

I was hoping that I’d find time to blog regular updates during the Open World week, but this proved a lot more difficult than I anticipated. There was simply so much going on during the days and evenings plus I had to continue with my day job; building Fusion GL and Intercompany Applications (that’s the day job I can’t blog a lot about). So to summarize my Open World, I saw a lot of people, talked a lot about Oracle, presented an Intercompany Session, spent some time on the DEMO booth and was exhausted at the end of it all.

I was going to attempt to write a review of the week, but there’s so much to say and so many people to remember to give a mention that now is not the time. I will focus on one particular area, the DEMO grounds; working here is IMO the hardest job at Open World

Is oracle.com cool again?

After last year’s Oracle Open World I asked if Oracle was cool again and that post was picked up by eye on oracle and created quite a bit of debate. Now we are approaching Open World again and I see Oracle has put it’s mix social network front and center taking over the oracle.com home page with the Oracle Listens campaign. Already @monkchips thinks it’s cool.

Not as cool as google? I don’t want to go there again. In fact there is a huge amount of buzz on twitter from many people, Oracle and non Oracle alike. I like the cynical take by @jknoll

I don’t think Oracle has run out of ideas, I just think they are admitting that customers and partners might have some equally good ideas that we should listen to.

I’m browsing through the ideas and there’s an amount of noise as you might expect, but there seems to be a new idea submitted about every five minutes. That amount of feedback is immense.  Credit to the Oracle marketing team for driving this, I see Justin is answering a lot of the ideas right now and other Oracle folks are jumping in too.  Expect to hear a lot more about this next week.

My opinion is this is a bold move and Oracle has convinced me its cool again this year. Do you agree or think it is just a gimmick? Make your voice heard in the comments.