Intercompany Segments in the Vision Demo

One of the most common questions I get asked is

‘Do we need to define an Intercompany segment in our chart of accounts?’

The answer is:

‘We do not require an Intercompany Segment, but we still recommend defining one’.

Even if you do not have a great deal of intercompany activity at the moment, it is worth having one defined now as it is difficult to add one later.

Another question I have been asked is

‘Can I define the same segment to be my balancing segment (aka Company Code) and my Intercompany segment?’

The answer I give here is

‘I would very strongly advise against this, you will not get the benefits of an Intercompany segment by doing this’

For example, if we have a chart of accounts structure with 3 segments:

Company – Natural Account – Intercompany

Company Segment has the Balancing Segment qualifier and Intercompany has the Intercompany Qualifier.

We have three values for the company segment, 01, 02, 03 – they represent the Legal Entities. We have set up the natural account 555555 as our Intercompany payables and receivables account.

So if we have a journal like this entered in GL

01.789789.00 Dr $1,000

02.978978.00 Cr $1,000

Intercompany balancing will be called during posting and we will get two extra intercompany balancing lines added to balance the journal by balancing segment.

01.555555.02 Cr $1,000
02.555555.01 Dr $1,000

Balancing populates the Intercompany segment with the value of the trading partner to show who this intercompany activity is between, we can now easily run segment based reports and determin the intercompany activity between 01 and 02 and 02 and 01, ensure they eliminate and all that good stuff.

So what happens if you set the same segment to be both your balancing segment and your intercompany segment? Essentially nothing, intercompany balancing would detect this situation and not try to insert the value of the trading partner into the intercompany segment.

You may notice that in the Vision demo instances there are some chart of accounts with the same segment as both the Intercompany and Balancing segment(Vision Operations is one example!), this does not mean it is recommended. For R12, the Apps Demo Services team (Max Melbin and Günter Wemhöner) did a great job creating new chart of accounts, ledgers in the Vision database which are used in the R12 financials demo flows. The Ledger names they created start with ‘SSC’ if you want to take a look.

Author: David Haimes

I'm Senior Director in the Oracle Research and Development Organization, with close to 20 years working in various roles on the development of the Financial Management product suite.  Since the summer of 2016 my focus is exclusively on working with customers and longer-term design work, particularly around next-generation functional and technical architecture. My task is to figure out NOW what the financial management system of the next 3, 5 or more years should look like and start working toward it.  At the moment the majority of my time is spent working on Blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), leading the effort for all of SaaS applications.  I'm also interested in AI, Machine Learning and new UX and interaction paradigms such as chat bots. I started out in Oracle UK and found my way out to Oracle's Redwood Shores, California HQ in May 2000.  My previous role was product owner for Fusion Accounting Hub, General Ledger, Intercompany and Legal Entity products in Oracle Fusion Financials and eBusiness Suite General Ledger. I have also worked on EMEA Globalizations, Federal and Public Sector Financials, XML Payments and a variety of projects on other products down the years.

17 thoughts on “Intercompany Segments in the Vision Demo”

  2. Pingback: Intercompany Segment in Secondary Ledgers « David Haimes Oracle Intercompany Financials Blog

  3. how to define the accounting key flex field in GL?

    (in vision we will chose accounting flex field from list of values but in new sever how to define accounting key flex field for GL)

    Like

    Reply

  4. Hi David,

    This article is informative.

    It would be great if you could eloborate on “…intercompany balancing would detect this situation and not try to insert the value of the trading partner into the intercompany segment….”

    If the system does not insert the value then what values does the intercompany segment carry ?

    Like

    Reply

  5. In the situation where the balancing segment is the same as the Balancing Segment then we preserve the balancing segment value, rather than overwrite it with the Intercompany value as this would be wrong.

    The point is having the same segmetn marked as blancing and intercompany makes no funcitonal sense

    Like

    Reply

    1. David,

      A couple asked me recently on the top three advantages of having an I/C segment versus not having one. Can you provide a quick list with a brief description?

      Like

      Reply

  6. Hi David,

    Can I have some useful tips while defining the chart of account structure for a commercial bank. How, to handle the Central Monetary Agency reporting through Oracle? Is it advisible to have CMA code as a segment value?

    Raman A V

    Like

    Reply

  8. Hi David,

    You mention that the most important reason for having an intercompany segment defined is for reconciliation, but doesn’t AGIS have functionality for reconciliation that would make the segment unnecessary?

    Thanks

    Like

    Reply

    1. AGIS does have reconciliation reports. However, if you want to see the activity between each pair of trading partners (in my exammple above 01 to 02, 01 to 03, 02 to 01, etc.) then you either need to define a specific and unique natural account for each pair of LE / Company codes OR use the intercompany segment.

      Like

      Reply

  9. Good way of explaining, and nice post to get data on
    the topic of my presentation subject, which i am going to
    convey in institution of higher education.

    Like

    Reply

  10. If you add an additional field (ie Division) and make that the balancing segment can you still have the company values as the Intercompany value set?
    01.102.789789.00 Dr $1,000

    01.103.978978.00 Cr $1,000 with these being your balancing entries?

    01.102.555555.01 Cr $1,000

    01.103.555555.01 Dr $1,000
    Thanks

    Like

    Reply

  11. Hi

    Thank you for sharing the information. We have a scenario where we are going to have over 20 ledgers, implementation in a large group of companies, while keeping the same COA for all ledgers. In this scenario, what are the pros and cons of having an intercompany segment, or will it be mandatory?

    Like

    Reply

    1. An Intercompany segment is always advisable. It will help you easily track the trading activity between the trading partners, weather is is within a ledger or across a ledger. You need to track this for reconciliation and eliminations.

      Like

      Reply

  12. hi David ,

    If we have Ledger A with LE A and ledger B with LE B , in order to have inter company accounting you have mentioned that we need to use AGIS , so in this case do we need to have inter company segment ?

    if yes , will it mean only for reporting and tracking purpose , if its only for reporting then can i not use multiple natural accounts if the transactions are less .

    Like

    Reply

    1. You don’t NEED an Intercompany segment, but we strongly recommend you have one in your chart of accounts. You say you can use multiple natural accounts, but over time this can become difficult to manage and an intercompany segment is more scalable should transaction volume and complexity increase over time, or if you have more than one LEgal Entity in a ledger in the future which is quite likely.
      On the other hand, I do not see a good reason to NOT include the Intercompany segment.

      Like

      Reply

Leave a comment