General LedgerOverviewOracle General Ledger enables global data management; it is a comprehensive financial management solution that dramatically enhances financial controls, data collection, information access, and financial reporting throughout your enterprise. 

New FeaturesInterface Data TransformerThe Interface Data Transformer is a user-friendly tool that facilitates the import of data from external feeder systems into Oracle General Ledger. It takes data from external feeder systems that have been loaded into the GL_INTERFACE table and transforms it into the proper format for import into Oracle General Ledger based on rules that you define.The Interface Data Transformer offers a variety of ways to transform data in the GL_INTERFACE table. You can use string functions to parse and concatenate substrings, reference lookup tables to convert one value into another, or call PL/SQL functions to perform sophisticated transformations. You can even define conditions to control when transformation rules are applied and validate the results of the transformation through value sets and lookup tables. This flexibility makes it easier for you to integrate non-Oracle systems into Oracle General Ledger.

Open Integration with External ProcessingOracle General Ledger now includes a number of business events to allow you to customize Oracle General Ledger processes without modifying the standard code. You can configure each event to trigger a notification, message, or other process to perform additional data validation or enrichment, for example.The Oracle Workflow Business Event System is an application service that leverages the Oracle Advanced Queuing (AQ) infrastructure to communicate business events among systems within an enterprise as well as between enterprises. The Business Event System consists of the Event Manager, which lets you register subscriptions to events that are significant to your systems, and event activities, which let you model business events within workflow process. For more information, please refer to documentation on the Oracle Workflow product.Oracle General Ledger now includes the following business events:• Account Disabled: This event occurs when an account is disabled in the GL Accounts form or by the Inherit Segment Value Attributes program.• Period Opened: This event occurs when a period is opened for the first time.• Period Closed: This event occurs when a period is closed.• Period Re-opened: This event occurs when a period is opened after it was previously closed.• Journal Import Started: This event occurs when a journal import process is initiated.• Journal Import Completed: This event occurs when a journal import process is completed.• Posting Completed: This event occurs when a posting process is completed.

XBRL Financial ReportingOracle General Ledger now supports eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). You can create financial reports in XBRL format using the Financial Statement Generator (FSG). XBRL is an open specification for software that uses eXtensible Markup Language (XML) data tags to standardize financial reporting across industries, regulatory bodies, and geographies. You can link FSG reports to XBRL taxonomies, enabling the automatic creation of XBRL instance documents. The ability to create reports in XBRL allows you to prepare, publish and exchange financial information across all software formats and technologies in a consistent standards-based manner for easy distribution, analysis, and comparison. 

Currency Rates ManagerThe Currency Rates Manager presents a new interface for you to easily manage your daily and historical rates. You can quickly upload and download currency rates via spreadsheets, or you can enter and maintain rates using the new web-based user interface. For daily conversion rates, you can automatically upload daily rates from a spreadsheet or manage rates using the web-based interface. Currency Rates Manager can even automatically calculate the cross rates between two or more currencies to ensure consistency in daily conversion rates across currencies. For example, if you define rates from U.S. dollars to euros, and from U.S. dollars to Japanese Yen, the Currency Rates Manager can calculate the cross rate between euros and yen, and the inverse rate from yen to euros. This ensures that intercompany transactions across multiple currencies are accounted for with consistent rates, minimizing the effect of exchange rate differences during the intercompany elimination process. Automatic generation of cross rates also reduces the number of currency combinations and rates that you must enter manually, thus enabling you to work more efficiently. For historical rates, you can automatically upload rates from a spreadsheet, or you can automatically download rates into a spreadsheet. The ability to download historical rates into a spreadsheet enables you to modify the rates if necessary, and copy them from one set of books to another for ease of maintenance. Added security is provided to ensure that you can only upload historical rates to periods that are open.

Secondary Tracking SegmentYou can now specify a segment in your chart of accounts as a secondary tracking segment, in addition to the balancing segment, to perform more detailed analysis within Oracle General Ledger. The secondary tracking segment is used in the revaluation, translation, and fiscal year-end close processes. The system will automatically maintain unrealized gain/loss, retained earnings, and cumulative translation adjustments by unique pairs of balancing segment and secondary tracking segment values.

MRC Revaluation Against Primary CurrencyYou now have more flexibility when revaluing balances in Multiple Reporting Currencies (MRC) Reporting sets of books. Instead of revaluing the MRC reporting book’s balances against the primary book’s entered currency amounts, you can revalue against the primary set of books’ functional currency balances. Applying this revaluation methodology in your reporting sets of books enables you to adhere to the Translation standards of #SFAS52 (which can also be satisfied by Oracle General Ledger translation functionality), while maintaining transaction level detail in your reporting currency at the same time.

Multilingual Support For FSG Amount TypesMultilingual support has been added to the Financial Statement Generator (FSG) amount types. Amount types, such as PTD and YTD, can now be displayed in the installed language. This is particularly useful for global companies using multiple language installations on a single instance to view amount types in the language of their choice when creating reports.

FSG Reports Name Display in Concurrent ManagerThe Financial Statement Generator (FSG) report name is now displayed when you review your concurrent requests. This allows you to quickly and easily identify your FSG reports in the Concurrent Manager without having to view each report’s output. 

Continue Step-Down Allocation OptionStep-Down Allocation Sets was first introduced in Release 11i to allow you to automatically generate journal batches in a specific order so that the posted results of one step are used in the subsequent step. Previously, Step-Down Allocations stopped processing if a step did not generate a journal entry. This required users to manually generate the subsequent batches. Now, you can control whether a Step-Down Allocation process should continue processing even if one of the steps did not generate a journal entry. By setting a new profile option, you can instruct Step-Down Allocation Sets to continue processing to the end of the Allocation Set. 

Open Period/Posting/Translation/Summary Accounts ProgramCompatibility Among Sets of BooksYou can now open periods, run translation, post journals, and maintain your summary accounts simultaneously when these programs are initiated in different sets of books. This significantly improves performance for companies using multiple sets of books in a single database instance. Instead of having to wait for each program to complete before the next one can begin, you can run the following programs in parallel among different sets of books: Open Period, Posting, Translation, Add/Delete Summary Accounts, Incremental Add/Delete Summary Templates, and Maintain Summary Templates. 

Journal Import Group By Effective DatesJournal Import now provides an option to automatically group journal lines into journal entries based on effective dates. This functionality was previously only available to customers using average balance processing. Now this option is available to all customers and is particularly useful for those who use Daily Business Intelligence. 

Presentation Quality FSG Reports Using XML PublisherFinancial Statement Generator (FSG) is now integrated with XML Publisher so that you can use the convenient formatting features of a word processing application to design the layout of your FSG reports. Some of the report formatting options include changing font characteristics, adding graphical images, inserting headers and footers, creating borders, reordering columns, and supporting an unlimited number of columns in your reports. This enables you to create boardroom-quality financial reports directly from the general ledger, which ensures the integrity and auditability of your financial information.  

Journal Import SRS ProgramYou can now submit the journal import program from Standard Request Submission (SRS) to take advantage of the SRS features, such as grouping journal import runs into request sets and scheduling journal import to run automatically. Using request sets and scheduling allow multiple journal import requests to run simultaneously, and also allow you to control the sequence in which journal import should run during the period close. 

Streamlined Core Oracle Financials WorkbenchesIn this release, Oracle Financials improved the format and usability of workbenches in five core products to streamline transaction entry and management. The user interface in key screens was enhanced to reduce the number of keystrokes required to enter and manage transactions, and to make access to associated transaction details quick and intuitive. Screens were consolidated and made larger to display more data at once using fewer windows. While primarily cosmetic, these enhancements will improve speed and ease of use for all types of users who enter and manage these key financial transactions. Oracle General Ledger enhanced the Enter Journals Workbench with these improvements.