Presented by Amira Morcos

This session is an overview of what's coming with Financials 9.1.

Overview

As expected, much of what was highlighted was how the Financials developers were able to utilize features of PeopleTools 8.5 to extend the products in this area. Here are the themes

• Increase productivity
• Accelerate business performance
• Lower cost of ownership

These themes were discussed in terms of the following processes and goals for Financials 9.1

• Improve period close processing
• Maximaize cash
• Automate compliance and controls

One thing to note is that there was that a lot of the content of this session discussed the initiatives that required effort of the financials developers. Many of the things that came for free from the tools (but didn't require much effort) was not discussed much in this session (but the PeopleTools 8.5 Customer Perspectives session discussed a few other areas that I think are also pertinent to the adoption of Financials 9.1

Period Close

The first area discussed after the overview was the improvements to the period close. Before getting into the features and functions, it's important to note first the important news regarding this functionality and the infrastructure that supports it. The Period Close is built using a feature in the Enterprise Portal called "Collaborative Workspaces". This allows content to be pulled together, discussions to be attributed, and status to be tracked for all activity for a business process. Initially, I was thinking that this would be a separately licensable product. However, this functionality will be made available as part of your GL license. In addition, instead of offering a limited use license of the Portal Infrastructure for this fucntionality, Oracle will be allowing PeopleSoft customers to create collaborative workspaces for other processes themselves. The limitation appears to be that you cannot create your own portal (versus extending an application you're already licensing which is allowed).

With that behind us, here are some of the features that are highlighted

• Exclusion based allocations
• Collaborative workspace
• Configurable milestones. Action items (configurable).
• Documents and discussions. Discussions are controlled and auditable.
• Ping people to have real-time discussions.
• close monitor.
• incremental consolicdations - Save results of one node as you iterate and go up or down the consolidation tree.
• multi-dimensional analysis - Use of Essbase to analyze across the ledger.
• improved reconciliation with subsystems - GL to subsystem recon (currently exists). Direct reconciliation online between GL and others (inluding items not journal generated)

Automated compliance and controls

Here are the features

• approval framework for journal processing
• transaction level security - Control 2 chartfields from a security perspective. Chartfield security.
• financials audit trail - ability to identify which event you want to track. For example, unpost. track status with log and online inquiry that shows activity. Includes audit archiving rules.
• simplified project costing integraiton
• attach supporting documentation to finaicailal transactions. Now in financials application. Search on journals that have attachments.
• Essbase integration. GL 9.1 will include template with Essabse integration.

Summary

After the session, I had the opportunity to talk the head of Financials Development to catch up. I made sure to tell him that what they've been doing is very impressive, and that I couldn't wait to get my hands on Financials 9.1. He informally told me that things are going well on the development side... 2 builds to go!!

Labels: Events, Financials