What is Oracle Financials?

Oracle Financials is a powerful and dynamic Financial Reporting Tool.

Oracle Financials has become the choice for blue-chips companies, multi-nationals and multi-
sites organisations.This is an E-business Suite, fully integrated and heavy-duty application of
more than 70 software modules tailored-made for:

• Financial management;
• Internet procurement;
• Business intelligence;
• Supply chain management;
• Manufacturing;
• Project systems;
• Human recourses; and
• Sales and service management.

These products and modules are available for mainframes, minicomputers, personal
computers, network computers and personal digital assistants, enabling organizations to integrate
different computers, different operating systems, different networks, and even different database
management systems, into a single, unified computing and information resource.

Oracle Financials was developed by the Oracle Corporation, the leading developers and
marketer of integrated line of software products for information and database management,
decision support and office automation. Oracle Corporation offers its database, tools and
application products, along with other consulting, education and support services.

Oracle Financials products provide organizations with solutions to a wide range of long-
and short-term accounting system issues. Regardless of the size of the business, Oracle
Financials can meet accounting management demands with:

• Oracle Assets: Ensures that an organization's property and equipment investment is

accurate and that the correct asset tax accounting strategies are chosen.
• Oracle General Ledger: Offers a complete solution to journal entry, budgeting,
allocations, consolidation, and financial reporting needs.
• Oracle Inventory: Helps an organization make better inventory decisions by minimizing
stock and maximizing cash flow.
• Oracle Order Entry: Provides organizations with a sophisticated order entry system for
managing customer commitments.
• Oracle Payables: Lets an organization process more invoices with fewer staff members
and tighter controls. Helps save money through maximum discounts, bank float, and
prevention of duplicate payment.
• Oracle Personnel: Improves the management of employee- related issues by retaining
and making available every form of personnel data.
• Oracle Purchasing: Improves buying power, helps negotiate bigger discounts,
eliminates paper flow, increases financial controls, and increases productivity.
• Oracle Receivables:. Improves cash flow by letting an organization process more
payments faster, without off-line research. Helps correctly account for cash, reduce
outstanding receivables, and improve collection effectiveness.
• Oracle Revenue Accounting Gives an organization timely and accurate revenue and
flexible commissions reporting.
• Oracle Sales Analysis: Allows for better forecasting, planning. and reporting of sales
information.

What is the most important module in Oracle Financials?

The General Ledger (GL) module is the basis for all other Oracle Financial
modules. All other modules provide information to it. If you implement Oracle Financials, you
should switch your current GL system first.GL is relatively easy to implement. You should go live
with it first to give your implementation team a chance to be familiar with Oracle Financials.

Implementation of Oracle Financial

This is a summary of the tasks that a typical implementation of an Oracle

Financial suite involves:

1. Project Initiation - taking instruction from and approval from the client;
2. Definition of the project's scope and boundary - in terms of overall structure and
costs;
3. Feasibility Study - involving a business plan, organization’s operations and
management chart flow;
4. Requirement Capture / Redefinition - review of draft implementation report and
planning;
5. Getting Requirement Specification signed off - Implementation report and processes
approved;
6. Analysis - Operational and management workflow-enable processes set-up guide and
documentation;
7. Design - Setting the flex fields, segment values, chart of accounts, accounting calendar,
currency, etc;
8. Build and Developed;
9. Testing;
10. Go live - competition
11. Support and advice - post implementation.

Oracle Financial Analyzer

Oracle® Financial Analyzer is a complete application for financial reporting, analysis,

budgeting, and planning. Integrating a central source of management data with powerful analytical
tools, Financial Analyzer allows businesses to make, manage, and measure decisions across the
enterprise. The system provides businesses with everything they need to control costs, analyze
performance, evaluate opportunities, and formulate future direction. Oracle Financial Analyzer is
part of the Oracle E-Business Suite, an integrated set of applications, which is designed to
transform your business to an e-business.

Distributed Budgeting and Forecasting

Financial Analyzer handles budget and forecast creation, review, modification, and communication
within the same system. The product coordinates and streamlines the budgeting process, whether
organizations use top-down, bottom-up, or mixed budgeting methodologies. Financial Analyzer can allocate
budget objectives from high levels--such as quarter and division--to lower levels, such as month and
department. Users can copy last year's actual into this year's budget and grow certain balances by specified
percentages or amounts. Volumes can be entered to drive costs, or marketing expenses to forecast revenues.
A number of data collection tools, including spreadsheets and Web browsers, enable controlled acquisition of
budget data. Users can store slices of the corporate financial database on personal computers to take their
budgets and forecasts on the road. At the close of the budget cycle, the finalized budget is consolidated to
provide enterprise access, and is locked to prohibit additional modification.
Create detailed salary and expenditure budgets with built-in functions, like spread, copy, and grow.

Comprehensive Reporting and Analysis

The power behind Financial Analyzer is the Express® multidimensional data model, which stores
data in the way that managers think about their business.
Financial Analyzer leverages the Express Web Agent to provide instant, secure access to
multidimensional data over corporate intranets and the World Wide Web. Key information may be viewed
across any combination of dimensions--line items, time periods, products, geographical regions, and cost
centers. Multidimensional data navigation tools allow users to isolate the source of a variance quickly. These
tools make it easy to query the financial performance of a profit center by product, channel, and time period.
Specialized tools, like Financial Analyzer's Selector, offer querying and exception-based analyses. With
multidimensional analysis, users can control and analyze financial data, as well as design and save personal
reports and graphs, without having to involve IS staff.
Perform data queries through the application interface or over corporate intranets using the powerful
Selector tool.

Extensive Financial Modeling

Financial Analyzer supports a wide variety of financial management tasks with its modeling tools.
Results of what-if analyses display immediately. An extensive library of built-in functions helps users create
forecasts and calculate performance ratios. Users can incorporate general ledger and non-general ledger data
into analyses to derive, and then share, new financial data. Models are characterized by controlled
independence, which allows users to establish different detailed equations for particular organizations and
scenarios, while consistent calculations are kept for universal or consolidated items.

Seamless Spreadsheet Links

Financial Analyzer leverages users' knowledge of spreadsheet applications. The system links directly
with industry-standard spreadsheets so that users can submit, view and report Financial Analyzer data from
those spreadsheets. This link also provides spreadsheets with access to the powerful data query tools of the
Selector.
Access the centralized data and application power of Financial Analyzer through desktop tools, like
Microsoft Excel.

Flexible Data Loading

With its extensive loading capabilities, Financial Analyzer can easily accept and validate data from
general ledgers, spreadsheets, relational databases, and other operational systems.

Decision-making with ERP Integration

Financial Analyzer seamlessly integrates with Oracle General Ledger. This integration eliminates the
need for duplicate data entry and structural maintenance, and thereby provides a more cost-effective financial
management solution. General Ledger information easily maps to Financial Analyzer where it is reported,
analyzed, combined with other non-general ledger data, and used as the basis for budgets, forecasts, and
plans. General Ledger account balances are reflected in Financial Analyzer. With a permanent link between the
two applications, modifications to hierarchies and other structures performed in the General Ledger flow
through to Financial Analyzer without additional maintenance. Data and structures can be automatically
refreshed on a regular basis so that data control and integrity are preserved. Budgets created in Financial
Analyzer can be written back to Oracle General Ledger and stored for comparative general ledger reporting.
Analysis is made clearer with drill-through to the Oracle General Ledger, allowing Financial Analyzer users to
see detail behind analysis.Controlled Data Access

Ensuring consistent and reliable financial information is key to Financial Analyzer. The product
maintains the integrity of financial data in a central source and ensures that users are able to access the data
they need, both locally and at remote sites via the client or a Web browser.

Access controls allow the administrator to determine, by user, which financial data can be viewed and edited.
Users see and manage only the information that is pertinent to their responsibilities and interests. Senior
executives might receive summarized data tailored to their needs, while departmental managers might receive
both detail and summary data.

Display an income statement and drill into the details of report data without having to know the data's
location.

Adaptable Business Model

Businesses do not have to change their perspectives and processes to conform to Financial
Analyzer; the product can reflect any existing business. Financial Analyzer adapts to any organization's
business structures, such as cost centers, products, services, and retail outlets. Additionally, the product's
models and data can be modified quickly to reflect new or potential business scenarios as well as
organizational changes. Scalable to meet the data capacity requirements of your growing business, Financial
Analyzer reduces the amount of time required for data management, affording users more time to focus on
qualitative analysis.

Flexible Network Architecture

Today's financial management systems are most effective when they can be utilized by more than
just the members of the Finance department. Organizations need to provide financial information to, and collect
data from, a variety of users across networks and around the globe. Internet-enabled, Financial Analyzer
delivers financial data and robust data analysis and collection tools throughout the organization. The variety of
clients provided, accessible from users' desktops, can be Financial Analyzer specific, spreadsheet-based, or
Web-based, offering flexibility to suit any organization's needs. The various system configuration options allows
administrators to tailor the Financial Analyzer's unique, distributed architecture to the needs and location of
financial managers. Flexible access and scalable architecture provide a networked application with the
processing power, speed, and control required to handle the data volumes and complexity of current and future
financial management challenges.