The October updates for Oracle's Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Service (FCCS) are here! This blog post outlines new features, including a new consolidation audit trail, extended dimensionality, and more.
The monthly update for FCCS will occur on Friday, October 19 during your normal daily maintenance window.
New FCCS Features
New EPM Automate Utility Version
A new version of the EPM Automate Utility is available with this update. This version includes the renameSnapshot command, which enables you to rename a snapshot available in an environment to prevent the maintenance process from overwriting it. Customers who have small applications can use this command to archive snapshots in the environment subject to snapshot retention policies.
This version also includes updates to the rundailyMaintenance command, which has been enhanced to take skipNext as a new optional parameter. This parameter allows you to skip the next occurrence of the daily maintenance process. Use this parameter to prevent the daily maintenance process from interfering with long running ad hoc processes of unknown duration that you execute in an environment.
Intercompany Reports Currency Dimension Information
When you generate Intercompany Reports, the reports now display Currency information. The Currency dimension is displayed in the report header, which enables you to determine the Currency member used by the report.
New Consolidation Audit Trail Report
Administrators and Power Users can now run a Consolidation Report that provides a detailed audit trail of the consolidation process.
The report displays for a selected parent entity, the original reported closing balances and all the adjustments, including manual journal entries, Multi-GAAP adjustments and automatic eliminations generated by Intercompany elimination and consolidation rules, detailing the net contribution of each immediate child entity, and any variance.
The report is available in HTML, PDF, and XLS formats.
Journals Approval Options
Administrators have the ability to allow users with the user role to approve journals. The option applies to all journals.
If you disable this option, when a User tries to approve a journal, the system displays an error message that they are not authorized to perform the task.
View Close Manager Tasks on the Welcome Panel
Administrators now have the ability to display either Close manager "Current Tasks" or "Current and Upcoming Tasks" in the Worklist and on the Welcome panel.
If administrators enable "Current and Upcoming Tasks", user can see items in the upcoming workflows, as well as items currently available to work on.
Working with Multiple Close Manager Schedules
Administrators can now perform various actions on multiple Close Manager schedules at a time. This can be helpful if your application has a large number of schedules.
You can perform these actions on multiple schedules: Set Status, Reassign Users, and Generate Report Binders.
New Server Setting in Financial Reporting Web Studio
A new server setting, "Export to Excel Using Default Sheet Name", controls Excel sheet names upon export. When set to false, the sheet name uses the Financial Reporting report name. When set to true, the sheet name uses the Excel default name (Sheet1, Sheet2, etc.)
Extended Dimensionality
If you want to use more than two Custom Dimensions, you must request the Extended Dimensionality update from Oracle Support.
When you make the request to update the environment with the Extended dimension applications, you must supply Oracle Support with the location URLs to update the application in the usual way. You also need to confirm to Oracle Support that you understand the following:
- When the update is applied, any existing application will no longer be available.
- After the update is complete, any existing application snapshot cannot be loaded.
After the update is applied, you must create a new application. You cannot modify the number of dimensions in an existing application. When Extended Dimensionality is enabled, you will see the option to create four Custom dimensions. If the application is enabled with the Multi-GAAP reporting option, you will see the option to create three Custom Dimensions.
METADATA CHANGES
In the update for Extended Dimensionality, the View dimension now has new seeded base members under a new seeded parent – FCCS_View_System_Members, which are suffixed with _RULE. These members are used internally and they are of the type Dynamic Calc. In any of the existing forms, if the rows or columns are referencing View members using functions such as (ILvl0Descendants(View)), these _RULE members will also be queried. Since these members are Dynamic Calc, the performance of the forms will be slow. Change the definition of the forms using one of the following options: Reference the Periodic, YTD, QTD and HYTD members directly, or Add Exclusions in the form definition to exclude the subtree of FCCS_View_System_Members.
MIGRATION CONSIDERATIONS
Extended Dimensionality is only available for new applications. The Migration Snapshot feature is not available between non-Extended Dimension and Extended Dimension applications. You can, however, move certain artifacts to your new application. See “Creating Extended Dimension Applications” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.
NOTE: For subsequent releases, if you have Extended Dimensionality, you must also request an update from Oracle Support.
Upcoming Changes
Proposed Changes to Application-level Access Control
Using Groups created in Access Control, EPM Cloud supports application-level access control for planning, consolidation and close, tax reporting, and Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud applications. In addition to the custom groups created in Access Control, access control screens list predefined identity domain roles (Service Administrator, Power User, User and Viewer) as groups.
With a view to simplifying security across EPM Cloud and to ensure that application-level access control can be seamlessly migrated across environments Oracle plans to remove the ability to display predefined roles as groups in access control screens. After this change, you will no longer see predefined roles listed when you search for groups in access control screens.
NOTE: The proposed change will not affect how you create and manage groups or use them for applicationlevel access control.
Before making this change, Oracle wants to evaluate the impact, if any, that the proposed change will have on your environments. If you are concerned that the proposed change will affect your environment, please create a service request explaining your use case.
Classic Dimension Editor
With a view to allowing customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update in 2019. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.
Ability to Create New Composite Forms
To allow customers more time to adapt and move from composite forms to dashboards, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) to a future update in 2019. After this update all existing composite forms can still be edited and used. This change impacts only the creation of new composite forms in the service. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.
All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. No more enhancements will be made to the composite forms functionality.
Considerations
Simplified Dimension Editor and Metadata Validation
Some of the Simplified Dimension Editor errors (cells outlined in red) are false-positive errors (i.e. incorrectly reported as errors).
Data Storage errors for the following members should be ignored:
- Data Source -> All children of "FCCS_Source Entities"
- Entity -> "FCCS_Global Assumptions"
In addition:
- The Metadata Validator incorrectly shows validation errors for shared level 0 Scenario dimension members.
- The Metadata Validator incorrectly shows validation errors for parent members of the Scenario dimension.
- The Metadata Validator warning message for the Data Source dimension’s system members incorrectly refers to “Never Shared” instead of “Never Share”.
Consolidation Operator for Children of Dimension Name Members
Seeded dimension members must have the Consolidation Operator set as Ignore. None of the POV members should be set to Dimension member. Rather, always use Top Member to view aggregated values.
Calculation Status
When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.
Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading
After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.
The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:
- FX Rates – Average
- FX Rates – Ending
Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.
Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.
Ownership Management Enablement
Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.
If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature.
Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature. When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.
If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.
Copying Data
When copying an entity with a Calculation Status of No Data, the target should also have a Calculation Status of No Data. The Copy Data process is incorrectly setting the Calculation Status to Impacted.
Self Service Upgrade
It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.
Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period
In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.
Entity Member Names/Aliases with ICP Property
When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.
Working with Metadata
Be aware of the following considerations when working with metadata:
- Do not change a base member to which a journal has been posted into a parent member If there are journals or Supplemental Data posted to those members, these changes can cause problems when accessing Journals or importing existing journals.
- When you use ad hoc grids in Smart View with Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, do not add a root Period member on the grid. Make sure the root Period member is removed by either clicking Remove Only or selecting periods that are in the application and selecting . If a Period Keep Only member is left on the grid, then any changes to data that you make will fail to properly set the impact status of the Entities.
Smart View Summary Dialog Display
In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:
- Use the keyboard arrow keys to make your selection, then close and reopen the dialog; or
- Minimize and then reopen the dialog; or
- Use a different browser.
Translation Override Rule Redirection
When you create a Translation Override rule, redirection does not work properly when you use a shared Parent account for the Source. Workaround: Specify the primary Parent account.
