Oracle EPM & BI Blog

How Hyperion Helps with Year-End Close

It’s the beginning of the fourth quarter. You’ve just finished yet another quarter-end close — the last thing you want to think about is year-end.

But it’s there, looming over your head, just like all the Christmas shopping that’s coming up fast. But, what if year-end close didn’t have to be so similar to the hellish nightmare that is shopping at the mall in December? What if year-end close could be peaceful?

Fortunately, there are tools to help — not just with year-end, but month-end and quarter-end close as well. If you’re shopping for a solution to help you speed up your close process, there are several Oracle tools (on-prem and in the cloud) that you should consider.

The Oracle on-prem financial close tools include:

• Hyperion Financial Close Management (FCM)
  • Close Manager
  • Account Reconciliation Manager (ARM)
  • Supplemental Data Manager
• Hyperion Financial Management (HFM)

The cloud-based Oracle financial close tools include:

• Account Reconciliation Cloud Service (ARCS)
• Financial Consolidation and Close Service (FCCS)

In this blog post, you’ll get a brief overview of each tool, telling you how they can help you have a stress-free close process. You’ll also find free resources to dive deeper into each tool.

Canned Reports vs. Ad-hoc Analysis: Which to Use and When [Infographic]

Different stakeholders demand different information in different formats and with different delivery requirements — a reality that can translate into a nightmare if you’ve been tasked with preparing reports to distribute the information.

So how can you keep up with increasing demands (and stay sane)? The key to saving your time and energy is determining which reports can be "canned," or automatically generated based on pre-set specifications. 

Either way, you can maximize efficiency:

• For insights that can be canned, you can automate pre-built reports.

• For all other use cases, give business users the ability to perform quick and easy ad-hoc analysis.

So, how do you know which reporting requests are good candidates for canned reports? And which requests are better suited for spontaneous ad-hoc analysis? You can view the flow chart to get a quick answer! In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at each type of reporting and how to maximize efficiency.

The Future of Oracle Financial Close Tools

There are a lot of possibilities for the future of your Oracle Financial Close tools. You could upgrade to 11.1.2.4, move to the cloud, or wait until 2019 to upgrade when 11.2 comes out. With so many different options, you’re bound to get overwhelmed, especially when you’re talking about tools to help with your integral finance operations.

In this blog post, we’ll cover new functionality and features as well as what’s coming soon to on-premises Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) and Oracle’s Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Service (FCCS).

HFM Admin SOX Compliance Checklist: Providing Support for SOX Sections 302 & 404

Since Oracle Hyperion Financial Management is generally a finance-owned and IT-supported application, HFM administrators have several responsibilities and requirements that they need to meet. Some are evidence-based activities (e.g. provide proof of how foreign-owned entities are translated and consolidated in the financial statements), and some are change control activities (e.g. ensure metadata updates of entities and/or accounts are approved by the accounting manager).

To support accounting for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance activities, use the SOX compliance checklist to see how HFM admins perform the following application support and change management tasks.

On-prem vs. Cloud: Comparing FCCS and HFM

You’ve probably heard it before — Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Service (FCCS) is not HFM in the cloud. Fortunately, Oracle EPM Cloud updates occur monthly, and FCCS is only getting better. In this blog post, we’ll show you the current differences between these two consolidation tools so you can answer the question, “to migrate to the cloud? Or not to migrate to the cloud?"

Hyperion Infrastructure Worst Practices, Part 2: HFM

Whether you’ve been using Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) from its advent or you’re new to the Hyperion product, you’ve probably seen a lot of “best practices” guides. But it's just as important to know common “worst practices” that hurt HFM’s performance.

In my last blog post, I covered mistakes I frequently see organizations make with Hyperion Planning and Essbase. Now it’s time to talk about HFM.

Resources for HFM Administrators: Top 10 Tools, Tips, and Tricks

As an HFM administrator, you’re tasked with maintenance of metadata, monitoring consolidation practices, managing data integration, and much more. A lot of responsibility rests on your shoulders. Because the success of your organization’s close process depends heavily on you, we’ve compiled our most popular downloads to help lift some of your burden.

The Top 10 EPM & BI Downloads of 2016

We had a big year producing tools, white papers, videos, and more so that you can get the most return from your EPM and BI investment. This blog post counts down our 10 most popular downloads.

5 Ways EPM Is Changing [2016 Forrester Report]

Last month, Forrester released a report on the 10 EPM providers that “matter most” and how they stack up. The key takeaways weren’t just the leaders in the field (Oracle Hyperion came out on top) but also Forrester’s research into how EPM technology is evolving.

The following five trends will show you what's on the horizon for your EPM applications.

Keeping up with HFM and Essbase Performance Tuning

Just like a car, you know your Hyperion products need regular tuning — but there’s not an odometer to tell you exactly when to do it.

Hyperion products install under the assumption you’re going to tune it, and it’s a necessity for regular users in order to fully optimize your system's performance.

So when should your revisit performance tuning? In most cases, once a month, but it depends on how often your using an application or module and what your using it for.

This blog will overview when you should conduct performance tuning based on what system you’re using, and what could have if you don’t keep up with regular tuning.