Oracle Cloud EPM - Financial Reporting finally being terminated

After multiple years of notice, Oracle has announced the end of the Financial Reporting report module in the Oracle Cloud EPM products.

Dave Roberts (Oracle product manager) shared the announcement to remove Financial Reporting. All of the Financial Reporting references, user interfaces, and content will be removed in the 27.02 (February 2027) release. This will include the repository (where the reports are stored) and FR studio (the report editor/builder). So these Navigator links and the Financial Reports tab in the Reports screen will be gone.

The worthy successor to Financial Reporting, simply called Reports, has been in the Cloud EPM suite since 2021 and has built on and exceeded the capabilities of Financial Reporting in many ways. When I worked at Hyperion I saw beta versions of Financial Reporting starting a year before it was released and saw how it out-performed the previous report writer (Hyperion Enterprise Reporting). Now it's time for Financial Reporting to move on as well.

There were a few clarifications in the announcement where Financial Reporting is not quite disappearing yet. This sunsetting does not impact Fusion Cloud ERP, legacy Profitability and Cost Management, and the Hyperion on-premise solutions. There are no plans to move Reports to on-premise and my guess is that Fusion and PCMCS will eventually get Reports.

The Reports module has been in the suite since 2021 and is a great successor. If EPM customers haven't been using it and are still using Financial Reporting, this announcement should be enough of a reason to finally migrate. For details on how to do the migration, refer to my blog post from February 2025 - link provided here: https://ericerikson.blogspot.com/2025/02/financial-reporting-another-nail-in.html

And for Oracle documentation on the differences between Reports and Financial Reporting and the migration, go to this link: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/enterprise-performance-management-common/dmepr/appendix_b_migration_of_reports_from_financial_reporting.html

Financial Reporting - Another Nail in the Coffin

 Logging into a test EPM environment after the 25.02 release (February 2025), I saw this message.

Oracle announced in the release notes that support for Financial Reporting in EPM is ending in June 2025 and this message is a confirmation. As noted above, this transition has been planned for some time now.

Fortunately, it's not a hard process to convert existing Financial Reporting reports to Reporting. But before trying to migrate reports, check first that they run and have no errors (if a report doesn't work now, it's not going to work later). Also check with the users about which reports need migrating.

Click the Navigator and go to Reports. On the Financial Reports tab where the FR reports are listed, there is an icon on the far right for each report for migration. Click the icon to begin the migration.

When prompted, click on the desired folder for the new report. If the folder isn't there, then cancel, create the folder on the Reports tab, and then run the migration.

After the process runs, a confirmation message is shown.

There is also a way to migrate all of the reports at once. Click the Migrate All button at the top right. Choose the top level destination folder and optionally select whether to recreate the existing folder structure.

The status of the process can be seen in the Jobs screen.

A common sense approach would be to migrate everything, deal with any issues (see below), and then migrate individual reports again if they require updating before the conversion is complete.

This process seems too easy, right? The documentation - link below - has two pages on (a) dealing with migration errors and (b) the differences between the two reporting tools. Depending on the report design and build, there may significant work still to do.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/enterprise-performance-management-common/dmepr/epm_cloud_migrating_reports_from_financial_reporting.html

So the next step, even if no errors are reported, is to edit each report and check for validation errors (open the report in edit mode and see if the red bar shows at the top of the screen) and verify the output with three objectives: does the report run, is the content correct, and is the formatting correct. 

For example, open a report in edit mode and you may see something like this:

When I've done the migration, I've noticed that the report/folder security within Financial Reporting is not copied over. I can't say whether this is normal, but also plan to verify and apply security as needed.

Last, the Financial Reporting books do not migrate. These will need to be recreated.

Admins should start on this migration soon if they haven't already. When Oracle refers to the "June 2025 (25.06) update" above, remember that does not mean the end of June - it's the third Friday in June. 

Applying the Most Basic IT Concept to Oracle EPM Cloud: Reset Service

There are different reasons why I write blog posts. Sometimes to illustrate something or to talk about the merits of attending Kscope23. You will be going to Denver, CO, USA this June, correct? If you haven't registered, may I suggest going to https://kscope23.odtug.com/ and checking it out.

This one is a reminder that no matter how impossible something seems, there might be the easiest fix for it.

Another consultant reached out with the following problem: an admin user who is properly provisioned with the service administrator role logs into an environment and doesn't see the admin cards on the home screen. My response was maybe the navigation flow has been customized or maybe the admin is logging in with a native ID instead of the SSO ID or along those lines. Both of which I've seen. They got back to me with a simple answer: they reset the service and everything is fine.

Resetting the service is like rebooting a computer. You flip the switch off and on, wait a few minutes, and see if the problem clears up. The thing is, how do you reboot an Oracle EPM Cloud environment? You really can't go to the nearest Oracle data center and start flipping power switches (at least I hope not!). Fortunately, Oracle provided a way to do it: EPM Automate.

Here are the two (well, three steps needed). Either with a command line or a batch script, log into the environment, run the reset service command, wait, and then log out.

AutoTune optimizes the database (use for Planning, FCC, and Tax Provision only) and -f skips the confirmation step. Here's the doc link on how to use the resetservice function.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/enterprise-performance-management-common/cepma/epm_auto_reset_service.html

Resetting the service can also be useful when reports don't run, data forms don't open, or just something seems off. I have reset a service for all of these reasons.

When in doubt about something not working right (or before trying to resolve seemingly impossible problems), reset. It works for personal computers; it works for Oracle EPM Cloud.

Using EPM Reporting Books with Smart View - Part 2

The previous blog post described the new Smart View extension to bring Oracle EPM Cloud books into Microsoft Excel using Smart View and walked through the installation steps. Please refer to that post before proceeding with the below.

This post will walk through how to use the extension to work with books. This new capability works with FCC, Planning/EPBCS, Tax Reporting, and Narrative Reporting. Note the books must be new Reporting books and not the old Financial Reporting books. Just another reason to migrate from FR. 

Connect to the application using the Smart View panel and click on the application ID. At the bottom of the screen a new item called Launch EPM Books Home will appear. If this does not show, click More>> and see if it is listed there. If not, then go back to the previous blog post and check the extension installation.

Once opened the extension will list the available books. The lower half of the screen is the job console. This section will be used after running a book.

Clicking the info bubble to the left of a book will show a few facts about the book.

Click the Run icon to the left of a book to run it. Running the book will show as a job at the bottom panel. Click Refresh as needed until the processing is complete. There are also tool buttons to remove a single job or all jobs from the display.

When the processing is completed, click the download icon in the Status column to download. Click Yes if prompted to open the workbook.

The table of contents will be shown on the first tab. The reports will show on subsequent tabs. The table of contents lists the reports with clickable links to the right (not shown below) to each tab.

Going to the other tabs will show the different pages. In my early testing the rows and columns of the report grid are parsed correctly into cells. The report header (not shown below) comes in as a graphic instead of text into cells. The reports in the books I have do not have footers so would have to assume footers would be treated as a graphic as well.

At this point there is a new "Books" ribbon showing. There are three options: Refresh, Edit POV, and Inspect.

Refresh is self-explanatory. The Inspect option shows the same information as above along with the POV used for the book.

As shown above the book ran for Dec FY19 Periodic. This was my active POV in FCCS (when I ran the report book last through the website it was for Dec FY19 Periodic). The middle option on the ribbon, Edit POV, suggests that the POV can be changed. After clicking it, for each dimension dropdown, there is an option to select. 

When I tried clicking Select..., I got a message that "Member selection not supported." According to the documentation, editing the POV should work. Also, if the user has enabled previewing the report POV in User Preferences on the website, then the POV prompts should appear when initially running the book. The software did correctly identify the dimensions in the POV. The books I'm using have Default as the only member selection in the book POV and are not limiting the members that the user can select. So that may have something to do with it. As I'm working with an early version, I'll assume that this will get cleaned up.

Here is the link to the product documentation.

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/enterprise-performance-management-common/svuuc/books.html

In conclusion, all of us can finally rejoice that report books can be brought into Microsoft Excel. Again, it requires migrating from Financial Reporting to Reporting and the quick installation of a Smart View extension. Looking forward to using this at clients.

Using EPM Reporting Books with Smart View - Part 1

One of the Oracle EPM product features that has been requested for decades - yes, decades - is to bring a report book into Microsoft Excel. With the April 2022 update this can FINALLY be done. Granted, the report book has to be the new Reporting book and not the old Financial Reporting book. But think of it as one more reason to migrate from Financial Reporting to Reporting.

This new feature works for FCC, Planning, Tax Reporting, and Narrative Reporting.

Using the feature requires enabling a new Smart View extension that is being released with the April 2022 update. This blog post will cover how to install the extension. A future blog post will cover how to use it.

To install the extension, go into Microsoft Excel and go to the Smart View ribbon. Click Options and then go to the Extensions panel.

The screen above shows EPM Books already listed but your screen will not. Click the blue "Check for Updates, New Installs, and Uninstalls" link at the bottom. When prompted, select the appropriate environment. Here, I'm using a FCC test environment.

Once the update is done, an item for EPM Books will be shown. Click Install on the right to install the extension. Note that administrator level access to the computer should not be needed for this. 

Once the installation is done, quit Microsoft Excel (the installation process will remind you) and restart. Now, use the Smart View panel to connect to the application. Once the application ID is clicked upon, a new link will show for launching EPM Books. Click More>> if the link does not show.

The next blog post will go through how to use the Smart View extension to bring books into Microsoft Excel.

EPM Automate - DOS style automation for Oracle EPM Cloud

Ever heard the phrase "history repeats itself" or "something out of fashion will become popular again"? EPM Automate is a good example.

EPM Automate is the automation tool for the Oracle EPM cloud products: EPBCS, PBCS, FCCS, ARCS, etc. It allows users to log into the cloud, perform various actions, and log off. It can be run interactively or scripted and then scheduled.

The "history repeating itself" piece of this comes from the user interface and the scripting language: MS-DOS command line and MS-DOS batch file (or PC-DOS if you got your copy of DOS direct from IBM instead of Microsoft or a clone manufacturer). Or if you've ever used the command line on a Unix computer - did you know Apple's Mac OS X is a Unix operating system? - then you'll feel right at home. A DEC VAX had something similar but the language was different.

Actually the idea of a cloud environment harkens back to mainframe computing, so "what goes around comes around." Ok, no more phrases.

Anyway, the first step is to log into the cloud product and download the installer - works with Windows or Linux (64 bit versions only). As the cloud environment is updated each month, the downloaded program should be updated each month too.

After the install, launch the program from the menu. You're basically put into a command line environment, complete with drive/folder> and blinking cursor. Type in what you want to do, like login, and then get a response back. If you don't know what you can type then enter "help" and get a list. For help on a specific command, type the command and then help, like "login help".

For automating, write a batch file and then schedule that with Windows Scheduler, CA-7, etc.  I'm tempted to use EDLIN as the text editor, just for the full 1980s DOS effect.

Notice I'm skipping screenshots for this post - Oracle has a YouTube video that shows you how it works - this video uses PBCS for the cloud product.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/1lUthzzoWEY?rel=0&autoplay=1


For full documentation on EPM Automate, go to:
https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/epm-common/CEPMA/CEPMA.pdf


Overall, a simple and easy way to work with the Oracle EPM Cloud products. I wish they'd make this available for HFM - I like it better than task flows. HFM Batch (Google it) was similar but wasn't replaced when 11.1.2.4 (with no Windows API) came out.


P.S. With good ideas from the past being brought to bear in current day solutions, I wonder when keypunch cards are coming back. I need a new holiday wreath (search Pinterest).