Cloud Customer Connect - the Importance of Upvoting Ideas

The #1 best place to go for Oracle Cloud EPM info (yes, better than this blog) is Cloud Customer Connect. It is part community forum, Oracle training, announcements and guidance from Oracle product managers, and the ONE way to submit enhancements or customer requests for new features, etc. This last component is the focus for this post.

Idea Lab is where everyone can go in and submit an enhancement request and explain why, the business case, etc. Others can review and upvote to indicate their interest in the same thing or downvote if they don't see the need. When I say "others can review," that includes Oracle product managers, who review each idea and, once a direction has been decided by Oracle, will tag for future inclusion, deny, or say the idea is already in the product.

The upvoting portion of the process is the most important for the community and is probably the least underutilized portion of the process. This is the mechanism for the community to review and indicate their interest in the ideas. Ideas that receive a lot of upvotes are considered more seriously by Oracle as they have more demonstrated appeal.

Here's an example. In a navigation flow, you can create a new card to Narrative Reporting report, package, snapshot, or book (see below). All that is great. But what would be much more useful would be to create a card that links to a Narrative Reporting folder. That way, for instance, with one click on a card in FCC, users would be able to access all of the FCC reports. With the current ability, the admin would have to create a card for each one. If there are 50, then that would be 50 cards. Add a new report, add a new card. This does not make sense!

In Idea Lab, there is an idea to add a folder to the above list. Here's the link (login with free Cloud Customer Connect account required):

https://community.oracle.com/customerconnect/discussion/652748/add-narrative-reporting-folder-to-navigation-flow

Down near the bottom is the place to upvote/downvote. To do so, click the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" icons. Maybe this navigation, which isn't exactly obvious, is the reason there isn't much up/down voting. Once the choice is clicked, it will fill in (here, I have already upvoted this idea). Users can also add comments to explain their support, add additional business cases, add workarounds, etc.

I think that upvoting ideas is highly underutilized by the community. By upvoting ideas that make sense to them, users can add their influence to the idea which will increase the appeal of the idea to Oracle.

So, get out and vote! 

FCC - Doing Away with Separate Loads for Balance Sheet and Income Statement

TWO UPDATES - Sep 28

First, I have to apologize - I got the name of the variable wrong. It should be: NewLoadYTDClosingBalanceInput

Second, Oracle product management posted on Cloud Customer Connect yesterday that the feature isn't working correctly for profit and loss accounts and it will be addressed. No indication on timeline.

It's been a while since the last blog post so thought I'd do one on a new feature that's everyone has been wanting to see: loading BS and PL data together instead of separately. The funny (well, not funny) thing is that I missed the announcement - it was listed down in the Actions and Considerations section of the release notes instead of in the regular new features section. A friend pointed it out to me and I'm thankful they did.

The August release (23.08) introduced a change where you don't have to do separate loads for the balance sheet and the income statement in order for the system to reverse out the prior period closing balance. More specifically, the system would reverse the prior period's periodic closing balance and carried over the income statement from the prior year in the first period. Now, the system reverses the YTD closing balance from the prior period and does nothing for the income statement accounts in the first period.

I tried this out for myself and got the process to work. There are a couple details that aren't obvious in the current documentation, so I'm sharing them here. One is the next line and one is at the bottom.

First, there is a substitution variable that is required to enable the process: NewYTDClosingBalanceInput.

Next, set up the metadata so that income statement accounts have the FCCS_Mvmts_NetIncome member assigned as the default movement. The balance sheet accounts should already have the assignment. Note: it is recommended to keep FCCS_Mvmts_NetIncome as a level 0 member and not make it a parent. I thought about making it a parent with the non cash income statement movements as children as well as a regular income statement movement and was advised against it.

Next, in Data Exchange, populate the movement dimension for both balance sheet and income statement accounts with FCCS_ClosingBalance_Input. Here, I'm using a SQL statement to map multiple dimensions at once as it's faster than mapping dimensions separately, but either way works. Note: your movement dimension may not be UD7, so use the appropriate field. And yes, this is the new Data Exchange interface to which we should all be transitioning.

Now, when data is loaded and consolidated, the movement and reversals are properly calculated - top two rows have an asset and the bottom two rows have an expense.

I need to do further testing and verification but so far so good. 

The other not so obvious detail is that the movement member must be somewhere under FCCS_Mvmts_SubTotal. So if you also have statistical data to load, which normally goes to FCCS_No Movement, that will seemingly need to be a separate load.

I've already changed the design for two projects to use this feature. The time for the design change and the extra setup should easily be recouped in the quicker loads (one vs two).

Audit Log - Showing Internal References

 Just a heads up on an issue with the audit log. When a member is moved from one parent to another, the audit log captures that and shows the "from member" and "to member." Only, it doesn't. What shows is an internal reference, which isn't helpful in determining the member labels that are seen in the application.

Apparently this is a platform bug, so not just related to FCC. It's also not always been this way, so hopefully it gets fixed soon.

FCC Release 23.03 - Metadata Validation for Movement Members

In the 23.03 release of FCC there is a new metadata validation that requires that all members under FCCS_ClosingBalance have a consolidation operator of Addition. On the surface this makes sense; however, it will cause major issues with cash flow.

It is common for cash flow to require various types of manual adjustments and calculations that are not part of the closing balance calculation. But, if a movement member is not under FCCS_ClosingBalance, then the data does not consolidate.

So what I and many others have done is to put these members somewhere under FCCS_ClosingBalance with a consolidation operator of Ignore. That way the data consolidates and does not impact the closing balance.

With the 23.03 release, when a metadata validation is run, this happens:

I filed an SR for the company I'm currently working with for this issue. Unless Oracle removes the restriction that members must be under FCCS_ClosingBalance to consolidate, I expect that this validation will get pulled back.

Oracle EPM: Hierarchy Calculations

Most implementations have some statistical calculations, particularly with accounts. There are multiple levels of calculation complexity. Member formulas is usually the go-to place to write these; however, for simple calculations, there's another option. And it has a benefit that member formulas don't have!

Create an alternate hierarchy with the parent member representing the result and the children representing the inputs. Then use the consolidation operator to add/subtract/multiply/divide or calculate a percentage. In the below example, FCCS_Gross Profit is being divided by FCCS_Gross Sales to calculate a gross margin percentage. And with the percentage option there is no need to multiply the results by 100.

If the calculation needs parentheses, then create a mid level parent to represent that part of the formula.

Now, the benefit. A user can view the result on a report, data grid, etc. and then drill down into it to see the components. The result member is just a parent member, after all. So that's helpful.

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.

FCC January 2023 Update - DO NOT CHANGE Dense/Sparse!

Hello and welcome to 2023! The first blog post this year is a warning regarding the FCC (Financial Consolidation and Close cloud service) update for this month.

The 23.01 (January 2023) release somehow opened up the dense/sparse settings for the dimensions in the application. Dense and sparse (if a dimension is not dense then it's sparse) relate to how the underlying Essbase database is structured for saving data. Below, the Period and Movement dimensions are set to Dense (checkmark enabled).  If your application shows only the Account as dense, see the bottom of this post.

The dense/sparse column is normally read-only (greyed out) but as you can see the column is editable. Do not make any changes to this! Untold calamities will occur - seriously, there is no telling what will work and not work. Insertion rules, for one, will have problems. Oracle has already worked through the optimal dense/sparse settings, determined the optimal setup, and built the application around them. A fix to put the setting back into read-only mode is under development.

If your application shows only the Account as dense, then consider running the migration to make Period and Movement dense. There are several benefits, the biggest being the consolidation time will be a lot quicker.

There are several steps to do. The process is not hard, but should be done in test to confirm, particularly if insertion rules exist. Here is the link for the documentation (note if two rows of text show this is one link that is wrapping on the screen).

https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/saas/financial-consolidation-cloud/agfcc/migrating_movement_period_dense.html