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. 

FCCS - Converting HFM Financial Reports to FCCS

Oracle just released a tool to migrate on-premise Financial Reporting reports for HFM to Financial Reporting reports for FCCS. The tool maps the dimensions, preserves the report formatting and layouts, can convert reports in bulk, and provides ready to use reports. The utility can be enhanced via Python scripting.

Here is the link to the Oracle Cloud Marketplace for the tool:

https://cloudmarketplace.oracle.com/marketplace/en_US/listing/50393071

Looking forward to trying it out!

Hyperion Financial Reporting - PSU 704 and Desktop Client News

With Hyperion Financial Reporting PSU 11.1.2.4.704, which was released on December 20, 2016, came multiple updates for the web studio:

New Features in 11.1.2.4.704

Financial Reporting Web Studio enhancements to achievemore parity with the Windows Studio functionality:

•   Conditional formatting and suppression 

•   Auto-Calculation

•   Ability to Save Objects

•   Related Content

•   Row/Column templates

Also, Oracle announced in the patch the planned date for parity with the Windows desktop client and its subsequent removal from the suite.

Removal of Support for Financial Reporting Studio Desktop Client

Oracle is committed to providing a simple and intuitive experience to the users of the service. To achieve this goal, Financial Reporting Web Studio, a component available since the 11.1.2.4.701 release, will be established as the only tool for designing and building reports. As a result, Financial Reporting Studio desktop client support will be fully transitioned to Financial Reporting Web Studio, tentatively in mid-2017. With a planned mid-2017 update, Financial Reporting Studio desktop client is planned to no longer be distributed.

Starting with the 11.1.2.4.704 release, Financial Reporting Web Studio will achieve functional parity with most of the capabilities provided with Financial Reporting Studio desktop client. You will be able to create new reports and modify existing reports using Financial Reporting Web Studio.

Oracle recommends that you transition to using Financial Reporting Web Studio at the earliest opportunity.

I've been using the web studio for a while now and for the most part it is familiar to those used to the desktop client. The key thing when working with it is to open the report, and then on the left panel click the object (grid, image, text, chart) on which you wish to work. The additions in the 704 PSU address some of the missing items. There are a few more to go.

Need more than 9 decimal places on a report?

So this comes from the "why bother but hey, why not" file. A financial report listing the currency exchange rates should look like this (actually, this is a screenshot of the final result).


 
So, what's so hard about this? In this case, the exchange rates come from the GL and have more than 9 decimal places - in this case, up to 12. Fine, HFM works with it. But, in Financial Reporting, you're limited to 9 decimal places. So, how to build a financial report showing the full resolution like above?

Step 1 - build the report as normal, including showing 9 decimal places

Step 2 - Format the data cell(s) for the rates to scale the data by .001 - this will not be on the dropdown so just type it.

Step 3 - Format the data cell(s) for the rates to show numbers with a period for the thousands separator and nothing for the decimal separator. If a period isn't desired, then use whatever character - the idea is we're going to make this look like a decimal even though it's really thousands.

Step 4 - Use a conditional format on the data cell(s)to check the current cell value. If the value is less than 1, format the positive number prefix to be 0. - see screenshot below. Also keep the other formatting options (9 decimal places, scale by .001).





At this point run the report and you should be all set with the result at the top. In this case I was lucky and the exchange rates only went out 12 places. If they went out more, then the fake decimal would not be where the thousands are. I could add more zeroes to the scaling, but then I'd have the fake decimal in the wrong place or worse, two decimals in my amount. At that point you may be better off with a simple data extract.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Financial Reporting, headers, and < >

Working today and ran into an issue I haven't had before. It's worked fine for years but now doesn't. Or, at least it doesn't in the specific version I'm using today (FRS 11.1.2.362).

Anyway, using Financial Reporting Studio to write a report with the HFM Value dimension in the columns. Heading display was set to labels. Run the report and - voila! - no column headers. I checked everything I could think of - color, suppression, size, font, etc. and nothing would make them show. I did a custom header with <Entity Currency> and had the same problem.

Next, I did a custom header and left off the < and > and this time it worked.

Lesson for today: if something you've done for years stops working, it's probably not you but what you're using.