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Oracle E-Business Suite RELEASE VALUE PROPOSITION
Release 12.1 Financials
Prepared by E-Business Suite Product Management and Strategy Last Updated: Version: December 28, 2009 2.0
Copyright 2009 Oracle Corporation All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
1. 2.
Disclaimer _______________________________________________________________________________ 1 Introduction ______________________________________________________________________________ 2 2.1. Purpose of Document__________________________________________________________________ 2
3.
Financials Release 12.1 Value Proposition _____________________________________________________ 3 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. Support global and shared service operations _____________________________________________ 3 Improve operational efficiencies ________________________________________________________ 4 Reduce risk __________________________________________________________________________ 4
4.
Architectural Features and Closely Related Enhancements ________________________________________ 6 4.1.

4.1.1. 4.1.2. 4.1.3. 4.1.4. 4.1.5. 4.1.6.
Gain process efficiencies _______________________________________________________________ 6

Role-Based Access ___________________________________________________________________________ 6 Increased Efficiency for Processing and Reporting Across Ledgers _____________________________________ 6 Streamlined Accounting Setup __________________________________________________________________ 7 Automated and Accurate Intercompany Balances ___________________________________________________ 7 Efficient Payment Handling ____________________________________________________________________ 7 Improved Bank Account Maintenance ____________________________________________________________ 8
4.2.
4.2.1. 4.2.2. 4.2.3.
Enforce controls and reduce risks _______________________________________________________ 8

Compliance with Legal and Reporting Requirements ________________________________________________ 8 Greater Control, Transparency and Auditability with Centralized Accounting _____________________________ 9 Simplified Tax Compliance ____________________________________________________________________ 9
4.3.
4.3.1. 4.3.2.
Provide visibility and drive performance ________________________________________________ 10

Comprehensive Business Intelligence ___________________________________________________________ 10 Simplified Self-Service Reporting ______________________________________________________________ 10
5.
Whats New in Oracle Advanced Collections? __________________________________________________ 11 5.1.

5.1.1.
Improve managerial decisions _________________________________________________________ 11

Improved Ability to Collect with Enhanced Dispute Management _____________________________________ 11
5.2.
5.2.1.
Comply with bankruptcy regulations ___________________________________________________ 11

Global Bankruptcy Visibility at the Party Level ___________________________________________________ 11
6.
Whats New in Oracle Assets? ______________________________________________________________ 12 6.1.

6.1.1.
Increase transparency and efficiency with centralized setup ________________________________ 12

Flexible Accounting Configuration with Oracle Subledger Accounting _________________________________ 12
6.2.
6.2.1. 6.2.2. 6.2.3. 6.2.4. 6.2.5.
Improve processing efficiencies ________________________________________________________ 12

Enhanced Mass Additions Interface for Legacy Conversions _________________________________________ 12 Enhanced Productivity with Automated Depreciation Rollback for Selected Assets ________________________ 13 Impairments/Unplanned Depreciation Visibility with Flexible Accounting ______________________________ 13 Unit of Production Depreciation for Oil and Gas Industry ___________________________________________ 13 Straight Line Depreciation Method for Oil and Gas Industry _________________________________________ 13
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition
ii
6.3.
6.3.1.
Reduce cost through improved reporting ________________________________________________ 14

Flexible Reporting Using BI Publisher __________________________________________________________ 14
7.
Whats New in Oracle Cash Management? ____________________________________________________ 15 7.1.

7.1.1. 7.1.2.
Streamline and automate processes _____________________________________________________ 15

Simplified Setup and Streamlined Bank Account Reconciliation ______________________________________ 15 Increase Automatic Bank Reconciliation Success Rates for First Notice Items ____________________________ 15
7.2.
7.2.1. 7.2.2. 7.2.3.
Optimize funds and reduce banking costs ________________________________________________ 15

Effective Monitoring of Bank Balance Trends and Cash Positions _____________________________________ 16 Optimization of Funds with Flexible Cash Pooling _________________________________________________ 16 Reduced Cost for Payments to Bank Accounts in the European Union __________________________________ 16
7.3.
7.3.1.
Effectively control bank account signatories _____________________________________________ 16

Effective Control of Bank Account Signatories ____________________________________________________ 17
8.
Whats New in Oracle Credit Management? ___________________________________________________ 18 8.1.

8.1.1. 8.1.2. 8.1.3.
Mitigate credit risk __________________________________________________________________ 18

Compliance with Corporate Credit Policy through Enhanced Credit Scoring _____________________________ 18 Better Credit Decisions with Credit Scoring Model Enhancements _____________________________________ 18 Improved Knowledge Base with Multi Period Financial Data Comparison_______________________________ 18
8.2.
8.2.1. 8.2.2.

Improved Credit Review Process for Leasing and Loans_____________________________________________ 19 Rules-based Automated Credit Analyst Assignment ________________________________________________ 19
9.
Whats New in Oracle Customer Data Hub? ___________________________________________________ 20 9.1.

9.1.1. 9.1.2. 9.1.3.
Mitigate risk and enforce compliance ___________________________________________________ 20

Tax Validation Management with Tax Geography Hierarchy _________________________________________ 20 Improved Data Quality Management ____________________________________________________________ 20 Real-time Address Validation for Tax Purposes ___________________________________________________ 21
9.2.
9.2.1. 9.2.2.

Multi-Org Access Control (MOAC) ____________________________________________________________ 21 Synchronized Customer Records with the Help of Integration Services _________________________________ 21
10. 10.1.
What is Oracle E-Business Tax? __________________________________________________________ 22 Increase transparency and efficiency with centralized setup ________________________________ 22
Centralized Tax Configuration Setup _________________________________________________________ 23 Centralized Tax Record Repository for Audit and Reporting _______________________________________ 23 Automatic Tax Exemption and External Provider Service Subscriptions ______________________________ 23 Simplified Implementation with Guided Configuration ___________________________________________ 23 Automatic Application of Specific Tax Configuration to Desired Business Entities _____________________ 24 Comprehensive Tax Calculation Methodology __________________________________________________ 24 10.1.1. 10.1.2.
10.2.
Reduce cost _________________________________________________________________________ 23
10.2.1. 10.2.2.
10.3.
Improve business agility ______________________________________________________________ 24
10.3.1. 10.3.2.
11. 11.1.
Whats New in Oracle General Ledger? ____________________________________________________ 25 Centralize setup for transparency and efficiency __________________________________________ 25
Multiple Accounting Representations Using Centralized Accounting Setup ___________________________ 25 Enhanced Reporting Currency_______________________________________________________________ 25 Greater Efficiency in Allocations ____________________________________________________________ 26 Improved Operational Efficiencies during Journal Import, Processing and Posting ______________________ 26 Better Financial Visibility across Your Enterprise _______________________________________________ 27 Streamlined Subledger to General Ledger Reconciliation__________________________________________ 27 11.1.1. 11.1.2.
11.2.
11.2.1. 11.2.2.
11.3.
Improve reconciliation and auditability _________________________________________________ 26
11.3.1. 11.3.2.
iii
12. 12.1.
Whats New in Oracle Internet Expenses? __________________________________________________ 28 Mitigate risks and enforce compliance __________________________________________________ 28
Policy Compliance with Global Per Diem and Mileage ___________________________________________ 28 Enhanced Per Diem and Mileage Calculations __________________________________________________ 28 Automatic Matching of Advance Payments to Expense Reports_____________________________________ 28 Flexible Application of Cash Advances to Expense Reports _______________________________________ 29 Expense Policy Adherence with Payment Holds and Automatic Notifications __________________________ 29 Enhanced Cost Center and Projects Approvals __________________________________________________ 29 Enforce Compliance with Itemization Control __________________________________________________ 29 Regional Expense Policy Compliance through Flexible Configuration _______________________________ 30 Enhanced User Interface for Cost Efficient Audit Management _____________________________________ 30 Better Auditability of Expense Allocations _____________________________________________________ 30 Effective GL Accounting Validations _________________________________________________________ 30 Accelerated Expense and Audit Process when Physical Receipts are not Required ______________________ 31 Automated Transaction File Transfers from American Express _____________________________________ 31 Automatic Itemization of Expenses from Visa __________________________________________________ 31 Rapid Expense Entry Process with Expense Allocations __________________________________________ 31 Accelerated Expense Process with Parallel Approvals ____________________________________________ 31 Faster Approvals with Document Attachments __________________________________________________ 32 Flexible Expense Allocations with Split Expenses _______________________________________________ 32 12.1.1. 12.1.2. 12.1.3. 12.1.4. 12.1.5. 12.1.6. 12.1.7. 12.1.8. 12.1.9. 12.1.10.
12.2. 12.3.
Reduce cost _________________________________________________________________________ 30 Increase productivity with streamlined and automated processes ____________________________ 31
12.2.1. 12.3.1. 12.3.2. 12.3.3. 12.3.4. 12.3.5. 12.3.6. 12.3.7.
13. 13.1.
Whats New in Oracle Loans? ____________________________________________________________ 33 Streamline loan processing and enforce policy for agents ___________________________________ 33
Streamlined Loan Processing with Configurable Loan Types and Products ____________________________ 33 Multiple Disbursement Loans _______________________________________________________________ 33 Loan Portfolios, Graphs & Online Reporting for Proactive Portfolio Management and Reporting __________ 34 Sophisticated Credit Decisions with Automated Credit Reviews ____________________________________ 34 Reduced Risk with Federal Budgetary Control __________________________________________________ 34 13.1.1. 13.1.2.
13.2. 13.3.
Proactively manage loan portfolio ______________________________________________________ 33 Reduce credit risk ___________________________________________________________________ 34
13.2.1. 13.3.1. 13.3.2.
14. 14.1.
Whats New in Oracle Payables? __________________________________________________________ 35 Reduce risk and improve compliance ___________________________________________________ 35
Greater Legal Context Visibility with Legal Entity and Improved Transaction Processing ________________ 35 Centralized Payment Processing _____________________________________________________________ 35 Automated Netting of Customer and Supplier Balances ___________________________________________ 36 Easier and Faster Supplier Maintenance _______________________________________________________ 36 Simplified Setup of Supplier Bank Accounts ___________________________________________________ 36 Improved Invoice Processing with Invoice Lines ________________________________________________ 36 Streamlined Invoice Processing for Complex Services like Contract Financing, Retainage, and Progress Terms 37 Enhanced Invoice Approval with Line Level Approval ___________________________________________ 37 Improved Non PO Invoice Processing ________________________________________________________ 37 Effective Collaboration with Suppliers through Oracle iSupplier Portal_______________________________ 38 14.1.1. 14.1.2. 14.1.3.
14.2.
Streamline and automate processing ____________________________________________________ 36
14.2.1. 14.2.2. 14.2.3. 14.2.4. 14.2.5. 14.2.6. 14.2.7.
15. 15.1.
Whats New is Oracle Payments? __________________________________________________________ 39 Reduce cost _________________________________________________________________________ 39

Configurable Formatting Framework _________________________________________________________ 39 Reduced Costs with Flexible Validation Model _________________________________________________ 39 End to End Process Automation _____________________________________________________________ 40 Easier Reconciliation of Funds Capture Transactions _____________________________________________ 40 15.1.1. 15.1.2. 15.1.3. 15.1.4.
iv
15.2.
Mitigate risk ________________________________________________________________________ 40

Improved Visibility with Payment Dashboards __________________________________________________ 40 Secure Payment Data Repository ____________________________________________________________ 40 Efficient Disbursement Process ______________________________________________________________ 40 Operational Risk Management with Improved Credit Card Security _________________________________ 41 Improved Customer Service with Support for Additional Payment Options ____________________________ 41 Improved Customer Satisfaction with Notification Functionality ____________________________________ 41
15.2.1. 15.2.2. 15.2.3. 15.2.4.
15.3.
Streamline and automate processing ____________________________________________________ 41
15.3.1. 15.3.2.
16. 16.1.
Whats New in Oracle Property Manager ___________________________________________________ 42 Reduced administrative overhead of tracking occupancy ___________________________________ 42
Streamlined Financial Operations ____________________________________________________________ 42 Effectively manage occupancy ______________________________________________________________ 42 Streamlined variable rent calculation process ___________________________________________________ 43 Added flexibility to variable rent calculation ___________________________________________________ 43 Broaden the variable rent calculation fundamentals ______________________________________________ 43 Usability improvements____________________________________________________________________ 43 Ability to early terminate a rent increase agreement ______________________________________________ 44 Streamline Process _______________________________________________________________________ 44 Improved handling of back bills _____________________________________________________________ 44 Comprehensive Reporting __________________________________________________________________ 44 Capture agreements in a structured way _______________________________________________________ 45 Easy Reconciliation _______________________________________________________________________ 45 16.1.1. 16.1.2.
16.2.
Improved variable rent calculation _____________________________________________________ 43
16.2.1. 16.2.2. 16.2.3. 16.2.4.
16.3.
Reduced complexity of index based rent adjustments ______________________________________ 44
16.3.1. 16.3.2. 16.3.3.
16.4.
Ability to manage complex operating expenses ___________________________________________ 44
16.4.1. 16.4.2.
17. 17.1.
Whats New in Oracle Receivables? ________________________________________________________ 46 Mitigate risk and enforce compliance ___________________________________________________ 46
Flexible Revenue Recognition Rules, Including Partial Period Revenue Recognition ____________________ 46 COGS and Revenue Matching ______________________________________________________________ 46 Reduced Risk with Payment Based Revenue Recognition _________________________________________ 46 Quick Resolution of Credit Card Payment Errors ________________________________________________ 47 Regulatory Compliance with E-Business Tax Solution ____________________________________________ 47 Granular Cash Application at the Invoice Line Level _____________________________________________ 47 Streamlined Funds Capture Processing through Centralized Payment Engine __________________________ 47 Improved Chargeback Reconciliation _________________________________________________________ 47 Improved Customer Communication with Attachment Printing _____________________________________ 48 17.1.1. 17.1.2. 17.1.3. 17.1.4. 17.1.5.
17.2.
17.2.1. 17.2.2. 17.2.3.
17.3. 18. 18.1.
Improve customer bill presentment _____________________________________________________ 48 What is Oracle Subledger Accounting? _____________________________________________________ 49 Meet diverse global accounting and tax requirements ______________________________________ 49
Simultaneous Compliance with Multiple Accounting Requirements _________________________________ 49 Increased Flexibility with Configurable Accounting Rules _________________________________________ 50 Enhanced Reporting Currency Functionality____________________________________________________ 50 Summarized Information for Streamlined General Ledger without Sacrificing Details ___________________ 50 Draft Accounting for Previewing Accounting Impact _____________________________________________ 51 Increased Productivity with Automatic Replacement for Disabled Accounts ___________________________ 51 Gapless Sequential Numbering for Audit and Global Legal Compliance ______________________________ 51 Best Practices for Intermediary Account Processing ______________________________________________ 51 Reduced Cost and Unparallel Visibility with a Single Global Accounting Repository ____________________ 52
17.3.1.
18.1.1. 18.1.2. 18.1.3.
18.2.
Centralize accounting policies for greater control, transparency and auditability ______________ 50
18.2.1. 18.2.2. 18.2.3. 18.2.4. 18.2.5. 18.2.6.
18.3.

v
18.3.1. 18.3.2. 18.3.3. 18.3.4. 18.3.5. 18.3.6. 18.3.7.
Reduced Period End Closing Time with Straight through Accounting Processing _______________________ 52 Simplified Customer and Supplier Balance Reconciliation _________________________________________ 52 Support for Automated Multi-Period Accounting ________________________________________________ 52 Automatic Foreign Currency Gain/Loss Calculations _____________________________________________ 53 Quicker Upgrades and Implementations with Application Accounting Definitions Loader ________________ 53 Flexible Standard Reporting ________________________________________________________________ 53 Improved Reporting and Analysis with Supporting References _____________________________________ 53
19. 19.1.
Whats New in Oracle Treasury? __________________________________________________________ 54 Streamline and automate processes _____________________________________________________ 54
Automated Cash Pooling Across Legal Entities _________________________________________________ 54 Hedge Effectiveness Testing under FAS 133 and IAS 39 Accounting Standards ________________________ 54 Automatic Floating Rate Reset for Bonds ______________________________________________________ 54 Automatic Bank Account Update for Redirecting Payments to a New Bank Account ____________________ 55 19.1.1. 19.1.2. 19.1.3.
19.2. 20. 20.1.
Manage operational risk ______________________________________________________________ 55 Global Enhancements ___________________________________________________________________ 56 China ______________________________________________________________________________ 56

Financial Control and Reporting _____________________________________________________________ 56 Transaction Tax__________________________________________________________________________ 56 Transaction Tax__________________________________________________________________________ 57 Asset Lifecycle Management _______________________________________________________________ 58
19.2.1.
20.1.1. 20.1.2.
20.2. 20.3.
India ______________________________________________________________________________ 57 Japan ______________________________________________________________________________ 58
20.2.1. 20.3.1.
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1.
Disclaimer
Purpose of Document
2.
Introduction
2.1. Purpose of Document
Purpose of Document
3.
Financials Release 12.1 Value Proposition

For nearly a decade, finance organizations have been on a path to transform themselves into a strategic partner to the business. Their goals are to separate routine work from more value-add work, centralize the former to gain efficiencies, and decentralize the latter by embedding finance in the lines of business to help with things like decision support and strategic planning. The focus is on driving revenue growth while maintaining costs in an ever more complex, global and regulated environment. Finance organizations that succeed in this transformation process will ultimately help the business compete against an ever larger pool of competitors, due in large part to globalization. Oracle E Business Suite Release 12.1 enables todays finance organizations to transform their financial model to take advantage of the opportunities brought on by globalization by providing a set of integrated applications that help alleviate the risks organizations face and improve their operational performance. Oracle E-Business Suite Financials Release 12.1 (inclusive of Release 12) is focused on the following key areas:

3.1.
Support global and shared service operations

The complexity of operating in highly competitive, global economy with ever more regulation means that managing this complexity and finding ways to simplify and standardize has become critical to enabling a platform for growth. This complexity has increased the demands on finance with the business expecting more decision support, better information, and efficient transaction processing while investors and regulators want increased transparency and better compliance. To meet rising expectations, the finance function must redefine itself as a strategic partner to the business without sacrificing the cost or quality of the routine services it provides. Many organizations have been able to accelerate the finance transformation process by borrowing the best practices of world-class performers. In the area of transaction processing efficiency, a common characteristic of leading finance organizations is the adoption of shared services. Finance can achieve significant cost savings by consolidating routine processes into a shared services environment that is located in a low-cost country. Even more substantial savings can be gained when companies use this as an opportunity to consolidate finance systems, standardize processes, and identify global process owners to eliminate redundancies. By designing better controls into the processes, companies can improve governance and reduce audit costs. In addition, shared service organizations often provide better customer service and more timely and consistent information.
Support global and shared service operations
The heart of Release 12.1 for Financials is enabling businesses to work globally, whether this is across applications, divisions, or regions. The new architecture and enhancements enable businesses to standardize accounting and tax rules with centralized setup and maintenance that is also highly flexible to meet diverse global financial reporting requirements. Secondly, as globalization shifts work around the world, companies must address the different country accounting and reporting requirements in which they operate. This requires producing multiple sets of financial statements to satisfy local, statutory, and parent company reporting needs. Together with Oracle General Ledger, Oracles centralized Subledger Accounting enables compliance with multiple accounting requirements concurrently.
3.2.
Improve operational efficiencies

Manual financial processes consume resources and time that could be better leveraged for more strategic activities. Companies are always seeking to reduce back-office costs to help boost the bottom line and Oracle offers a multifaceted system to support this need. Financials in Release 12.1 enables features like Multi-Org Access Control (MOAC) which combined with ledger set access and reporting streamline back-office functions by allowing a single person or process to do the work of many. Oracle's Advanced Global Intercompany System coordinates transactions from initial proposal through approval to streamline the process and eliminate imbalances. The improved transaction accuracy results in downstream savings by eliminating time-consuming reconciliation during consolidation. Oracles Web Applications Desktop Integrator (WebADI) spreadsheet solution delivers full cycle accounting capabilities in a familiar spreadsheet environment to help maintain the productivity of finance professionals. At a macro level, Oracle's ability to support a single global instance simplifies the creation of shared service centers that drive efficiencies through economies of scale, and also establish global processing standards. Not only do shared service centers lower the cost of operations but they also minimize process risks by reducing the number of points to control. Finally, the unparalleled processing horsepower of Oracle's solution enables you to handle large volumes of data to drive efficiency of financial processes even under the most aggressive performance requirements.
3.3.
Reduce risk
Regulatory compliance continues to be at the front-and-center of concerns for finance professionals and corporate executives. Furthermore, businesses are feeling the pressure to effectively leverage technology while better understanding and mitigating process risks. The Financial Control and Reporting solution enables companies to improve control over the journal approval processes with workflows that clearly define the routing sequence and approvers at each step. To handle evolving business structures, Oracle's centralized and configurable accounting solution enables compliance with multiple legislative, industry or geographic requirements concurrently for a single entity. As a common data model and repository for all subsystem accounting activity, Oracle Subledger Accounting increases transparency and enables full auditability of transaction and accounting information with robust drilldown from Oracle General Ledger to the subledger and back.
Improve operational efficiencies
To support complex business structures as well as mergers and divestitures, Oracle offers complete and built-in consolidation tools that help you to centrally manage the global consolidation process. A centralized consolidations dashboard allows you to control this process with actionable and timely alerts as well as the ability to lock down the process and prevent further changes to finalized results.
Reduce risk
4.
Architectural Features and Closely Related Enhancements

Release 12.1 is designed to increase the ease with which you understand and process your worldwide business transactions. It reflects the maturity of several initiatives designed to rationalize subledger bookkeeping, generalize transaction tax compliance and improve access to subledger data, with the intention of both facilitating subledger shared services and improving and standardizing throughput. In Release 12.1, Oracle Financials delivers benefits in these focus areas:

Gain process efficiencies Enforce controls and reduce risk Provide visibility and drive performance
4.1.
Gain process efficiencies

Eliminating redundant processes, continuously lowering the unit cost per transaction through self-service, automating processes, and standardizing common business practices reduces costs. In an effort to focus business units on their core competencies, increase efficiencies company-wide, and better manage and access information, companies consolidate non-revenue generating, administrative tasks in shared service centers. 4.1.1. Role-Based Access A shared services model of operations drives cost savings and increases information quality. By centralizing information through a shared service center, a consolidated view of essential decision-making information is available and accessible globally. Standardization of common business practices also adds to the timeliness and accuracy of data. With consistent business processes throughout the enterprise, information can be gathered uniformly, with consistent quality. Services can be shared at many different levels, and shared service centers can exist for different reasons.
Multi-Org Access Control enables companies that have implemented a shared services
operating model to efficiently process business transactions by allowing them to access, process, and report on data for an unlimited number of operating units within a single applications responsibility. This increases the productivity of shared service centers, as users no longer have to switch responsibilities when processing transactions for multiple operating units at a time. Data security and access privileges are still maintained using security profiles that now support a list of operating units. 4.1.2. Increased Efficiency for Processing and Reporting Across Ledgers
Ledger Set
4.1.3.
Streamlined Accounting Setup
Accounting Setup Manager
4.1.4.
Automated and Accurate Intercompany Balances Organizations must track and document transfers of goods and services between related legal entities for financial consolidation, local compliance, and tax reporting purposes. This requires complying with local accounting and tax regulations as well as with established corporate-wide standards for processing intercompany transactions between subsidiary legal entities. Advanced Global Intercompany System streamlines the intercompany trading and reconciliation process across Ledgers by driving balanced intercompany transactions for the global enterprise. Oracle Advanced Global Intercompany System (AGIS) in Release 12.1 enables the initiator organization to create a single batch containing multiple recipient transactions across different ledgers, currencies and calendars, which are automatically submitted to all recipients. AGIS enables the intercompany accountant to control whether the intercompany transactions require approval by the recipient organization or whether the transactions should be auto approved, providing great flexibility for straight through processing of intercompany transactions. In respect of intercompany regulations, certain European countries require that physical intercompany invoices are generated for intercompany trading, whereas other countries such as the U.S. do not require intercompany invoices but just require intercompany journals to be generated in General Ledger. In Release 12.1 you have the flexibility to achieve best business practices as well as the ability to adhere to specific local regulations, with the option to define which legal entities require intercompany invoices and which legal entities require only manual journals in General Ledger. AGIS automatically creates the intercompany invoices in Oracle Payables and Receivables when intercompany invoicing is enabled. AGIS also provides interactive reconciliation reporting which allows drill-down to the details of intercompany account balances in order to quickly identify the source of any discrepancies in trading partner account balances thereby reducing the time spent reconciling intercompany transactions at period-end.
4.1.5.
Efficient Payment Handling Organizations are always trying to reduce the administrative and processing costs associated with payment processing. With Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1, organizations can process payments and collections faster using a single payment engine that manages disbursements and receipts using Oracle Payments, the single central source for all payment formats.
The highly configurable centralized payments engine enables straight-through processing (STP) based on industry standard protocols, with a dashboard for process visibility and management. Along with the new and the enhancements to Multi-Org Access Control the payments engine delivers significant efficiency to shared service centers that perform collections and disbursements. For example, a single responsibility can process invoices across multiple operating units producing separate payments, all with a single bank instruction significantly reducing administrative and payment processing costs. 4.1.6. Improved Bank Account Maintenance Users can spend less time managing bank account information with the new Bank Account Model in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials. The centralized bank model provides a single access point for defining and maintaining bank account information for Oracle Payables, Oracle Receivables, Oracle Advanced Collections, Oracle Payroll, Oracle Cash Management and Oracle Treasury. In Oracle E-Business Suite Financials Release 12.1, each internal bank account is assigned to a Legal Entity. Any or all operating units associated with that legal entity are permitted to use that bank account. This new architecture eliminates the need to maintain as well as reconcile multiple account records. Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 also provides a centralized repository for suppliers and customers bank account and credit card information. All data is stored in one, secure place, and provides shared service centers and collection departments with consistent information that they need.
4.2.
Enforce controls and reduce risks
4.2.1.
Compliance with Legal and Reporting Requirements Legal compliance remains of paramount importance in todays global marketplace. From an external viewpoint, all transactions are entered into a legal entity. Being able to easily manage transaction data by legal entity is key to achieving such compliance. Oracle Legal Entity Configurator enhances the ability to manage the legal corporate structure and track data from a legal perspective. The solution provides the foundation for features that help daily operations comply with local regulations. For example, strengthening the recognition of legal ownership enables accurate intercompany documentation as well as sophisticated tax calculations specific to local jurisdictions. The legal functions set for each legal entity provide basic process controls that facilitate internal control management. Tracking information from the legal perspective enables detailed reporting at legal entity, establishment, and registration level. To facilitate the setup, the most common jurisdictions are seeded. Your auditors can easily review
jurisdictions and legal authorities for control and compliance and the information is available for reporting and tax purposes. 4.2.2. Greater Control, Transparency and Auditability with Centralized Accounting Enterprises often have multiple reporting requirements. These enterprises and their subsidiaries may need to satisfy the accounting and reporting requirements for multiple countries or jurisdictions in addition to those of the parent or controlling enterprise. This can involve accounting in accordance with different accounting principles, in different currencies, charts of accounts and/or calendars. Oracle E-Business Suite Financials in Release 12.1 makes parallel financial reporting easier and streamlines period-end processing by providing support for diverse regulatory and reporting requirements. Ledgers are used to maintain multiple representations of the same data. The new centralized Subledger Accounting engine posts subledger data into these ledgers simultaneously, preserving the integrity of both corporate accounting standards and local compliance in a single consistent business process.
4.2.3.
Simplified Tax Compliance
Oracle E-Business Tax
4.3.
Provide visibility and drive performance
4.3.1.
Comprehensive Business Intelligence
Oracle Financial Analytics
4.3.2.
Simplified Self-Service Reporting Many customers have very strong business requirements for reporting in E-Business Suite. Whether its for reports that include images, charts, multiple fonts and color; board quality financial statements, or government mandated formsRelease 12.1 makes producing all types of reports much easier. By delivering reports using BI Publisher (formerly known as XML Publisher), were putting the capability to format and deliver reports in the hands of business users. Financials has moved much of its standard reporting to the extract and template model, offering increased efficiency to our customers compliance with local reporting obligations.
Provide visibility and drive performance
10
5.
Whats New in Oracle Advanced Collections?

Oracle Advanced Collections is designed for collection agents and managers, receivables account managers and revenue management personnel responsible for resolving delinquencies and recovering outstanding debt from customers. In Release 12.1, Oracle Advanced Collections delivers benefits in these focus areas:

5.1.
Improve managerial decisions
5.1.1.
Improved Ability to Collect with Enhanced Dispute Management Better dispute management helps you resolve customer issues in a more efficient manner and improve collection results. Advanced Collections' aging tab now provides an option to include amounts on transactions that have been partially disputed. You can now also check to see if the total disputed amount for a transaction is not greater than the total amount due.
5.2.
Comply with bankruptcy regulations
5.2.1.
Global Bankruptcy Visibility at the Party Level Managing customers appropriately during bankruptcy or collection actions is necessary in complying with bankruptcy regulations. Collections organizations that track pending or actual customer bankruptcies are now able to track them at the Party (Customer) level in Advanced Collections and be assured that all accounts and billing locations associated to the customer are also included.
Improve managerial decisions
11
6.
Whats New in Oracle Assets?

Oracle Assets, a comprehensive asset management solution, simplifies asset management and accounting complexities. It lowers the cost of asset ownership and secures your assets while giving you a global view. In Release 12.1, Oracle Assets delivers benefits in these focus areas:

6.1.
Increase transparency and efficiency with centralized setup
6.1.1.
Flexible Accounting Configuration with Oracle Subledger Accounting Standardizing and centralizing administrative processes and accounting can be instrumental in lowering the overhead costs. In Release 12.1, Subledger Accounting provides you with the ability to control and enforce your standard accounting practices and also gives you the flexibility to handle the exceptions and define additional sets of accounting rules where needed. Subledger Accounting offers maximum flexibility for generating accounting entries by making it possible for the user to configure accounting rules based on virtually any attribute of a transaction. Oracle Assets is fully integrated with Oracle Subledger Accounting for creating Journal Entries, Account drill down and Inquiry. Oracle Assets provides several out-of-the-box sources and rules to derive account code combinations and journal entry descriptions. Customers can use the seeded Oracle Assets accounting definition or they may use the flexibility of Subledger Accounting to create their own definitions.
6.2.
Improve processing efficiencies
6.2.1.
Enhanced Mass Additions Interface for Legacy Conversions When implementing a new application, companies look at minimizing the effort involved in transferring legacy data to the new application. In Oracle Assets Release 12.1 the mass additions interface has been expanded to enable you to interface more attributes for a given asset from legacy systems. A number of enhancements in the mass additions
12
interface reduce manual intervention and minimize the effort involved in transferring legacy data to the new application enabling asset managers to focus on more strategic activities such as reviewing the asset data. The enhancements include availability of additional attributes to ease legacy data conversion and extensible public Application Programming Interfaces to automatically prepare a mass addition line for all required attributes. 6.2.2. Enhanced Productivity with Automated Depreciation Rollback for Selected Assets Organizations are always looking to speed up the period close process and need visibility of the profit and loss (P&L) figures early on. Depreciation costs impact P&L and companies want to be able to run depreciation and view results early on, even if certain asset processing is not yet complete for the period. They want the ability to re-run depreciation for an open period as needed. In Oracle Assets, depreciation rollback has been automated so that the depreciation rollback is seamless to the user. If you've run depreciation without closing the period and you decide to make adjustments to an asset, Oracle Assets will automatically rollback depreciation for that particular asset. There's no manual action for you to take to rollback depreciation, thus minimizing workload for you. 6.2.3. Impairments/Unplanned Depreciation Visibility with Flexible Accounting The energy industry's best business practice for recording impairments is that the nature of the impairment must be tracked and a specific account entered dependent of the impairment type. Impairment is used to reduce the carrying value of a producing asset. Expressed another way, impairment expense is simply an unplanned depreciation expense. Oracle Assets unplanned depreciation provides the additional fields to track the nature of impairment and provides flexibility around accounting, to be derived from either the category setup or from the account entered for the unplanned depreciation entry, enabling the asset user to adhere to best practice for impairments. 6.2.4. Unit of Production Depreciation for Oil and Gas Industry The Oil and Gas industry's best business practice for assets such as fields, leases and wells mean that a Unit of Production Depreciation method must be used. In Release 12.1, Oracle Assets has a new Unit of Production depreciation method available to use for such assets. The Unit of Production depreciation method can be applied to group assets and then allocated down to the member assets. By using this depreciation method you can fulfill best business practices of the Oil and Gas industry. 6.2.5. Straight Line Depreciation Method for Oil and Gas Industry The Oil and Gas industry's best business practice for non-producing assets is to depreciate them using a specific energy . Oracle Assets in Release 12.1 delivers a new Straight Line depreciation method based on the asset's net book value. The depreciation can be applied at either member or asset group level. By using this depreciation method you can fulfill best business practices of the Oil and Gas industry.
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6.3.
Reduce cost through improved reporting
6.3.1.
Flexible Reporting Using BI Publisher Oracle Assets leverages Oracle BI Publisher technology to support major asset transaction reports thereby helping reduce the number of customized reports and minimize maintenance cost. The XML extracts that are provided with the reports give you a lot of data to include or exclude, as you'll be able to copy existing report formats and modify them easily to fit your needs, using desktop publishing tools familiar to you, such as Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF.
Reduce cost through improved reporting
14
7.
Whats New in Oracle Cash Management?

Having enough cash on hand at the right time in order to fund core business operations is a number one priority for cash managers worldwide. Oracle Cash Management is an enterprise-wide solution for managing liquidity and controlling cash. Oracle Cash Management gives you direct visibility into expected cash needs and forecasted cash receipts. You can quickly analyze enterprise-wide cash requirements and currency exposures, ensuring liquidity and optimal use of cash resources. In Release 12.1, Oracle Cash Management delivers benefits in these focus areas:

7.1.
Streamline and automate processes

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 empowers your cash managers with visibility into bank account setup and streamlined processes around bank account maintenance and bank statement processing. 7.1.1. Simplified Setup and Streamlined Bank Account Reconciliation
Reconciliation options can now be defined at the bank account level
7.1.2.
Increase Automatic Bank Reconciliation Success Rates for First Notice Items Bank reconciliation can be very time consuming due to the manual effort in resolving errors and exceptions. Companies seek to automate the bank reconciliation process to reduce the overall reconciliation effort so that their staff can focus proactively on more strategic business issues. In Oracle Cash Management Release 12.1 you can define flexible matching rules to automatically create and reconcile transactions based on reported prior day bank statement lines, significantly reducing reconciliation issues associated with first notice items such as bank fees or bank account interest.
7.2.
Optimize funds and reduce banking costs

In a tight credit market every penny counts. Idle funds hidden throughout your global bank account network can prove to be a healthy liquidity boost if concentrated in a timely manner. Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 provides you with the tools to manage and optimize your liquidity while reigning in the payment cost.
15
7.2.1.
Effective Monitoring of Bank Balance Trends and Cash Positions Companies desire to optimize funds while minimizing idle cash, as well as decrease external borrowing costs and increase overall investment returns. Flexible configuration and reporting provide the tools necessary to monitor trends and take actions as necessary to reduce your banking costs. In Oracle Cash Management Release 12.1 you have the ability to enter and report on different bank account balance types for internal bank accounts such as ledger, available, value-dated, 1-day float, 2-day float, and projected balances. Centrally stored balance history provides the flexibility to report on trend analysis as well as compare actual versus expected balances based on daily cash position projections. Additionally, you can verify interest amounts charged or credited by your banks based on balance history and user-defined interest rate schedules.
7.2.2.
Optimization of Funds with Flexible Cash Pooling Companies frequently use cash pooling techniques to optimize funds by consolidating bank balances from across multiple bank accounts. By consolidating balances and minimizing idle funds, companies may decrease external borrowing costs and increase overall investment returns. Oracle Cash Management Release 12.1 provides the ability to define and manage various types of cash pooling techniques such as:

Self-Initiated Physical Cash Pools Bank-Initiated Physical Cash Pools, or Zero Balance Accounts (ZBAs) Notional Cash Pools
In addition, you have the ability to initiate cash transfers between internal bank accounts manually or automatically through physical cash pools. The related cash flows are stored in Oracle Cash Management for reporting purposes and are reflected in your daily cash positions. Payment processing and accounting is managed via Oracle Payments and Oracle Subledger Accounting. The full integration of these Oracle E-Business Suite components enables you to optimize your bank balances, minimize idle funds and improve your cash. 7.2.3. Reduced Cost for Payments to Bank Accounts in the European Union With the introduction of Single European Payments Area (SEPA), banks now require International Bank Account Number (IBAN) as a part of the payment instructions for settlements in the Euro zone. Without IBAN, higher fees, delayed processing times or even outright payment failure can be encountered. In order to help organizations transition to SEPA, Oracle Cash Management in Release 12.1 is integrated with Oracle Payments to support SEPA payments, by enabling the user to assign a Bank Identification Code (BIC) for the bank branch and an International Bank Account Number (IBAN) for the bank account in addition to a reconciliation flag at payment group level. The additional attributes provide the data to improve straight-through processing as well as automate the reconciliation of SEPA payments by providing the capability to reconcile with Payment Group number.
7.3.
Effectively control bank account signatories
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7.3.1.
Effective Control of Bank Account Signatories The growing complexity and interdependence of the global economy requires accommodating the ever increasing demands of worldwide compliance. Good, holistic governance and compliance require that management have clear visibility across the enterprise, have effective internal controls, and operate efficiently. In Oracle Cash Management Release 12.1 you can enter, maintain and report on users authorized as signatories for your internal bank accounts. When defining bank account signatories, you can indicate single and joint signing limits for each bank account as well as signer group categories, effective dates, approval status, and other relevant information. You can attach electronic copies of documents like passport photos, signature files, or bank documents directly to the signing authority records. Reporting used for internal control and audit purposes is available via an Oracle Discoverer view enabling you to monitor and control bank account signing authority policy effectively to ensure compliance.
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8.
Whats New in Oracle Credit Management?

Oracle Credit Management is the hub for credit analysis and decision making throughout the Oracle E-Business Suite. This release contains features that extend the functionality and integration among products in the suite. It also provides the infrastructure to extend the data needed to make informed credit decisions. In Release 12.1, Oracle Credit Management delivers benefits in these focus areas:

8.1.
Mitigate credit risk
8.1.1.
Compliance with Corporate Credit Policy through Enhanced Credit Scoring You need a 360-degree view of your customer during a credit review, which includes your own customer records as well as external publicly available information about your customer. In cases where external data represents a customer's credit score, the raw data values may be used passed as the actual score. Credit scoring can now include actual scores or values coming from external data sources such as Dun & Bradstreet's Paydex without further manipulation.
8.1.2.
Better Credit Decisions with Credit Scoring Model Enhancements Credit managers need to use the best data available to them, whatever the source, to be sure their credit approval process is fact-based and accurate. By including data from external as well as internal sources and employing that data in the best possible manner, credit managers can be sure theyre using credit information efficiently. Oracle Credit Management offers an extensive array of historical, system, external, and user entered data for credit reviews. With the additional ability to add user-defined data points, credit decisions can be more accurate and comprehensive.
8.1.3.
Improved Knowledge Base with Multi Period Financial Data Comparison When analyzing customers liquidity, a historical trend can draw attention to a potential red flag much faster than a single snapshot balance sheet number. Credit Management now allows financial data from previously entered credit applications to be used for comparison to current financial data. Users can select from a variety of periods and compare the values in that period to what has been submitted in the new credit application.
Mitigate credit risk
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8.2.
8.2.1.
Improved Credit Review Process for Leasing and Loans
appeal the rejection
8.2.2.
Rules-based Automated Credit Analyst Assignment A lot of time can be wasted by a credit analyst if he/she has to first figure out every day where to begin and what are the priorities. Automatic assignment of credit work, based on parameters defined by management, allows the credit department to operate smoothly and efficiently with nothing 'dropping through the cracks'.
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9.
Whats New in Oracle Customer Data Hub?

The largest single area of the Customer Data Management (CDM) product family, this area covers not only the products Customer Data Hub and Customer Data Spoke, but also the underlying data model, Trading Community Architecture (TCA). TCA is a cornerstone of many business objects in E-Business Suite, such as customers, banks and bank branches. In Release 12.1, Oracle Customer Data Hub delivers benefits in these focus areas:

9.1.
Mitigate risk and enforce compliance
9.1.1.
Tax Validation Management with Tax Geography Hierarchy Companies have to consider the varying taxation rules on goods and services when operating in different countries around the world. The transaction tax varies from country to country. In the U.S. there is sales tax on transactions, which is comprised of a combination of state, county and city tax; whereas in the UK the usual tax is a VAT rate of 17.5%. In Release 12.1, the Customer Data Hub provides Tax Geography Hierarchy Setup user interface to enable you to create and manage a foundation of geographies and geographical hierarchies for the purpose of tax validation. Once the foundation of geographies is established, tax administrators can define flexible zones without impacting the underlying geographies themselves. The geography hierarchy and zones when implemented correctly supports tax compliance and minimizes risk of user errors.
9.1.2.
Improved Data Quality Management Companies expect application systems to be optimally tuned to provide good performance as well as have accurate data. In Release 12.1, the Data Quality Management (DQM) tool delivers improved administration with a new level of audit detail and maximized out-of-the box performance. A new overview page provides relevant and timely information about the status of important DQM processes and setups, while more consistent attributes and transformations naming conventions improve the users experience. A new set of diagnostic reports have been introduced to give users access to DQM setup information including configuration settings, performance of activities like staging, as well as health indicators of key setup entities such as the indexes. Lastly, a new DQM public Application Programming interface is available for integration into external source applications for performing real-time duplicate checks against the core Customer Data Hub repository.
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9.1.3.
Real-time Address Validation for Tax Purposes Companies expect real-time address validation on transactions for tax purposes e.g., ensuring that addresses have valid geographic information, such as the correct combination of city, state, and postal code. In Release 12.1 the Customer Data Hub uses the Trading Community Architecture and provides real-time address validation based on tax jurisdictions, plus a new geography validation solution based on a manually entered geographic hierarchy. The solution includes validating the address both while it is being entered in the user interface and at the Application Programming Interface level. This feature when implemented correctly supports tax compliance and minimizes risk of user errors.
9.2.
9.2.1.
Multi-Org Access Control (MOAC) Your company may be operating a shared services center (SSC) and your staff in the SCC needs to manage customer records for processing of transactions across multiple organizations. Multi-Org Access Control (MOAC) supported in the Customer Data Hub in Release 12.1 gives your SSC staff the ability to access customer sites across multiple operating units within a single responsibility for customer maintenance such as customer merge, customer import and to view customer accounts online. By leveraging MOAC in a shared services environment, companies can streamline maintenance of customer records across multiple sites resulting in significant savings in operating costs without compromising data security.
9.2.2.
Synchronized Customer Records with the Help of Integration Services Most companies have a combination of some standard financial applications and some custom built legacy systems and have a need to integrate data between these systems. In Release 12.1 the Oracle Customer Data Hub (CDH) Integration Services are targeted at the integration developer responsible for enabling bi-directional synchronization of customer information between the Oracle Customer Data Hub and related Data Spokes. The Integration Services Foundation provides a business object-based abstraction of the Oracle Trading Community Architecture (TCA) to soften the learning curve associated with implementing a customer data integration initiative using Oracle CDH. This integration enables you to automatically streamline customer records stored in disparate systems.
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10. What is Oracle E-Business Tax?

Oracle E-Business Tax, introduced in Release 12 provides the infrastructure for transaction tax knowledge management and delivery using a global system architecture that is configurable and scalable for adding country specific tax content. As the single point solution for managing transaction-based tax, Oracle E-Business Tax uniformly delivers tax services to all E-Business Suite business flows through one application interface. Oracle E-Business Tax consists of a tax knowledge base, a variety of tax services that respond to specific tax events, a set of repositories (for tax content and tax recording) that allows customers to manage their local tax compliance needs in a proactive manner, as well as the ability to integrate with external tax content providers through a single integration point. In short, Oracle E-Business Tax is the global and consistent compliance repository that encapsulates fiscal and tax rules in a single point solution for tax events that is easy to integrate, extend, and implement. Oracle E-Business Suite products that are integrated with E-Business Tax include the following:

Oracle Purchasing Oracle Internet Procurement Oracle Receivables Consigned Inventory Oracle Payables Oracle Intercompany Invoicing Oracle Order Management Oracle Trade Management Oracle Services Contracts Oracle Order Capture/iStore/Quoting Oracle Internet Expenses Oracle Project Accounting Oracle General Ledger
Oracle E-Business Tax streamlines common processes and procedures around tax calculation and reporting so that your organization can focus on more value-added activities such as tax planning. In Release 12.1, E-Business Tax enables users to:

10.1. Increase transparency and efficiency with centralized setup
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10.1.1.
Centralized Tax Configuration Setup Organizations operating across multiple countries or across multiple states often have complex tax requirements to record taxes for the products and services being offered or received. The ability for organizations to automate and streamline calculation of transaction taxes directly impacts transaction processing efficiency. Oracle E-Business Tax allows businesses to setup simple as well complex tax requirements in a centralized repository, where all the tax rules and tax rates can be configured and stored. These tax setups can by leveraged during transaction creation, for tax calculation.
10.1.2.
Centralized Tax Record Repository for Audit and Reporting For an organization that offers or receives products and services that are taxable, it is essential not only to calculate the right tax amount, but also to have easy access to transaction tax information for both reporting and audit purposes. Oracle E-Business Tax Record Repository stores transaction tax data for all transactions. The transaction tax data stored in the Tax Record Repository includes pertinent input transaction data as well as output transaction data the can be accessed and utilized for reporting and ongoing audit purposes. In addition to the seeded report library, new custom reports can be efficiently generated from standard tax reporting templates using Oracle BI Publisher. Additional features such as tax calendar, draft and final reporting, as well as the tax form support make your tax reporting much more efficient and reliable, which also facilitates an audit ready system.
10.2. Reduce cost
10.2.1.
Automatic Tax Exemption and External Provider Service Subscriptions For an organization, its important to understand that a tax dollar saved is a dollar earned. An organization may be eligible for reduced tax liability by virtue of tax exemptions or special tax rules. With E-Business Tax, an organization can automatically apply tax exemption or special tax rule configuration to all applicable, existing business entities and can also extend any tax exemption or special tax rule configuration to newly added business entities acquired in the future to achieve tax savings. Also, in geographies where the in-house tax expertise may be lacking, E-Business Tax also allows you to use the services of a certified, third-party tax calculation service provider, thus letting your staff work on their core competency areas.
10.2.2.
Simplified Implementation with Guided Configuration Setting up complex tax requirements can be a daunting task for an organization. To help you plan for and ultimately save you time during implementation, a standard setup task list is available in Oracle E-Business Tax. It provides a methodology and an outline to better guide a business in the identification of all key elective and mandatory tax setup tasks to achieve specific transaction tax system functionality. This setup task list was
Reduce cost
23
designed to accommodate Oracle E-Business Tax users with different backgrounds and experience levels with the product.
10.3. Improve business agility
10.3.1.
Automatic Application of Specific Tax Configuration to Desired Business Entities As an organizations structure changes or business grows, the ability to assign previously created tax configurations to new business units helps you enable transaction processing in the new business units faster, making your business more agile. With E-Business tax, you can be as granular or as generic when configuring and assigning tax configurations. Your tax department can selectively or globally designate the use of specific tax configuration upfront to all applicable, existing business entities and can also extend any tax configuration to newly added business entities acquired in the future. This saves you time and effort related to the tax configuration maintenance, while allowing the system to grow as your business grows.
10.3.2.
Comprehensive Tax Calculation Methodology Incorrect calculation of transaction taxes can not only result in over or under payment of transaction taxes but can also lead to penalties imposed by tax authorities. The tax simulator in E Business Tax provides independent testing of tax configuration to specifically determine the impact of existing tax configuration on the application of taxes and tax exemptions on individual transactions. Testing your setup in advance will give you confidence that the chosen configuration is going to give you the correct result every time. Also, within Oracle E-Business Tax, the Tax Determination Services component identifies and applies the proper method by which to calculate tax on a given transaction based upon factors such as the tax registration of the parties involved, the applicable tax calculation location, and any tax rules defined. This will facilitate compliance with various tax regimes, wherever your business takes you.
Improve business agility
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11. Whats New in Oracle General Ledger?

Oracle General Ledger is a comprehensive financial management solution that provides highly automated financial processing, effective management control, and real-time visibility to financial results. It provides everything you need to meet financial compliance and improve your bottom line. Oracle General Ledger works seamlessly with other Oracle E-Business Suite products to drive better decision-making, sustainable financial discipline, regulatory compliance, and optimized business processes at the lowest cost. In Release 12.1, Oracle General Ledger delivers benefits in these focus areas:

11.1. Centralize setup for transparency and efficiency
11.1.1.
Multiple Accounting Representations Using Centralized Accounting Setup Companies that are global in nature and that have operations in different locations often have multiple reporting requirements. These companies and their subsidiaries often need to satisfy the accounting and reporting requirements for each country as well as those of the parent company. This involves performing accounting in accordance with accounting principles and standards of multiple countries and in different currencies, charts of accounts, and/or calendars. The reporting requirements can also be statutory in nature, and one subsidiary may even need to satisfy multiple sets of statutory requirements. Oracle General Ledger simplifies the simultaneous management of the accounting for all of these different reporting requirements in this latest release. You are able to define your Ledgers, Legal Entities, Balancing Segment Values and the setup needed to address each accounting and reporting requirement using the Accounting Setup Manager. Integration with Subledger Accounting enables Oracle General Ledger to perform accounting for all reporting requirements of Ledgers simultaneously.
11.1.2.
Enhanced Reporting Currency Most companies follow International Accounting Standards (IAS 21) and Financial Accounting Standards (FAS 52) recommended best practices for translation of monetary account balances into other currencies. Oracle General Ledger in Release 12.1 provides centralized accounting setup enabling you to define Ledgers and their relationship to Legal Entities, Balancing Segment Values and Operating Units all in a single place, as well as, assigning Reporting Currency Ledgers to report data in a different currency to the base currency of the primary ledger. For each Reporting Currency Ledger, you can convert data at three levels: Journal
Centralize setup for transparency and efficiency
25
Level (GL), Subledger Journal level (Subledger Accounting) or Balance Level (summary) providing you with great flexibility in the automatic generation of reporting data.
11.2. Improve processing efficiencies
11.2.1.
Greater Efficiency in Allocations Organizations need to be able to distribute overhead costs across their operations in as automated a manner as possible to minimize manual user intervention and reduce the workload on their accounting department. In Oracle General Ledger Release 12.1, allocations have been enhanced to enable you to allocate financial data from one or more ledgers to a different target ledger. This enables you to perform cross-ledger as well as cross currency allocations, which is useful for allocating corporate or regional expenses to local subsidiaries when each entity has its own ledger which may have different currencies. Foreign currency allocations are also useful within a single ledger if you need to allocate amounts to a currency that is different from the primary currency of a ledger. These allocation enhancements automate calculations and journal entries that were previously manually calculated or cumbersome to create, reducing the periodic processing effort.
11.2.2.
Improved Operational Efficiencies during Journal Import, Processing and Posting In a shared services environment users need to post journals for multiple ledgers in an efficient manner. In Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 a user can now access and process data in multiple ledgers from a single responsibility utilizing Data Access Sets and Ledger Sets, enabling your user to define auto-post criteria across ledgers and speed up the period end processing by posting journals automatically across multiple ledgers simultaneously. The new journal batch copy feature in General Ledger enables you to create new journal batches faster by re-using existing journal batch content and providing flexibility to change period and effective date of the new journal batch during the copy process, thus reducing the amount of work required. When an account is disabled, you can improve straight through processing during journal import by defining the account that replaces a previous disabled account, through the Alternate Account user interface, thus reducing manual intervention.
11.3. Improve reconciliation and auditability
26
11.3.1.
Better Financial Visibility across Your Enterprise Organizations need fiscally controlled financial reporting to gain visibility into financial results across the enterprise as a whole. In Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 you can access and process data in multiple ledgers from a single responsibility , enabling you to define Financial Statement Generator (FSG) reports in Oracle General Ledger that includes data from multiple ledgers or alternatively run FSG reports for multiple ledgers simultaneously.
11.3.2.
Streamlined Subledger to General Ledger Reconciliation Financial period end reconciliation is usually very time-consuming for most organizations. Several new features in General Ledger assist with streamlining the reconciliation required at period end. First, in Oracle General Ledger Release 12.1 you can identify specific natural accounts within your chart of accounts as control accounts, such as Accounts Payable control account and Accounts Receivable control account. Only specific subledger transactions can be posted to these control accounts which streamlines the reconciliation between subledgers and General Ledger. Second, you have the flexibility of deciding how you want to transfer subledger data to General Ledger, in summary by GL Period or GL Date or in detail. Oracle Subledger Accounting provides a consistent view when drilling down from General Ledger balances to subledger transactions. Third, you can view the balances of multiple detail or summary accounts in a single page and drill down to supporting journal entries and subledger transactions all within a browser window with the new web-based interface, Account Analysis & Drilldown. This easily allows you to review and analyze your general ledger financial data and the supporting transactional detail. Lastly, subledger reconciliation to General Ledger can become a problem if your users are able to reverse subledger journals that have been imported into General Ledger. In Oracle General Ledger Release 12 you can flag the journal sources that you wish to freeze, to prevent them from being reversed helping to improve reconciliation between subledgers and General ledger.
Improve reconciliation and auditability
27
12. Whats New in Oracle Internet Expenses?

Oracle Internet Expenses, a travel and expense management solution, is designed to ensure self service users comply with your expense reimbursement policies, while quickly and accurately entering and processing their expenses. In Release 12.1, Oracle Internet Expenses delivers benefits in these focus areas:

12.1. Mitigate risks and enforce compliance
12.1.1.
Policy Compliance with Global Per Diem and Mileage Organizations want to ensure that their travel and expenses policies are adhered to by their staff. Automating validations of travel and expense reports as widely as possible enforces compliance and reduces risk. The ability to enforce compliance with per diem and helps you comply with various statutory rules that dictate how users should be reimbursed. In Release 12.1 Oracle Internet Expenses allows you to upload per diem rates for the Continental United States (CONUS) and outside Continental United States (OCONUS), as provided by U.S. Government, the policy limits for meals and accommodation expenses. These limits are automatically enforced, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring greater travel policy compliance.
12.1.2.
Enhanced Per Diem and Mileage Calculations Expense policies vary by company and may be controlled by country regulations. For example, in the Nordic countries accumulated mileage count must be tracked and complex calculations supported to ensure that the appropriate amounts are reimbursed for the mileage expenditure. Accumulated mileage upload and configurable calculation formulas provide the flexibility needed to enforce policy compliance on mileage expenses.
12.1.3.
Automatic Matching of Advance Payments to Expense Reports To offset travel expenses for an employee, companies in the public sector and some organizations in the private sector will pay a cash advance. The benefit to the employee is that their out-of-pocket expenses are covered without any material impact to their personal finances. However, the risk of recovering the funds from the employee can be high and the process is often time-consuming. By automatically validating advances against expense reports entered and prompting the end user to apply outstanding cash advances to expense reports or to require an explanation if an advance is not applied to a
Mitigate risks and enforce compliance
28
specific expense report, the risk of recovering cash advances is reduced and the expense reporting process is streamlined. 12.1.4. Flexible Application of Cash Advances to Expense Reports A company paying advances to employees for upcoming travel expenses wants to ensure the advances are recouped. By prompting the end user to apply advances to expense reports helps mitigate the loss to some extent but there may be cases where the Payables department needs to intervene and apply an advance to an expense report. This is especially true if an advance has been open for a long time. In Release 12.1 Oracle Internet Expenses allows Payables staff to apply outstanding cash advances to employee's expense reports, providing greater control and reduces risk. In addition, you can configure audit selection rules to review expense reports that include advances to further ensure accuracy. 12.1.5. Expense Policy Adherence with Payment Holds and Automatic Notifications Employees submitting their expense reports without submitting required receipts should not be paid if they're not in compliance with expense policy. Organizations want to automate expense processing and at the same time ensure compliance to their expense policy. To provide this level of control, Oracle Internet Expenses can automatically place expense reports on hold for payment if required receipts have not been received. The employee can be automatically notified, to ensure the employee takes the action to rectify the issue, reducing the risk of non-compliance and ensuring that the organization reimburses expenses that are business related, and properly documented and deductible. 12.1.6. Enhanced Cost Center and Projects Approvals Limited visibility into pending travel costs allocated to a manager's project or departments has been a painful reality for most organizations. While expenses are correctly divided between various projects, managers dont often have the ability to review these transactions before they are posted. In Release 12.1 Oracle Internet Expenses, approvals from managers responsible for the appropriate cost centers or projects are required. The automatic routing of expense reports to the appropriate managers for approval increases efficiency and reduces risk. 12.1.7. Enforce Compliance with Itemization Control Inaccurate accounting is a consistent challenge, especially for expense reporting. In addition, employees don't want the burden of itemizing expenses. While this detailed information is useful in capturing actual travel expenses by category, employees entering an expense report want to save time and ideally want to just enter one expense line per expense. In reality, a single expense may represent multiple expense types such as hotel accommodation, food, internet connection, and phone charges. The Payables Department would expect this single expense to be itemized into specific lines for each of the expense types, to ensure the expenses are accounted for correctly and the expense policy is adhered to. The Payables Department can configure Oracle Internet Expenses using itemization control to prompt users to itemize certain types of expenses. Also, Payables' staff can access the employee's expense report to ensure the expenses are itemized, correctly accounted for and conform to the company's expense policy.
Mitigate risks and enforce compliance
29
12.1.8.
Regional Expense Policy Compliance through Flexible Configuration Companies operating worldwide may have different travel and expense policies to enforce in various countries. Fully flexible system configuration enables you to configure the expense submission and processing instructions according to local and regional requirements. You use region-based messages, for example, to provide different receipt submittal policies and related processes to meet shared-service or other organizational needs.
12.1.9.
Enhanced User Interface for Cost Efficient Audit Management During expense processing many organizations spend an inordinate amount of effort providing data and information for internal auditors to review. If the expense data is readily available and easy to review, this could help improve efficiency and facilitate better decision making. In Release 12.1 Oracle Internet Expenses auditors can use the Audit Expense Report to quickly verify expenses, review reports for policy compliance, and accounting accuracy. By displaying the relationship between the receipt and the itemized expense lines, auditor productivity is increased because they can quickly verify that required receipts have been received.
12.1.10.
Better Auditability of Expense Allocations When auditors review selected expense reports they may want to review expense reports where employees have used allocations, partly to check that the content matches the receipt, verify the accounting is correct and if incorrect, to be able to adjust the allocations. This ensures that the expenses are accounted for correctly in profit and loss statements. Oracle Internet Expenses enables auditors to view specific expense reports that include allocations and allows the auditors to easily update the allocations, as necessary, to comply with generally accepted accounting practices.
12.2. Reduce cost
12.2.1.
Effective GL Accounting Validations Inaccurate accounting slows period close and drives costs upward due to time and resources used to research, find, and correct invalid General Ledger accounting codes or combinations. However, the timing of when these errors are captured and corrected can be defined by your organization's business process. Whether your accounting department adjusts expense report accounting that fail or the employee that entered the expense report can correct expense accounting, using Oracle Internet Expenses and workflow gives you control of when account validation and correction process occurs. You can choose to let the end user correct any invalid accounting at time of expense report submission or you can choose to let your accounting department correct invalid code combinations via a workflow notification. The benefit is that your company can configure the expense report validation to fit your business needs.
Reduce cost
30
12.3. Increase productivity with streamlined and automated processes
12.3.1.
Accelerated Expense and Audit Process when Physical Receipts are not Required IRS regulations allow that electronic transactions from corporate travel cards are valid as receipts for most expenses with a few exceptions, such as car rentals. For companies that implement this best practice, their employees can submit expense reports without receipts, provided the receipts fall within a certain threshold. By automatically uploading the business expenses from the employee credit card directly into Oracle Internet Expenses using delivered interfaces and configuring the system appropriately, the need for physical receipts is eliminated which speeds up auditing and expense payment process.
12.3.2.
Automated Transaction File Transfers from American Express Expense entry and validation is a time consuming task. The ability to use corporate credit card data for expense entry and reporting helps streamline administration of credit card programs as well as expenses entry. More and more credit card companies provide self service websites for their customers to access and download credit card data on a regular basis. This consumer trend has also occurred for corporate travel card providers By using American Express self service website you can download your company's data files and import them into Oracle Internet Expenses. This flexibility allows your organization to automate this task within the expense process and to download the data at a time to suit your business.
12.3.3.
Automatic Itemization of Expenses from Visa Employer Credit Cards (Procurement Cards) are widely provided to employees in larger companies. This enables employees to pay their travel and expenses bills easily but also to help speed up expense processing. Credit Card companies have worked with suppliers to provide more detailed information within credit card files, to help minimize manual user intervention. Oracle Internet Expenses uses the detail transaction data to automatically itemize credit card transactions, reducing the time users spend completing expense reports, and ensuring transactions are accounted for properly.
12.3.4.
Rapid Expense Entry Process with Expense Allocations Completing expense reports is one of the least favorite activities of most business travelers. Any additional steps that need to be completed as part of expense reporting, such as allocations, is often viewed as cumbersome and time-consuming. Now users can speed up the expense entry by configuring allocation sets to use again and again for expense reports for rapid expense entry.
12.3.5.
Accelerated Expense Process with Parallel Approvals If an expense report has to be routed to various managers, due to various cost center or project charges, and it cannot be routed simultaneously to all the managers, the expense
Increase productivity with streamlined and automated processes
31
processing takes longer, due to the wait for each manager to approve the expense. Using parallel approvals enables the end user to send the expense report for approval to multiple approvers simultaneously, requesting their approval all at once, thus speeding up the overall timeframe for expense report completion and payments. In this way, organizations can simplify expense processing and improve overall productivity. 12.3.6. Faster Approvals with Document Attachments As modern technology advances companies look at gaining benefits from it, one of them being the area of document attachments. With increased compliance regulations related to travel and entertainment, documenting who was at an event, the purpose and employee and non-employee attendees, is critical. Along with expense report receipts that can be scanned and added as document attachments, end users also have the option to attach meeting agendas or separate documents related to the event. The ability to attach receipts to expense reports facilitates more efficient approvals, since managers can access and view the attached document online as part of their approval processing. 12.3.7. Flexible Expense Allocations with Split Expenses Capturing project costs which include associated travel is challenging for project-centric divisions or organizations. However, the business need to capture this information enables organizations to compete more effectively and to determine opportunities for greater efficiencies internally. Full flexibility and improved usability is provided by allowing end users to split expenses across multiple accounting segment values or multiple projects or tasks and giving them the flexibility to split one, many, or all expenses at the same time using equal percentages, or user-defined percentages or by individual expense amounts. In Release 12.1, Internet Expenses enables you to meet the requirement to capture project costs without imposing additional work on the business traveler.
Increase productivity with streamlined and automated processes
32
13. Whats New in Oracle Loans?

Oracle Loans is designed to support the full range of business activities associated with creating, approving, funding, servicing and monitoring loans. Its purpose is to automate and standardize the loan origination and loan servicing processes for lending organizations. Oracle Loans is geared toward federal and state/local agencies and other lending organizations that offer direct loans or extended repayment plans. In Release 12.1, Oracle Loans delivers benefits in these focus areas:

13.1. Streamline loan processing and enforce policy for agents
13.1.1.
Streamlined Loan Processing with Configurable Loan Types and Products
index based rates payment frequency disbursements schedule of multiple
13.1.2.
Multiple Disbursement Loans
convert them to loans automatically
13.2. Proactively manage loan portfolio
Streamline loan processing and enforce policy for agents
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13.2.1.
Loan Portfolios, Graphs & Online Reporting for Proactive Portfolio Management and Reporting Senior management at lending organizations expects their loan agents to work proactively to ensure they're as productive as possible. Configurable online dashboard with key portfolio data and graphs, informative reporting and automated notifications place all the actionable information to the loan agents fingertips.
13.3. Reduce credit risk
13.3.1.
Sophisticated Credit Decisions with Automated Credit Reviews Lending organizations want to ensure they minimize their risk by ensuring they're not lending to a person or company that has a poor credit history and therefore may not be able to repay the loan. Automating the credit review process for a loan, increases efficiency and reduces revenue risk. This credit review process is automated and tightly integrated between Oracle Loans and Oracle Credit Management enabling the loans agent to review the credit status for the loan at any point in time to make the appropriate decision for a loan.
13.3.2.
Reduced Risk with Federal Budgetary Control U.S. Federal Agencies enforce funds control, which means that before submitting the loan for approval it must be funds checked against the funds available. Fund checking for loans is fully automated and the loan agent is alerted if the funds check fails with a warning or error, enabling the loan agent to take actions to either cancel loan or request appropriate funding for the loan.
Reduce credit risk
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14. Whats New in Oracle Payables?

Oracle Payables provides the integration and flexibility you need to efficiently manage disbursements while keeping strong controls over matching, budgets, approval processes, and payments. As a cornerstone to the Procure to Pay flow, Payables provides process collaboration across departments within the enterprise and beyond to suppliers. Oracle Payables assist users in meeting the demands of corporate governance, promotes fiscal discipline, and meets complex and diverse statutory requirements. In Release 12.1, Oracle Payables delivers benefits in these focus areas:

14.1. Reduce risk and improve compliance

Regulatory compliance continues to be at the front-and-center of concerns for finance professionals and corporate executives. Furthermore, businesses are feeling the pressure to effectively leverage technology while better understanding and mitigating process risks. Oracle Payables enables companies to improve control over supplier invoices and payments. To handle evolving business structures, Oracle's centralized and configurable centralized accounting solution enables compliance with multiple legislative, industry or geographic requirements concurrently for a single entity. 14.1.1. Greater Legal Context Visibility with Legal Entity and Improved Transaction Processing For organizations operating a shared services center responsible for processing transactions for multiple legal entities, the ability to identify the correct legal entity for transactions is critical to ensure accurate tax, currency and accounting treatment. Oracle Payables in Release 12.1 captures transactional data within the context of the legal entity owning this data, thus enabling better, more streamlined statutory compliance. Invoices and payments indicate the operating unit and the legal entity owner of the transaction. The legal entity can be used as selection criteria when preparing pay runs. Multi-Org Access Control in Oracle Payables gives your SSC staff the ability to access and process transactional data for multiple operating units from a single responsibility. By leveraging MOAC in a shared services environment, companies can achieve significant savings in operating costs without compromising data security. 14.1.2. Centralized Payment Processing Many organizations are moving towards shared service centers and one of most common processes to move to a shared service environment is payment processing. In Release 12.1, organizations can greatly increase processing efficiency of all payments through the centralization of all payment activity with Oracle Payments. Separated from Oracle Payables, Payments now manages all disbursements. While the payments themselves are not paying invoices of different operating units or cross currency, one payment run can be submitted for multiple currencies and operating units leaving less batches to manage.
Reduce risk and improve compliance
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By adopting Oracles standard reporting submission process, pay runs can be scheduled periodically or with a more flexible schedule. 14.1.3. Automated Netting of Customer and Supplier Balances Considering todays business dynamics, a vendor may also be a customer of the same organization, thus evolving into a full trading partner. So, if you are both selling to and procuring from the same trading partner, netting your mutual balances before making payments is a common practice that allows all parties to save on transaction fees. You are now able to determine whether you or your trading partner has a greater balance outstanding and update your books, collect payments or make payments accordingly. The matching of open receivables and open payables is automated and reduces administrative and processing costs associated with making payments for invoices that can be netted. This helps an organization manage its resources and relationships effectively.
14.2. Streamline and automate processing

It is not uncommon these days for a corporation to deal with hundreds or thousands of suppliers and funnel payments through dozens or even hundreds of bank accounts. Managing a global supplier and bank account network can be a challenging task, especially if it is centralized in a shared services center. Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 empowers payables managers with streamlined invoice processing and improved supplier visibility and maintenance. 14.2.1. Easier and Faster Supplier Maintenance Entering and periodically managing supplier information to ensure that it is accurate is critical for organizations to reduce the risks associated with duplicate or incorrect payments. In Release 12.1, the new user interface for supplier entry and maintenance presents a clear distinction between the suppliers company details and terms and controls for the trading relationship. This user interface leverages Trading Community Architecture to deliver these capabilities. Also, attributes specific to particular functional areas such as Oracle Payables, Purchasing and Receiving can be controlled with the use of Function Security while additional tax and legal registrations provide key information to meet your reporting and compliance needs. 14.2.2. Simplified Setup of Supplier Bank Accounts To streamline vendor management, bank Account setup is simplified with centralized maintenance and security of the bank account information. Enhancements to the setup of supplier bank accounts remove some processing restrictions and achieve greater control and security. Bank accounts are modeled centrally and the bank account is tied directly to the trading partner allowing one bank account definition to be leveraged by a supplier trading partner and shared if the trading partner is also an employee or customer. 14.2.3. Improved Invoice Processing with Invoice Lines Verification of invoices and fast, controlled resolution of issues is a top priority for Payables and Purchasing departments. The addition of invoice lines is a key architectural change which offers the ability for line level workflow approval, matching between an invoice line and a purchase order shipment or receipt, and deferred
Streamline and automate processing
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accounting schedules. Furthermore, it facilitates the capture and transfer of additional, pertinent information to and from Oracle Projects and Oracle Fixed Assets. 14.2.4. Streamlined Invoice Processing for Complex Services like Contract Financing, Retainage, and Progress Terms Managing and controlling services spend continues to be a topic of great interest and importance to all sectors of the economy. These contracts tend to have high dollar values, often running into several millions of dollars. They also tend to be long lead time contracts, sometimes extending over multiple years. These contracts are characterized by progress payments that are governed by the advanced payment terms, and which are released based on completion of work. Additionally, complex work contracts can also have provisions for Contract Financing making these difficult to manage and track. In Release 12.1, Oracle Payables along with many other products has streamlined the management of complex services projects. Complex payment terms and conditions for fixed price contracts can now be captured during the procurement contract flow. Automated calculations for prepayment recoupment and retainage take the complexity out of invoicing against a complex work contract. Matching prepayments to approved purchase order items add a level of control to prepayments that only invoices could accomplish previously. Work Confirmations can result in self billed invoices reducing work load. Retainage release is also managed with tight controls allowing only the amount that was actually retained. Payables also provides extended support for planned verses actual control for fixed priced, complex work contracts thereby reducing the risk associated with these type of contracts. 14.2.5. Enhanced Invoice Approval with Line Level Approval For an organization to operate effectively and efficiently, it is not only important to streamline its business processes, but its also important to have all the checks and balances in place to effectively control departments and spending. In Release12.1, Payables has continued its focus on Sarbanes- Oxley requirements. Routing controls are provided by Oracle Workflow and Approvals Management with user actions and informative details delivered by Payables bringing to users an architected partnership for defining policies in the application itself instead of on paper or spreadsheets. With the introduction of Invoice Lines, users are able to further extend their approval policy granularity in Oracle Approvals Management for individual lines of an invoice. Notification details are targeted to the level of approval required and embedded with a view of the invoice including summary amounts, essential line information, approver sequence, and attachments. Approvers of invoices submitted without a purchase order can enter accounting details as they approve. Employees that take part in the verification and approval of invoices are better targeted based on line and invoice level information. Policy configurations determine if matched invoices require further approval or not. Approval notifications linked directly to interactive pages provide users with action choices and a bountiful amount of information about the transaction. 14.2.6. Improved Non PO Invoice Processing Considering todays business environment, an organization needs to truly leverage its partners. There is a need to create seamless integration of processes and resources, so that both the partner and the organization can transform their businesses to compete effectively with the competitors. One such capability is the ability of a vendor to enter their invoices into the organizations system via Self-Service Interface. Self Service
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Entry reduces the cost of transaction processing and improves supplier satisfaction. Self
Service invoice entry has been extended to include transactions where a purchase order has not been obtained upfront. Invoices entered by suppliers where a purchase order has not been obtained are represented as Invoice Requests. Invoice requests are visible in Oracle Payables but are not paid or accounted until the invoice can be verified and approved. 14.2.7. Effective Collaboration with Suppliers through Oracle iSupplier Portal The verification of invoices and fast, controlled resolution of issues is a top priority for Payables and Purchasing departments. Strong internal processes, streamlined dispute management, and supplier collaboration equate to timely payment of invoices and improved trading partner relationships. In Release 12.1, designated users can negotiate with suppliers when disputes arise. Negotiation actions are tracked and routing, timeouts, and reminders managed by Workflow. This also enables payables clerical staff to be utilized for tasks other than having to follow-up on approvals, proper costs centers or resolve buyer/ supplier disputes. Suppliers are able to negotiate online via Oracle iSupplier Portal. All changes and comments entered during the collaboration are tracked in Payables and can be viewed at any time.
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15. Whats New is Oracle Payments?

Oracle Payments provides a highly configurable and robust engine to disburse and receive payments. Oracle Payments is a fundamental part of the Oracle Applications architecture, and is provided with multiple products that require support for payment processing. As the new central payment engine, Oracle Payments processes invoice payments from Oracle Payables, bank account transfers from Oracle Cash Management, and settlements against credit cards and bank accounts from Oracle Receivables. Oracle Payments provides the infrastructure needed to connect these applications and others with third party payment systems and financial institutions. With Oracle Payments companies are able to efficiently centralize the payment process across multiple organizations, currencies, and regions. Better working capital management can be achieved by providing cash managers real-time visibility into cash inflows and outflows. A full audit trail and control is supported through a single point of payment administration. In Release 12.1, Oracle Payments delivers benefits in these focus areas:

15.1. Reduce cost
15.1.1.
Configurable Formatting Framework An organization usually works with multiple vendors and multiple financial institutions that accept payments in different payment formats, making it necessary to easily create and maintain different payment formats. The new formatting framework in Release 12.1 along with the rich library of seeded formats will greatly lower the need for writing customizations and reduce implementation costs to a fraction. Users can configure new formats with minimal effort via familiar Word document-based templates without costly external consulting help. Implementation team and functional end-users benefit from the user-friendly, template-based approach to handle formats.
15.1.2.
Reduced Costs with Flexible Validation Model An organization may process several thousand payments during a payment cycle. An erroneous transaction or a wrong payment instruction can result in delayed payments as well as additional charges or fees to reprocess the same payment. The flexible validation model in Release 12.1 allows users to achieve greater control through upfront validations on documents that need to be paid, thereby improving their straight through processing rates and reducing costly errors as well as manual interventions.
Reduce cost
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15.1.3.
End to End Process Automation Business processes that require a lot of manual intervention are not only prone to errors but also increase operating costs. Oracle Payments supports end-to-end electronic payment processing that includes validation, aggregation, formatting and secure transmission of payments resulting in high straight through processing rates. High straight through processing (STP) rates helps lower costs associated with the disbursement process. In Release 12.1, check printing has been enhanced to make the initiation of printing, recovery from printing errors, and recording of print results simple and intuitive.
15.1.4.
Easier Reconciliation of Funds Capture Transactions Reconciliation of funds capture transactions is a necessary but time consuming process for most organizations. The new dashboard approach to monitoring the funds capture process in Release 12.1 provides significant productivity enhancements by making it easier to reconcile funds capture transactions (such as credit card payments) Shared service centers and payment administrators can use the new dashboards to effectively manage the payment process across multiple organizations and reduce administrative costs.
15.2. Mitigate risk
15.2.1.
Improved Visibility with Payment Dashboards Top priority of CFOs and Treasurers is to keep their firm liquid and optimize their working capital; Oracle Payments provides the visibility to make this possible via the Funds Capture and Funds Disbursements dashboards to monitor the payment and receipt process. Users can achieve better working capital management with real-time visibility into cash inflows and outflows and have a full audit trail and control through single point of administration.
15.2.2.
Secure Payment Data Repository Security of sensitive payment data including bank account numbers and credit card information is critical for organizations. The single payments repository provided by Oracle Payments stores all this information in a central place which allows better control and encryption capabilities.
15.2.3.
Efficient Disbursement Process Reducing the administrative burden of making payments and achieving payment processing efficiencies is key to optimal performance for Payments department In Release 12.1, payables managers can simplify their processes by submitting fewer invoice selection batches, each one spanning multiple payment formats, bank accounts, and payment currencies while payment administrators can lower the cost of the disbursement process by creating check runs and EFT payment files that span multiple invoice selection batches and multiple organizations.
Mitigate risk
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15.2.4.
Operational Risk Management with Improved Credit Card Security In the present business environment, Credit Card Payments have become more prevalent as instruments for a financial transaction. It is therefore increasingly important that customers and organizations be able to protect themselves against risks due to identity thefts and frauds. This risk is reduced by consistent implementation of credit card security functions throughout the funds capture process.
15.3. Streamline and automate processing

Depending on your industry, it is not uncommon for a corporation to process hundreds or thousands of payments per day. Organization are moving closer to centralized shared services to manage these large volumes of transactions. Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 empowers your payment managers with flexible setup, centralized payment engine and tools aimed to support customer satisfaction during funds capture process. Similar improvements in funds disbursement process improve vendor relationships. 15.3.1. Improved Customer Service with Support for Additional Payment Options In order to improve overall customer satisfaction, an organization needs to offer options that increase customer flexibility. Support for additional payment instruments like PINless debit cards provides allows organizations to offer more payment choices to their customers thereby improving customer satisfaction. 15.3.2. Improved Customer Satisfaction with Notification Functionality Organizations are under constant pressure to manage their customer base effectively and constantly improve their level of satisfaction. This can be attained, if an organization operates in a transparent manner and customers stay informed of their standing with the organization. The ability to notify payers like customers via a notification letter whenever a customers bank account is debited for a payment helps improve customer satisfaction.
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16. Whats New in Oracle Property Manager

Oracle Property Manager streamlines and automates lease administration and space management, enabling you to more intelligently manage your real estate portfolio. Whether you are a corporate, commercial, or retail/franchise operation, Oracle Property Manager offers a comprehensive solution for reducing costs and identifying new revenue opportunities, minimizing contractual and financial risk, and providing data transparency that helps maximize the value of your real estate.
16.1. Reduced administrative overhead of tracking occupancy

To better abstract and manage critical lease information and other critical contractual information we have revisited this area. 16.1.1. Streamlined Financial Operations Reentering lease calculation information increases the potential for user error. With the introduction of tenancy extension and contraction automatic update, the cumbersome process, of reentering lease calculation information has been eliminated. Organizations desire to continue improving the efficiency of payment and billing processes and reduce the amount of errors in their financial operations. One particular area that was troublesome in prior releases Property Manager related to changes made to a lease schedule. Previously, Oracle Property Manager could create only one schedule for a lease for a date, which meant that once you had approved a schedule for a particular date, you could not create any new items for that date. Now, with schedules for same schedule day, new draft schedules are created when it is necessary because of approved schedules. 16.1.2. Effectively manage occupancy A much more efficient and accurate process to manage occupancy has been introduced in Release 12.1. With the many different possible tenancy agreements, terms and extensions it became apparent that additional choices and functionality was required to enable far less customer intervention, and creative workarounds when creating or altering associated terms, tenancies, and agreements. Better handling of occupancy has been addressed with such enhancements as new lease statuses which enable you to generate deposit payments or bills before finalizing the lease. New lease statuses lease extension options enabling you to choose whether you want terms and tenancies extended when you extend the lease. Second, you can choose to have variable rent and rent increase agreements extended automatically. And third, Property Managers now manage the extension of normalized terms when they put a lease in month-to-month or holdover status then later return it to active status.
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition Reduced administrative overhead of tracking occupancy 42
16.2. Improved variable rent calculation

The variable rent calculation has been revisited (enhanced and streamlined) with the intent to make you better equipped to automatically calculate rent based on sales volume while supporting industry practices of deductions from sales, banded breakpoints, caps, floors, ceilings, and netting of other rent related items. Allowing the generation of payments and billings based on user-defined volume data. 16.2.1. Streamlined variable rent calculation process Breakpoint handling had been a significant inconvenience and source of potential error, often requiring cumbersome workarounds. Since it is common in leases to have breakpoint definitions change over time and not necessarily at the start of a year, customers have requested greater flexibility to reduce the current cumbersome workarounds. Increased breakpoint flexibility with breakpoint definitions extending beyond one year has been introduced in Release 12.1. The ability to directly change existing volumes saves substantial efforts and reduces errors. An efficient process for entering revised sales volumes has been provided. As a user you are no longer required to enter the revised amounts by adjustments. You can populate the descriptive fields for one or more Line Items saves time and reduces error. Every field on the agreements tab can now be automatically filled in with default values from the selected variable rent template. 16.2.2. Added flexibility to variable rent calculation Keeping your agreements current and accurate and having the flexibility to support a wide variety of additional industry practices is key with variable rent calculations. Customers have had to abandon an agreement and create a new replacement agreement because they were not able to make needed changes due to aspects of the variable rent calculation functionality not being flexible enough. With improvements to areas such as
natural breakpoints, early termination of rent increase agreements, month-tomonth roll forward of variable rent agreements and updates to allowances and abatements now, you can amend agreements or correct setup mistakes even for periods
for which terms have been approved. You can make these changes effective retroactively if necessary. 16.2.3. Broaden the variable rent calculation fundamentals After further research with customers and understanding their business scenarios, we determined that additional flexibility was needed with the cumulative calculation method to support variable rent calculations. In Release 12.1, the cumulative calculation method now supports:
16.2.4.
Usability improvements The ability to see the total picture on one view as well as get a comprehensive view of all parts of the variable rent calculation is critical with the complex nature of this process. Since the variable rent calculation is inherently complex, especially depending on the terms of a lease, Oracle Property Manager in Release 12.1 now shows all steps in the
Improved variable rent calculation
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calculation in a form that is logical, allowing you to understand and confirm every step of the process. The improved display and navigation will help you will find your way around the variable rent screens more easily and because information is consolidated on a much smaller number of windows you can now navigate to the information you need to see more quickly.
16.3. Reduced complexity of index based rent adjustments

Index based rent adjustments are very complex, Oracle Property Manager aims to simplify and apply structure to this complexity; enabling you to automatically assess and generate the appropriate index based rent adjustments based on fluctuations of various indices. We have added new functionality in this area aimed at providing better accuracy, more flexibility on your approach to the calculation and provide automation where possible to remove the chance of human error and speed up the process. 16.3.1. Ability to early terminate a rent increase agreement Cumbersome workarounds had to be adopted to early terminate a rent increase agreement, Oracle Property Manager in Release 12.1 enables you to early terminate a rent increase agreement to any date, regardless of whether terms have been approved or not. You can also extend agreements. 16.3.2. Streamline Process In an effort to better handle and process adjustments (currently seen as a slow manual process), accurately and effectively (removing the chance of human error and speed up the process) we have made a number of process changes, examples being: you can roll forward leases in month-to-month status automatically by means of a new batch concurrent process. Oracle Property Manager now provides support for rent increase agreements under which rent is to increase by some multiple of the actual index change amount. 16.3.3. Improved handling of back bills One-time back bills create spikes in the basis for natural breakpoints resulting in incorrect variable rent calculations. With Oracle Property Manager in Release 12.1 two new options address this. T he single term option has additional advantages of reducing the number of terms on the lease and simplifying transactions. Comprehensive Reporting Due to the complexity of index based rent adjustments and the value of reports in this area. Multiple RXi reports have been created; these reports are highly configurable, so that you can tailor the reports to your needs and highlight all pertinent information.
16.4. Ability to manage complex operating expenses

The Operating Expenses module is a complete solution for tenants managing operating expense agreements, own charges, and in validating the accuracy of these charges; functionality identified as very useful, and a perspective not provided prior to this release. Managing operating expense, or CAM, charges is very important to retailers. These charges frequently make up a large amount of their total rent. Retail landlords generally attempt to recovery 100% of common area expenses from tenants, keeping base rent relatively low. Operating Expense charges are common on office leases as well.
Reduced complexity of index based rent adjustments
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16.4.1.
Capture agreements in a structured way

Its important to provide a consistent way to capture, refer to, and compare information about agreements and terms across a portfolio from a tenant perspective, keeping an active log and up-to-date record of all agreements. The new Operating Expense Agreement functionality in Oracle Property Manager in Release 12.1 provides a place for you to capture all of your Operating Expense or CAM agreements in a structured way.
16.4.2.
Easy Reconciliation Many types of errors can occur with landlord calculations and result in over-charges, often these charges are hard to prove and time consuming to validate. Oracle Property Manager in Release 12.1 will help you to recreate the landlords reconciliation statement with a minimum amount of data entry. The Oracle Property Manager reconciliation provides an excellent workbench for what is sometimes called a desktop audit. To facilitate your analysis, catch errors, and provide an effective way for you to communicate issues back to the landlord you can see your statement and expected values in a side-by-side layout. To preserve a history of the analysis and any disagreements and provide a view of how much money has been saved by your audit efforts with the landlord you can save multiple revisions of the same reconciliation.
Ability to manage complex operating expenses
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17. Whats New in Oracle Receivables?

Oracle Receivables is an invoicing, payment, deduction, and revenue management application that streamlines your order-to-cash process while providing strong financial controls and strategic financial information. In Release 12.1, Oracle Receivables delivers benefits in these focus areas:

17.1. Mitigate risk and enforce compliance
17.1.1.
Flexible Revenue Recognition Rules, Including Partial Period Revenue Recognition Various accounting standards such as U.S. GAAP and International Accounting Standards mandate that companies need to adhere to strict revenue recognition requirements, which require flexible revenue policies to be implemented dependent on the terms and conditions in a sales contract or sales order. Revenue recognition in Oracle Receivables Release 12.1 has been enhanced to provide greater flexibility in defining revenue recognition schedules and configurable accounting rules for treatment of revenue allocations for partial periods. event based revenue management allows users to define revenue deferral reasons and defer revenue to an unearned revenue account until a certain event occurs.
17.1.2.
COGS and Revenue Matching Generally accepted accounting principles mandate that a company's statement of financial earnings must take revenue recognition and cost matching principles into account. The matching principle of accounting states that each expense item related to revenue earned must be recorded in the same accounting period as the revenue it helped to earn. COGS and Revenue Matching satisfies this matching principle by synchronizing the recognition of revenue with the recognition of associated COGS. For example, if revenue is partially recognized, the corresponding COGS are proportionately recognized.
17.1.3.
Reduced Risk with Payment Based Revenue Recognition With the changing regulatory environment, companies are turning to payment based revenue recognition as the answer to meeting strict revenue recognition rules for specific business transactions. The enhanced Event-Based Revenue Management achieves payment based revenue recognition by associating transaction lines with revenue impacting contingencies. Revenue for impaired loans, evergreen-leasing agreements, and various miscellaneous fees can now be automatically deferred at first and, then,
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recognized when customers pay. You are able to take a cautious approach to revenue recognition thus reducing your overall risk. 17.1.4. Quick Resolution of Credit Card Payment Errors Minimize risk by quickly rectifying errors with your receivables. The new Credit Card Error Handling feature in Oracle Receivables Release 12.1 provides a quick and efficient method to handle credit card errors that occur during payment authorization and capture. 17.1.5. Regulatory Compliance with E-Business Tax Solution Many companies operating globally must be able to process invoices with the appropriate tax according to the local rules of the countries in which they operate. There is therefore a need for a fully flexible tax solution to enable companies to easily define tax rules that can be automatically calculated and applied to the transactions as appropriate. Oracle E-Business Tax provides a centralized tax engine with very flexible and configurable rules to enable you to address varied requirements across the globe. The tax engine is fully integrated with Oracle Receivables, which means that item lines automatically generate one or more tax lines depending on the tax setup you defined.
17.2. Streamline and automate processes
17.2.1.
Granular Cash Application at the Invoice Line Level When a customer disputes the invoiced amount and remits only a partial payment, it may be challenging to resolve the issue and collect the money if cash specialists cannot easily identify which lines have been paid and which have not. Line Level Cash Application allows the application of receipts to specific transaction items such as individual lines, groups of lines, or tax or freight buckets. This enables increased efficiency when interacting with the customer, as you will know specifically which items you've not yet received payment for, aiding your discussion when following up with the customer.
17.2.2.
Streamlined Funds Capture Processing through Centralized Payment Engine Timeliness is critical when it comes to processing revenue. Seamless integration provides better real-time payment processing status information to Receivables users. Oracle Receivables leverages funds processing in Oracle Payments, including the new customer bank accounts model, to support the automated, electronic funds capture via Credit Cards, ACH, and bank-to-bank transfers. Oracle Payments stores and handles all payment related information for automatic payment processing.
17.2.3.
Improved Chargeback Reconciliation Cardholders can dispute credit card charges with their card-issuing bank and, when they do, the merchants account is charged back by the card's issuing bank. The new feature
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allows you to reconcile balances accurately by recording credit card chargebacks in the Receivables system as a specific activity against a receipt.
17.3. Improve customer bill presentment

Oracle Bill Presentment Architecture (BPA) allows you to retrieve billing data from multiple data sources for presentment on a bill. This means that the physically presented bill is no longer limited to information contained within Oracle Receivables. By separating bill presentment from transaction accounting, Oracle BPA allows for more understandable and comprehensive bills, increasing the likelihood and timeliness of bill payment. 17.3.1. Improved Customer Communication with Attachment Printing
automatically printing any PDF document
Improve customer bill presentment
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18. What is Oracle Subledger Accounting?

Oracle Subledger Accounting introduced in Release 12 enables corporations to comply with corporate, local and managerial accounting and audit requirements via increased control, visibility and efficiency. Oracle Subledger Accounting increases control by storing a complete and balanced journal entry for each subledger transaction and GL date. Detailed drilldown and audit information is captured for each journal entry line. Oracle Subledger Accounting streamlines the close by providing a common accounting engine, so that all Oracle products and non-Oracle products can transfer controlled and summarized data to the General Ledger using a standard methodology and auditable, reviewable process. Oracle Subledger Accounting increases management visibility by supporting multiple parallel accounting representations. Corporate accounting policies can be defined and implemented globally; free from limitations imposed by local fiscal reporting requirements. Oracle Subledger Accounting allows accounting policies to be created once and deployed many times. Oracle Subledger Accounting also enables business users to control all aspects of journal entry layout including debits and credits, accounting flexfields, descriptions and GL date. This is paramount for compliance if local statutory requirements stipulate that each accounting line must show a detailed business event description. In Release 12.1, Oracle Subledger Accounting allows users to:

18.1. Meet diverse global accounting and tax requirements
18.1.1.
Simultaneous Compliance with Multiple Accounting Requirements With the movement towards standardizing on global accounting and financial reporting standards, organization are often in a situation where they need to produce accounting according to their current accounting standards, as well as, produce their financial reporting according to IFRS/IAS. Oracle Subledger Accounting (SLA) in Release 12.1 enables corporations to comply with corporate and local accounting and financial reporting requirements simultaneously. When creating multiple accounting representations of the same transaction, Oracle Subledger Accounting ensures that all journals are complete and valid before they may be posted, which minimizes reconciliation issues.
Meet diverse global accounting and tax requirements
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18.1.2.
Increased Flexibility with Configurable Accounting Rules In order to achieve a competitive advantage, companies must continue to lower the cost of doing business. One way that many companies are making this happen is by standardizing and centralizing administrative processes and accounting automation. When an organization standardizes its accounting policies, it needs to document the policy, communicate it to those who must apply it, and ensure the standard policy is enforced not always an easy task. In Release 12.1, Subledger Accounting provides you with the ability to control and enforce your standard accounting practices and also gives you the flexibility to handle the exceptions and define additional sets of accounting rules where needed. Subledger Accounting offers maximum flexibility for generating accounting entries by making it possible for the user to configure accounting rules based on a number of attributes of a transaction.
18.1.3.
Enhanced Reporting Currency Functionality Multiple Reporting Currencies functionality is enhanced to support all journal sources. Reporting sets of books are now known simply as reporting currencies. Every journal that is posted in the primary currency of a ledger can be automatically converted into one or more reporting currencies. This conversion can be performed by Oracle Subledger Accounting, to convert all subledger journal entries, or by Oracle General Ledger, to convert more summarized General Ledger journals. You can choose to convert any journal source and category.
18.2. Centralize accounting policies for greater control, transparency and auditability
18.2.1.
Summarized Information for Streamlined General Ledger without Sacrificing Details Most enterprises store only summary level data in their General Ledger to keep it streamlined and ensure good performance for system processes. The downside of maintaining only summary level data in the General Ledger becomes apparent when you need to see the detail behind the accounting balances. You need to go back to each individual source system or application that affected the general ledger account balance to get the information you want. This can be a tedious and time-consuming task. In Release 12, Subledger Accounting provides your organization with the best of both worlds. By maintaining the detailed accounting for subledger transactions in the new subledger accounting architecture and providing summary options for transfer of accounting journals to the General Ledger, means the General Ledger will not be burdened with granular detail. The seamless integration between General Ledger and Subledger Accounting ensures that youre able to easily analyze the summarized balances in General Ledger through integrated drill-down to subledger accounting journals and all the way to the subledger transactions for full visibility of data.
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition Centralize accounting policies for greater control, transparency and auditability
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18.2.2.
Draft Accounting for Previewing Accounting Impact

Enterprises wish to minimize accounting errors resulting from last minute adjustment transactions, manual adjustments to correct errors or for businesses operating in certain European countries where reversing a journal with an error in accounting is viewed negatively. Oracle Subledger Accounting allows you to preview the subledger accounting journal with the exact GL accounts that would be impacted by the transaction before you actually post it. Draft or preview accounting, simplifies accounting for business transactions in subledger applications. It also gives an organization the ability to modify accounting and test the results of an accounting policy change before deploying the change across multiple ledgers or multiple parts of the business, reducing risks of inaccurate fiscal reporting.
18.2.3.
Increased Productivity with Automatic Replacement for Disabled Accounts Subledger Accounting in conjunction with Oracle General Ledger has introduced the ability for users to specify a replacement account for any account combination that has been disabled. When an account is disabled, users can continue creating accounting for transactions that include the account, without errors. Oracle Subledger Accounting replaces the disabled account with the replacement account and continues processing. This improves processing efficiency by enabling the successful creation of journal entries with minimal user intervention if an account has been disabled and minimizes any fallout during the closing process. Oracle Subledger Accounting also stores substituted disabled accounts on subledger journal lines for audit and reconciliation purposes.
18.2.4.
Gapless Sequential Numbering for Audit and Global Legal Compliance For global organizations, Oracle Subledger Accounting provides the capability to track transactions within the financial application with unique sequential numbering. This proves vital for analysis, drill-down and audit capabilities as well as enables fulfillment of legal reporting requirements.
18.2.5.
Best Practices for Intermediary Account Processing Given the variety of ways to "manage your business", Oracle Subledger Accounting offers support for varying business flows by formalizing the generation of global accounting entries into centralized accounting rules. By allowing business users to create accounting definitions that handle cases where there is a logical relationship for two or more transactions for intermediary accounts, greater controls across the enterprise are enabled. Users can create accounting policies based upon user specified product business flows. This allows accounting definitions to explicitly handle cases where there is a logical relationship between accounting for two or more transactions facilitating reconciliation for intermediary accounts. Enforcement of the accounting rules is automatically achieved when SLA creates the accounting entries for all subledger transactions using the rules that have been defined. Managing accounting generation using business flows in Subledger Accounting is illustrated with the following two examples: When creating the accounting for a payment, you can indicate that the account used to book the invoice liability, through the invoice transaction, should be relieved
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition Centralize accounting policies for greater control, transparency and auditability
51
When accounting for a Payables invoice matched to a purchase order, you can indicate that the expense account for the Payables invoice be derived from the purchase order
18.2.6.
Reduced Cost and Unparallel Visibility with a Single Global Accounting Repository Oracle Financials Accounting Hub enables you to centralize accounting data from any third party transactional system. Together, they offer an open repository and a centralized accounting engine for transactional data from any third party source.
18.3.1.
Reduced Period End Closing Time with Straight through Accounting Processing Straight through processing allows real-time, single step posting to all relevant ledgers (primary, secondary and reporting ledgers). This allows users to create subledger accounting entries, transfer and post the GL accounting in a single step. When creating journal entries either online or offline by the concurrent program, users can choose to immediately transfer and post the accounting in General Ledger.
18.3.2.
Simplified Customer and Supplier Balance Reconciliation Keeping payables and receivables balances reconciled to General Ledger is often challenging for most organizations.
party control account. 18.3.3. Support for Automated Multi-Period Accounting Oracle Subledger Accounting supports multi-period accounting enabling users to create accrual and recognition journal entries to allocate costs over a range of accounting periods. Users can also configure the GL dates, a prorating method, and have the ability to create a single recognition journal based upon the multi-period end date. This recurring entry allocates the costs according to these definitions and streamlines the entire process. Depending on your business practices, you may need to intermediately reverse accrual journal entries. Oracle Subledger Accounting allows you to define if an accrual journal
Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition Streamline and automate processes 52
entry needs to be automatically reversed ether next day or next accounting period. It is possible to drill to the related reversal when viewing an accrual journal entry and vice versa. 18.3.4. Automatic Foreign Currency Gain/Loss Calculations Ensuring accuracy of foreign currency gain/loss calculations is critical for global organizations. By automating the capture of foreign currency gains/losses and the creation of accounting entries in the ledger currency due to foreign currency fluctuations customers will substantially increase the efficiencies of this processing. In Oracle Subledger Accounting, the gain/loss amounts are calculated and reported to the appropriate accounts using company defined business rules. Oracle Subledger Accounting can use conversion information such as the conversion rate, entered amount and currency information to calculate accounted and gain/loss amounts. 18.3.5. Quicker Upgrades and Implementations with Application Accounting Definitions Loader When implementing ERP systems enterprises want to be able to export setup defined in a test environment to other test environments and the production environment to save time and increase efficiency. The Application Accounting Definitions (AAD) Loader enables customers to import and export application accounting definitions and journal entry setups. Users can build and test their journal entry setups on a test instance, export them, and then import them to their production instance. The AAD Loader also supports concurrent development and version control of the application accounting definitions. 18.3.6. Flexible Standard Reporting Most enterprises have a large number of customized reports to address various business needs of their end users, and the maintenance of such customized reports often require specialist IT developer skills. Oracle Subledger Accounting reports are built to allow end users such as your business analysts or accountants to take full advantage of Oracle BI Publisher. The combination of BI Publisher and Oracle Subledger Accounting allows end-users to easily create reports by copying existing report templates and modifying them using MS Word or Adobe Acrobat to match their specific business requirements, eliminating expensive report customizations. The business users can take charge and get the results that they need with the assurance that Oracle security will only give these users visibility to the data within their responsibility. 18.3.7. Improved Reporting and Analysis with Supporting References Enterprises are always looking for ways to improve performance. Sometimes the chart of accounts isnt sufficient to help with performance analysis. Other business dimensions, such as geography, sales channel, industry, product category, which are not stored in the chart of accounts but could be important key business drivers for an enterprise. Supporting references in Subledger Accounting enables you to store key business dimensions with your subledger accounting journals and to track and generate analytical balances in Subledger Accounting by supporting reference, to provide better information to help you drive your business performance. . Subledger Accounting maintains subledger balances for a GL account, GL period and supporting reference.
53
19. Whats New in Oracle Treasury?

Oracle Treasury is a complete solution for managing global treasury operations with improved efficiency, profitability, and control. In Release 12.1, Oracle Treasury delivers benefits in these focus areas:

19.1.1.
Automated Cash Pooling Across Legal Entities You know how to optimize your cash across the enterprise and you have already implemented a Zero Balance Account structure or a cash pool. But have you also discovered that, while your cash flows freely, your accounting department is suddenly swamped by the number of the intercompany loan transactions they have to post manually in order to reflect those cash concentration activities? With the Cash Pooling across Legal Entities, you can now have the best of both worlds: automatic cash concentration and automatic intercompany loan tracking. The system now automatically recognizes a cash sweep that crosses legal entities and adds it to the intercompany loan, which in turn automatically produces accurate and timely journal entries for both legal entities.
19.1.2.
Hedge Effectiveness Testing under FAS 133 and IAS 39 Accounting Standards You want to make sure that your hedges get the preferential accounting treatment under FAS 133 and IAS 39 rather than introduce unnecessary volatility to your income statement. But does it mean that you have a time-consuming spreadsheet on your hands that has the entire audit department frown on you? The new feature allows you to track prospective and retrospective effectiveness test results in the system, where they are subject to the same strict security rules as the rest of your sensitive financial data. Moreover, the system can now automatically calculate the retrospective effectiveness hedge results using the dollar offset methodology, as well as account for it all the way, including reclassification.
19.1.3.
Automatic Floating Rate Reset for Bonds Having current rates in the system for your entire bond portfolio at all times ensures correct coupon accruals and cash flows. Manual rate updates is inefficient and errorprone. Concurrent processing automates this task by accessing benchmark rates you feed into the system and then automatically updates the relevant coupon rates and amounts. The new concurrent program in Release 12.1 provides the ability to automatically reset floating rates for bonds based on benchmark rates like LIBOR as well as margin adjustments assigned at the bond issue level.
54
19.2. Manage operational risk
19.2.1.
Automatic Bank Account Update for Redirecting Payments to a New Bank Account Your bank account landscape can change over time as you rationalize your banking relationships or have to absorb the effects of mergers and spin-offs. Your financial counterparts go through a similar process and then you receive "new bank account notification" letters. Do you know if all the future payments scheduled in the system will go though the right bank accounts or will you have to incur late payment fees as a result of trying to remit funds to a closed bank account? The new concurrent program allows you to take action in order to prevent an embarrassing and potentially costly mistake. As soon as you become aware of the bank account closure, execute this concurrent program to indicate what bank account should be used instead of the closed one and all the future payments (and receipts) will be automatically updated with the new bank account information.
Manage operational risk
55
20. Global Enhancements

Oracle provides expanded support in Release 12.1 for country-specific business requirements across all regions. These requirements span a wide range of categories, including: financial reporting, tax reporting, asset accounting, and many others. The new set of enhancements will help you compete globally while successfully complying with the local regulatory requirements. The following section highlights the business benefits for some of the key local business requirements addressed in Release 12.1. The capabilities within each country will be categorized by business process/solution. For a complete listing of product capabilities delivered via product localizations please refer to Oracles User Guides. In Release 12.1, Global Enhancements were delivered for the following countries:

20.1. China
20.1.1. Financial Control and Reporting 20.1.1.1. China National Audit Office Interface Standard
20.1.2.
Transaction Tax 20.1.2.1. Golden Tax Adaptor for China
China
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20.2. India
20.2.1.
Transaction Tax 20.2.1.1. Support for Tax Collected At Source
20.2.1.2.
Provision for Computing Additional CVD under Customs Regime
20.2.1.3.
Provision for Computing Higher Education Cess for all Federal Taxes
20.2.1.4.
Support of Fringe Benefit Tax
20.2.1.5.
Transaction Sources
India
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20.3. Japan
20.3.1. Asset Lifecycle Management 20.3.1.1. Tax Reforms
Japan
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Oracle E-Business Suite RELEASE VALUE PROPOSITION

Release 12.1 Financials

Copyright 2009 Oracle Corporation All Rights Reserved

Disclaimer _______________________________________________________________________________ 1 Introduction ______________________________________________________________________________ 2 2.1. Purpose of Document__________________________________________________________________ 2

Architectural Features and Closely Related Enhancements ________________________________________ 6 4.1.

Gain process efficiencies _______________________________________________________________ 6

Enforce controls and reduce risks _______________________________________________________ 8

Provide visibility and drive performance ________________________________________________ 10

Whats New in Oracle Advanced Collections? __________________________________________________ 11 5.1.

Improve managerial decisions _________________________________________________________ 11

Comply with bankruptcy regulations ___________________________________________________ 11

Whats New in Oracle Assets? ______________________________________________________________ 12 6.1.

Increase transparency and efficiency with centralized setup ________________________________ 12

Improve processing efficiencies ________________________________________________________ 12

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition

Reduce cost through improved reporting ________________________________________________ 14

Whats New in Oracle Cash Management? ____________________________________________________ 15 7.1.

Streamline and automate processes _____________________________________________________ 15

Optimize funds and reduce banking costs ________________________________________________ 15

Effectively control bank account signatories _____________________________________________ 16

Whats New in Oracle Credit Management? ___________________________________________________ 18 8.1.

Mitigate credit risk __________________________________________________________________ 18

Improve processing efficiencies ________________________________________________________ 19

Whats New in Oracle Customer Data Hub? ___________________________________________________ 20 9.1.

Mitigate risk and enforce compliance ___________________________________________________ 20

Streamline and automate processes _____________________________________________________ 21

Reduce cost _________________________________________________________________________ 23

Improve business agility ______________________________________________________________ 24

Improve processing efficiencies ________________________________________________________ 26

Improve reconciliation and auditability _________________________________________________ 26

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition

12.2.1. 12.3.1. 12.3.2. 12.3.3. 12.3.4. 12.3.5. 12.3.6. 12.3.7.

Proactively manage loan portfolio ______________________________________________________ 33 Reduce credit risk ___________________________________________________________________ 34

13.2.1. 13.3.1. 13.3.2.

Streamline and automate processing ____________________________________________________ 36

14.2.1. 14.2.2. 14.2.3. 14.2.4. 14.2.5. 14.2.6. 14.2.7.

Whats New is Oracle Payments? __________________________________________________________ 39 Reduce cost _________________________________________________________________________ 39

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition

Mitigate risk ________________________________________________________________________ 40

15.2.1. 15.2.2. 15.2.3. 15.2.4.

Streamline and automate processing ____________________________________________________ 41

Improved variable rent calculation _____________________________________________________ 43

16.2.1. 16.2.2. 16.2.3. 16.2.4.

Reduced complexity of index based rent adjustments ______________________________________ 44

16.3.1. 16.3.2. 16.3.3.

Ability to manage complex operating expenses ___________________________________________ 44

Streamline and automate processes _____________________________________________________ 47

17.2.1. 17.2.2. 17.2.3.

17.3. 18. 18.1.

18.1.1. 18.1.2. 18.1.3.

18.2.1. 18.2.2. 18.2.3. 18.2.4. 18.2.5. 18.2.6.

Streamline and automate processes _____________________________________________________ 52

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition

18.3.1. 18.3.2. 18.3.3. 18.3.4. 18.3.5. 18.3.6. 18.3.7.

19.2. 20. 20.1.

Manage operational risk ______________________________________________________________ 55 Global Enhancements ___________________________________________________________________ 56 China ______________________________________________________________________________ 56

India ______________________________________________________________________________ 57 Japan ______________________________________________________________________________ 58

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition

Financials Release 12.1 Value Proposition

Support global and shared service operations

Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 Release Value Proposition

Disclaimer ___________ 1 Introduction 2 2.1. Purpose of Document 2

Proactively manage loan portfolio 33 Reduce credit risk _____________ 34

Whats New is Oracle Payments? 39 Reduce cost _______________ 39

Manage operational risk ____________________________ 55 Global Enhancements _ 56 China ______________________________________________ 56

India 57 Japan 58