Oracle Cloud Applications delivers new updates every quarter. This means every three months you’ll receive new functionality to help you efficiently and effectively manage your business. Some features are delivered Enabled meaning they are immediately available to end users. Other features are delivered Disabled meaning you must opt in for them.

22A quarterly release introduced some of the key features in the areas of Project Billing and revenue management, Cost management control and planning/scheduling. Let’s look at some of them briefly and understand how these enhancements would help business users work efficiently and effectively.

Billing and Revenue Management

INVOICE ATTACHMENTS INCLUDED IN INVOICE APPROVAL NOTIFICATION

The New feature enable project contract invoice approvers to view invoice attachments from the invoice approval email notification. Project Billing Specialists can optionally include attachments for the invoice to the approval workflow email notification. The first 10 attachments to the invoice with a category of Project Billing are included in the invoice approval workflow email notification. Attachments with any other category value are excluded.

Approvers can view the attachments in the email tool itself or in the Approval History section of the Project Contract Invoice Approval Notification report within the invoice approval workflow email.

This feature provides the benefit of sharing documents with invoice workflow approvers that provide backup for the charges on the invoice, making approvals easier and quicker.

PROJECT PROGRESS UPDATES FOR ALL CONTRACT LINES

This Feature enables contract administrator to update Progress action all contract lines. Regardless of invoice and revenue method assigned. The action updates percent complete at the contract line or associated project level.

The benefit of this feature is the saving of many hours manually entering physical percent complete from Project Progress into the percent complete attribute on contract lines or associated projects and tasks for contract lines. Billing Specialists and Project Accountants can then use the percent complete source, as part of a custom formula in the project process configurator, for invoicing or revenue recognition.

SHIP-TO ACCOUNT AND SITE EDITABLE ON INVOICE LINE

This Feature enables billing specialists to view and override ship-to information on project invoice line.

The business benefit of this feature is an improvement in efficiency. The contract administrator no longer needs to create separate contract lines for each possible ship-to account or continually amend contract lines to change the ship-to account. The Project Billing Specialist can simply override the ship-to information on the invoice line.

Cost Management and Control

PARALLEL PARTICIPANT SUPPORT FORPROJECT COST ADJUSTMENT APPROVAL WORKFLOW

Create parallel participants for the Project Cost Adjustment Approval workflow to meet business requirements. Using this feature, configure approval rules for the project cost adjustment approval workflow to route the workflow to multiple approvers in parallel.

You can now create highly complex project cost adjustment approval flows, to satisfy even the most demanding approval requirements.

PLANNING CURRENCY MODIFICATIONS FOR PLANNED RESOURCES

Modify the planning currency of planned resources the budgets, and forecasts without having to delete and recreate the plan line.

Planning currency in a budget or forecast line is editable, modifying the currency will recalculate the amounts.

This Increases efficiency by cutting down the steps required to modify the currency of planning resources in your budgets and forecasts.

SEPARATE LINE BURDEN TRANSACTION RECONCILIATION WHEN GROUPING BY TRANSACTION NUMBER

Reconcile burden transactions to source transactions when creating burden transactions as a separate transaction and grouping by transaction number. Use the Burden Cost Grouping Process Configurator to configure this option.

To recap, release 20D delivered the Burden Cost Grouping Process Configurator feature. The configurator enables you to add the Transaction Number of a project cost as an additional grouping criterion for summarized burden costs. If an active Burden Cost Grouping configurator has been defined with Transaction Number selected as a grouping source, a summarized burden transaction can only relate to a single project cost transaction. In summary, with such a configurator in place, there will always be a one-to-one relationship (or one-to-many, if the burden structure has multiple burden cost codes) between a source project cost transaction and its resulting summarized burden transactions.

In this release, if an active Burden Cost Grouping configurator has been defined with Transaction Number selected as a grouping source, the source transaction number is recorded against the resulting summarized burden transaction(s). With this definition, the Source Transaction Number is populated during the Generate Burden Costs process. The source transaction number is available in both the Manage Project Costs page and the OTBI subject area, Project Costing – Actual Costs Real Time.

UPFRONT VALIDATION OF PROJECT COST ADJUSTMENTS BEFORE INITIATING APPROVAL WORKFLOW

View validation messages in real time when you perform an adjustment on a single project cost, instead of having to navigate to the Adjustment History tab to see why an adjustment failed. Project accountants and grants accountants must now take corrective actions prior to submitting an adjustment for approval.

Consider the following scenario: A user performs a project cost adjustment to transfer a single transaction to another task in the same project. The user is not privileged to make this change without approval, so an approval workflow will be initiated (this is indicated to the user by a popup requesting a justification for the adjustment). The user provides a justification and, upon proceeding, is presented with an error message resulting from an upfront validation. In this case, the error informs the user that the transaction date is not within the transaction dates of the destination task. With the validation upfront, the user must take corrective action before submitting the adjustment for approval.

With most of validations now performed upfront, this leads to:

• Streamlined adjustment processing, as approvals only need to be performed once.
• Quicker period closure. Prior to this feature, errors resulting from adjustments may have been deferred until period end.

Planning, Scheduling and Forecasting

ATTRIBUTES FOR IDENTIFYING PROJECTS IMPORTED FROM ENTERPRISE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Identify the projects that are imported from Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM Planning) using the Integration Application Code and Integration Project Reference attributes on the Manage Financial Project Settings page.

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