ePBCS Financials: Finally, Bring Your Own Chart of Accounts (BYOCOA)!

     ePBCS 18.2, a release to remember!

We were waiting for this release quite anxiously, this is filled with a lot of bug fixes and a few new features. It solves one of the biggest Financial Model’s problem which I am sure any one who has either implemented or trying to implement must have faced. 

How to bring in your chart of account and how to make it work with out of box(OOB) Account hierarchy ? 

In above aspect, there were quite a few issues, some of them but not limited to:

• You have to map your COA with OOB Account categories
• Completely ignore OOB and start creating your own rollup and deal with consequences
• Go hybrid with the combination of above two
• Use existing members and Rename alias
• Add/Delete option disabled for member creation and deletion (Because of obvious reasons), 
• It creates a lot of additional unused accounts, leads to additional increased block size
• If you dont want to confuse planners with additional unused hanging accounts, deal with it using security or valid intersections 
• This list goes on! 

At the end of day you are trying to fit in your COAs with what comes out of box!

     Now we have following options:

•         Use your own account (BYOCOA) 
•           Use OOB :
• Accounts, 
• Drivers, 
• or both

If you want to use your chart of accounts just enable expenses not don't check Accounts or Drivers and Related Accounts option.

Here is the update from Oracle:

"The Financials business process in Enterprise Planning and Budgeting Cloud includes a robust, complete chart of accounts to get you up and running quickly. Financials also gives you the flexibility to use your own chart of accounts and still retain the benefits of the integrated Financials framework.

You choose whether to use the provided chart of accounts or your own chart of accounts when you enable features.

When you create your own chart of accounts, you can still:

• Use existing forms and dashboards
• Work with existing integrated financial statement
• Use existing calculations, such as trend-based planning
• Integrate with other business processes

Existing customers of the Financials business process are not impacted by this change"

Let me create a new app and start enabling finance model:

 If you look closely you have : 

 Accounts option: which auto creates accounts, 

 Drivers and Related Accounts: Which brings in list of drivers which can be checked based on available option 

We will delve deeper in both of above options in next post, for now, let's go ahead with enabling just expenses

If you look at number of accounts created OOB is just 26! Your block size will be now based on the accounts you will be using!

No Additional OOB account that you have to deal with!

You can either use import option or create accounts manually, here I have manually created some accounts:

Here is a one OOB data form where you can enter data against these members:

BYOCOA... thanks Oracle! 

Rahul S.