Oracle Financials Implementation Workshop Series

Sample
Preliminary Definition & Workshop Questions
This sample illustrates how to use questionnaires to determine Oracle/GEMMS package
configuration parameters within a specific application area.
Workshop 1
Reporting Requirements
What are your reporting needs, internal and external?
The purpose of this workshop is to gather all your current and anticipated reporting requirements
and determine what packaged standard reports are comparable and what custom reports are
needed.
This workshop will involve two sessions. The first will be to gather and discuss the critical data
elements on current reports and to assign a preliminary priority to the reports. The second session
will be to review the results of matching current reports with packaged reports. This session will also
include approving the creation of user defined fields in Oracle and GEMMS to capture information
not otherwise available through the system, and prioritizing the development of custom reports.
(Custom report development is not included in our original contract.)
Prior to attending the first session of this workshop:
I. Gather a sample of each report you currently use and require for your business functions. Decide
what you can consolidate. Exclude reports you no longer need.
II. Module sponsors should review and create a list of each sample report for that business function.
This list will become the basis for prioritizing report needs for that module.
III. Consider special report needs that are not currently met. List them and create a sample of the
report layout. Review the user manuals for standard reports already available.

Workshop 2
Organization Definition

What are the building blocks of your organization?

The purpose of this workshop is to identify the lowest level of your organization with reporting
requirements, to review the different combinations of information you report on, and to understand
how you roll up and summarize information within the organization. Our purpose is to define the
smallest piece of information your organization needs to track in order to use this as a building block
to provide all the reporting capabilities you require.
The following items should be identified prior to attending the workshop.
I. Legal Entities
A starting point is to define the legal entities your organization includes. Each legal entity is generally
defined as a Company and the general ledger will balance at this level of your organization.
A. What are the legal entities/companies you intend to set up in the Oracle General Ledger?
B. Do all the companies have the same fiscal calendar and chart of accounts? Do they follow similar
accounting rules? List any differences
C. What will be the code for each company? When GEMMS is used a 4 digit code is required. Will
this require a change from your current coding structure?
D. What intercompany transactions do you record? Do you want to take advantage of Oracles
automatic intercompany entries? Do you need to know the source company of an intercompany
expense or other entry?
II. Lower Organization Levels
Within a company, your organization may track information according to one or more of the
following: location, division, department, region, cost center, product line, project. You may have
other organization types not mentioned. Here we need to define what these organizations types are
and which ones are subsets of each other.
A. List all the organization types you currently have.
B. List all the organization types you plan to use or need in the future.

C. What is the hierarchy for these organization types? Which organizations are actually roll ups for
lower level organizations? For example, is a location a subset of a region? It may be helpful to draw
your organization hierarchy.
D. Are the codes for each organization type in the hierarchy unique? For example, does Department
001 mean Human Resources in Division 010 and in Division 020? Does product 1557 mean the
same thing throughout the whole organization?
III. Accounts
Is your current chart of accounts satisfactory for tracking expenses, income, assets, liabilities and
equity? Now is an excellent time to review your accounts and renumber or redefine as necessary.
Also, if you have two companies that you would like to book inter-company entries to, they will need
to have the same chart of accounts.
A. Review your current chart of accounts. Identify redundancy, obsolete items and accounts that are
needed.
B. Consider reorganizing so that financial report line items will include a range of accounts.
Reporting will be faster, if you structure your chart of accounts to report easily on a range of
accounts.
C. Decide on the number of characters needed for the account number.
D. Do you need more detail accounts or sub-accounts?
E. Does your current chart of accounts contain detail accounts for employee receivables or vendors?
Is this a requirement?
F. Do you make statistical journal entries? Do you need statistical accounts?
IV. Accounting Flexfield
The Oracle Accounting Flexfield Structure is composed of each element you have identified that is
required to track your business information. Each element is defined to be a segment of the
Accounting Flexfield.
A. List all the elements (segments) needed in your Accounting Flexfield.
B. e.g.: COMPANY-LOCATION-DEPARTMENT-ACCOUNT-PRODUCT

C. Decide on the number of characters needed for each segment. Create a four letter abbreviation
for each segment name (GEMMS requirement). Create some valid values for each segment. Will
values be numeric or alphanumeric? What will the default value be? Keep in mind that these
segments will have to map to your existing accounting structure.
D. Consider which roll up organizations do not need to have a separate segment, but will be defined
with parent-child relationships using the same segment as the child. These roll up segment values
will be used for summarizing information but will not have transactions posted to them.
V. GEMMS Organizations
The GEMMS organizations will correspond to what is setup in Oracle. GEMMS requires definition of
the companies and plants/locations to be setup. A warehouse is not treated as an organization for
accounting purposes.
VI. Other Non Accounting Organizations
Locations - Warehouses
Budget Organizations

Workshop 3
Accounting Flexfield Values and Code Combinations
What are the valid codes and combinations of codes for each segment?
This workshop will be used to review the accounting flexfield structure and identify the actual values
to be used in the Oracle Financials system. Be sure to refer to the decisions about the accounting
flexfield structure that were made in the previous section.
The goal of this workshop is to produce detailed lists of valid values and how they map to your
current system. A spreadsheet format may be given to you to help create these lists. It will be helpful
if you can download your current valid segment values to a spreadsheet.
I. Prepare a spreadsheet of legal entities (balancing segment values) including the company code,
company name, old system code. Be sure to include any leading zeroes if necessary. All names
should be in all capitals.

II. For every segment of the Accounting Flexfield defined in the previous section create a spread
sheet listing the new system code, the name and the old system code number. (For segments that
are part of the GEMMS organization structure, the code numbers should not be more than four
characters.) All values of a segment should have the same number of characters. Leading zeroes
should be included. All characters should be capitalized. Segments that are not part of the GEMMS
organization, such as a project or product may be more than four characters.
III. For the Accounting Segment, create a spread sheet listing the new account number, the
description, the old account number and the account type: Liability, Asset, Expense, Income, Equity.
If this account is used for statistics only, indicate this in a separate column. Also indicate whether this
account allows a budget.
A. Will all combinations of these values be allowed? If not, what are the valid combinations? Once
these rules are in place is dynamic insertion okay? (Dynamic insertion means that a code
combination that does not exists will be created automatically if the validation rules are not violated.)
B. Do you require more information than the period, account code combination, amount and
description for a journal entry? Do you need a special field to capture this information? This may be
set up as a descriptive flexfield.
C. Who will do the initial setup of valid values, and who will have access to maintain and add values
to the list in the future?

Workshop 4
What are your common accounting rules?
The purpose of this workshop is to define the default information for your set of books. The material
in this workshop is mostly one time setup details based on how your accounting organization works.
Please list the answers to each set of question on a separate piece of paper.
I. Fiscal Calendar
A. List the start date, end date and period name for each period you report in a fiscal year. Include
quarters. (Oracle will append the fiscal year to each period name, for example AUG will become
AUG-96.)
How many future periods do you want to allow for journal entry prior to a period being opened? The
default is one (1).

II. What name do you want for this set of books? 20 Character maximum. This name will appear as
a heading in every report. (For GEMMS the name of the set of books must be the same as the
calendar name.)
III. Currencies
A. List all the currencies you use throughout the business year. Include the country name, currency
name and precision (number of decimals) to use in calculations.
B. Will U.S. dollars be the functional currency of the set of books?
C. What account should cumulative translation adjustments be posted to? This should be an equity
account.
D. What account will be used for unrealized gains and losses due to revaluation adjustments?
E. Will you use a corporate conversion rate on a daily basis, or will it be user defined?
F. Who will maintain currency translation rates? Will they maintain daily rates as well as period
rates?
G. Will historical rates be used for equity accounts or default to Oracles calculation? What range of
accounts?
H. Who will be responsible for the translation processing? What about late journal entry postings?
IV. Journal Entry Process
A. How is the responsibility for making journal entries distributed throughout the accounting
organization?
B. What journal entry sources and categories will you need? There are some that are required for
GEMMS when the product is integrated. These are: IC, PO, OP, PM. They are created automatically
by the integration steps. There are subevent categories that GEMMS creates automatically also
when the product is integrated.
C. Will you allow posting of out of balance journal entries? (Oracle will automatically balance them
using a suspense account.) What is the default suspense account for your set of books? This is the
account that will be used to automatically balance any journal entry that is out of balance, if you

allow posting out of balance journal entries. Do you need different suspense accounts depending on
the source and category of the journal entry?
D. Will you allow automatic intercompany balancing of your journal entries? What is the default
intercompany account? Are different intercompany accounts needed for each journal category and
source and debit or credit entry. Identify any that are needed.
E. Do you want your journal entries to be numbered automatically?
F. Define your recurring journal entries. There are three possible types:
a. Same accounts every period
b. Same accounts and amounts every period
c. Same formula every period
V. What is your retained earnings account? Oracle automatically posts the net of all income and
expense to this account on opening a new fiscal year.
VI. Do you have journal entries that are based on allocation calculations? Define the allocation
formula for each allocation journal entry.
VII. Journal Entries from GEMMS and other systems. If the system is not integrated, these entries
will need to be made manually or possibly loaded from a spreadsheet. If it is integrated, the entries
will automatically be transferred to Oracle, but an import process will need to be executed.

Workshop 5
Financial Statements, Budgeting, Data Conversion
GL Setup Continued
This workshop includes three separate GL topics: financial statements, budgeting, and data
conversion. We will review your financial statement formats and how to create them using the Oracle
accounting flexfield values previously defined. In the process we will identify what summary
accounts and rollup groups may be needed. We will also review your budgeting process and how to
setup Oracle to accommodate your process. Finally we will discuss your data conversion needs for
effective implementation of the Oracle GL module.

The answers to these questions will best be presented in a spreadsheet.

Financial Statements
I. Prepare a sample format for each financial statement listing the accounts that each line should
include.
II. List the high level organizations (parent organizations) for which you produce financial statements.
III. List the children for each parent organization. You may have parents and children for each
segment of your accounting flexfield. For example, if one segment of your accounting flexfield is a
product segment, you may need to report on a product line. List each parent you need to report on
and what children belong to that group. Another segment may be divisions that are grouped into
regions. For every segment that has a hierarchy list the parents and their children. The list
should include a code value and description for both the parents and children. If these values existed
on your old system, also include the old value. Note that the parent values should have the same
number of characters as the children.
Example: PARENT: Region 100 Eastern Region
CHILDREN: Division 080 New England
070 Mid Atlantic
060 Florida
IV. Are there flash reports or summary balances that you want to be able to inquire on periodically?
For instance, do you need to know your total cash balances or your total raw materials inventory
balance. Summary accounts may be created which will maintain the total of all the posted amounts
for the accounts that they summarize. Summary accounts are quicker to report on then summing a
range of accounts in a report.
V. Review the General Ledger Reference Manual Reports Chapter to become familiar with the
Oracle standard report formats. Note any special reporting requirements.
VI. Do you have certain reports that you run every day during the close cycle? List those reports that
are needed on a regular basis noting whether they could be scheduled to run at night.
Budgeting
I. Who will have access to enter budgets? (Accounting may enter all budgets, or each individual
department may enter budgets which are reviewed and frozen by the accounting organization.)

II. Name every organization that will have a separately entered budget.
III. How will budgets be entered? Options include: journal entries, calculations or spreadsheet
uploads.
IV. Specify the accounting flexfield combinations or ranges of combinations that each organization
may enter a budget for. Specify whether the budget amount will be entered or calculated.
Data Conversion
I. What historical general ledger data needs to be converted? The minimum required is the balance
sheet balances from the prior fiscal year and subsequent monthly balances of all accounts until the
Oracle module is in production.
II. How will the balances be converted? Manual journal entries or journal import?
III. Who will verify the mapping of the old account structure to the new accounting flexfield structure?
IV. Who will verify that the correct balances have been loaded? What reports will you use?
V. Consider whether you would want to start using the general ledger as soon as it has been tested,
reducing the need for converting data every month (a phased implementation).

Workshop 6
System Administration Setup
Controlling System Access, Printers and Processing
This workshop will identify the information needed to set up users on the system, and connect
printers to the Oracle Application. In addition, a preliminary review of the accounting processing
cycle will be used for evaluating the default concurrent processing queues.
Answer the questions for each subject prior to the workshop session.
Security and Responsibilities
I. Who will have the access and responsibility for maintaining users? This is defined to be a system
administration function.

II. Who determines what a user may have access to? Do you have procedures for communicating
this to the system administrator?
III. Create a spreadsheet listing of all the users of the Oracle Applications and GEMMS application.
IV. What naming conventions will you use for userids? Consider that GEMMS has a limitation of 4
characters. Add a column to the user list including the userid.
V. What modules will each user have access to? Within the module what functions should they be
allowed to access? For example, should all GL users have access to setup new accounts, to post, to
open and close periods?
VI. Oracle names certain groups of functions as a responsibility within a module. Review the
Oracle default responsibility menus for different levels of access and select the most adequate for
each user. Add a column to the spreadsheet for each application and the responsibility for each
application.
VII. If the Oracle standard responsibility menus are not satisfactory, make a list of requirements or
changes needed.
VIII. A responsibility may access only one set of books. If you are using more than one set of books,
will the responsibilities be similar?
Printers
Prepare to setup printers in the Oracle Application by listing the name of all the printers that the
operating system has access to. Include the printer type, i.e. Make and Model and the page size and
orientation. It may be helpful to have the printer manuals available for finding escape sequences to
change font sizes and orientation.
When the system is available, then setup the printers in each instance by following these steps:
Register all printers in Oracle.
Test each print style for each printer from the Oracle application.
Modify Printer Drivers in Oracle as necessary.
Concurrent Processing
The System Administrator is able to control the queues for processing and reporting. The number of
queues he sets up will depend on the volume of requests each group of users generates and

company policies on what requests should get priority. Of course the hardware capabilities will also
influence how many queues are set up.
Start with the defaults provided by Oracle, then adjust as needs arise and experience indicates
changes that will reflect the company priorities. The System Administrator may also choose to not
allow certain reports or processes to run concurrently. This may be especially helpful when a
resource intensive report that is requested for different parameters is run at the end of the month.
Prepare for heavy usage days by knowing the accounting close schedule. Some processes and
reports may need to be scheduled to run regularly at night during the closing cycle, to maximize use
of the system resources without impacting the daytime usage.

Workshop 7
Items to setup based on information already given or consultants best judgment.
Profile options
System controls - may vary depending on how much data conversion occurs.
Statistical Units of Measure
Document Sequences
Automatic Posting
Custom responsibilities
GL Super User
GL non-posting user
GL posting user