Oracle E-Business Suite has multiple products that support the capability to manage an enterprise. The term often used with these type of software solutions is ERP, which stands for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).
There are various ERP software solutions in the market but this book focuses on the solution from Oracle and the latest version is most often referred to as "EBiz Suite R12" or just simply R12 in this book (and in discussions and forums).
This handbook focuses on Oracle Financial products for Procure to Pay (P2P) and Order to Cash (O2C) business flows. As we will also be covering Oracle Fixed Assets and some reporting aspects in the following chapters it might seem like we are also covering additional flows or portions thereof, but the focus will remain on these two flows mentioned previously.
It is important to note the fact that these are separate products (and were at some point in time developed as stand-alone products) and there are differences in the way they feel, act, and look. Though they accomplish their goals in an integrated fashion, some of the technological framework is different. This does in many cases lead to interesting scenarios.
Over the following chapters, you will be introduced to key setups and key configurations considerations of Oracle Financial Applications products and transaction processing concepts.
The modules that will be covered are:
General Ledger
Subledger Accounting
Accounts Payables
Accounts Receivables
Cash Management
Treasury
Fixed Assets
Inventory
Purchasing
Order Management
Credit Management
The following common products are integrated with the Oracle Financials suite and serve as important building blocks:
Key setups and configurations will be discussed for the common modules.
Oracle E-Business Suite is a complete set of business applications that enables corporations to efficiently track detailed business transaction data to help gather decision-making information. Oracle Financials are a subset of the E-Business Suite and are a family of products designed to capture and analyze your financial data. Oracle Financials applications helps to meet your obligations in key areas such as:
Compliance
Financial control
Regulatory reporting
Cost containment
Risk management
Though the following chapters do not necessarily cover all these aspects in detail the controls and reporting capabilities are inherently built into the suite and are available to be implemented and used as needed.
Some products may need additional licensing. One of the data entities we will talk about in this chapter is generically called organizations. The financial suite supports the capability to help represent various business models in its configuration structure and are represented with related data entities. These can be listed in brief as follows:
Your organization
The role of your Legal entities
Representing your organization in the system
Organizational classifications in Oracle Financials
Chart of Accounts
System entities
We will briefly cover the inherent aspects of the organization in this chapter and the details will be covered in subsequent chapters where they are more relevant and configured. In Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12 (R12) the legal entity has been upgraded to an important data entity and now controls the ownership of various transactional and master data within the product suite. This is covered in more detail in Chapter 2, General Ledger.
The Chart of Accounts is a key feature in capturing your transactional accounting information to be able to report in a manner that supports and benefits the organizations' various organizational requirements.
Organizations and what they denote and identify will be briefly covered in a later part of this chapter.