Finance leaders from Cardtronics and Allegis Group with more than three years of combined experience using Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close joined Perficient and Oracle for a panel discussion regarding their cloud journey.
Richard Ng, Director, Financial Systems, Cardtronics, and John Oliphant, Financial Developer Lead Allegis Group, shared the stories of their organizations’ migration from Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) to Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close. In the first blog post of a four-part series, Richard and John discuss Oracle Cloud Benefits from a Customer’s Point of View. In part 2, read about Consolidation Times in HFM vs FCC. In this third blog post of a four-part series, Richard and John discuss financial reporting in FCC.
To view the spotlight video on this topic, click on the link below. To view the entire webinar, click here.
Any challenges from a reporting standpoint, migrating reports from the on-prem environment into cloud FR changes, Financial Reporting Studio changes or anything like that, that your team had to deal with from an administrator’s perspective?
[John Oliphant] John from Allegis essentially said that the functionality available on the Web is very similar to what was available on prem. There is a migration process required which, with help of an experience partner like Perficient can be managed and implemented more effectively.
[Richard Ng] Richard from Cardtronics however had a different experience in terms of implementation. Overall managing the expectations and report list from different user group was a challenge. However once the UAT process was completed, the maintenance of the reports was pretty similar to the prior on-prem world.
Cardtronics was another project where the reports needed to be migrated and merged with two sources – FCC and reporting cube in OAC.
This was accomplished using the Management Reporting Studio within Narrative Reporting Cloud solution. Perficient was able to migrate the on-prem reporting objects to the new Narrative Reporting repository and make necessary adjustments with database connections and dimensionality updates. The process is more streamlined than it seems at the onset, once the major change components are identified they can be implemented with relatively quick turnaround.
Perficient’s Perspective
FCCS as an out-of-the-box consolidation solution is designed to meet management and statutory reporting needs. FCCS out of box features allow for robust reporting on Intercompany, Journals, Multi-GAAP reporting needs and automated cash flow reporting among other Consolidation reports.
There are several tools that one can utilize to report data out of FCC via Web and/or Microsoft Office.
Management Reporting/Financial Reporting
Print friendly reports that allow for standard reporting like Balance sheet, P&L, cash flow etc can be built using Financial Reporting Studio on the Web or Management Reporting. Management Reporting tool (MR) is the future of FR . Currently all FR reports can be migrated over to Management Reports using the migration tool. Oracle plans on sunsetting FR in near future. MR features are at parity or above par in terms of the FR tool on prem and Web based FR.
Smart View Report
On top of the print friendly reports, Smart view is also available and allows for ad hoc reports in excel by connecting directly to cloud application. Between HFM and FCC, reports can be migrated/redesigned easily. Obviously, there are some dimensionality differences, but they are very easy to manage and transition over. As part of migration process, Perficient can help managing the process so that it doesn’t seem painful. A typical migration process involves – collating reports by different groups, rationalizing the list, identifying candidates for FR vs Smart view and then building them.
FCC Consolidation Reports
FCC not only offers Financial reporting and Smart View addin features, but also Oracle BI publisher prebuilt reports to do some standard reporting. These Out of box Consolidation Journal reports and Intercompany matching reports are easy to configure and can be used for analysis and auditing purpose.
Narrative Reporting
Management and regulatory reports can be designed, built and published using Narrative Reporting which allows for narration along with displaying data in charts/table formats. Building report packages, sharing information between collaborators, analyzing and reviewing the statuses of the report packages becomes more streamlined and more efficient with Narrative Reporting business process. There are other sub modules within Narrative reporting – Narrative Reporting, Management Reporting and Disclosure Management.
