Auto Accounting rules for Projects R12

by Amit Kumar Bothra, iTrain

ccounting Practices have been severely scrutinized and progressively modied over the last decade. Ever since the world saw the debacle of Enron and WorldCom and then, more recently, the sub-prime crisis, Sarbanes Oxley and Basel II were no longer alien words and companies started becoming more watchful of their accounting practices.
Company management had to ensure that they complied with the International Accounting Standard (IAS), Financial Accounting Standard Board (FASB) and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Finally, demands from auditors request that companies nancial and management activities are in strict adherence with such accounting guidelines and are making the project managers job even more complex. For organizations running projects, Oracle Projects offers are a great tool to handle their day to day business both on the project management side as well as the accounting for project management activities.

The Basic Accounting Practices for Project Management

Accounting entries must be generated for all nancial activities of a project, from inception to project completion. From an IAS point of view, costs on revenue generating projects should not be capitalised unless the project has been completed to a signicant level and it has been accepted by the customer. In Oracle Projects, the AutoAccounting feature allows the creation of accounting entries for the various project activities using pre-dened accounting rules. AutoAccounting is a feature in Oracle Projects that determines how each project-related transaction is recorded in a form of accounting entry in Oracle General Ledger. AutoAccounting is unique to Oracle Projects. During each Project process (Cost Distribution, Transfer, Revenue Distribution, or Invoice Generation), the AutoAccounting function is called and run against each transaction automatically by the system. Based on rules dened to meet customer specic business practices, AutoAccounting determines the appropriate value for each of the individual segments of the companys Accounting FlexField. The transaction is completely processed only if AutoAccounting has successfully populated all of the segments of the accounting FlexField and the combination of the segments passes Oracle General Ledgers validation.

AutoAccounting creates Accounting FlexField segment combinations, also referred to as Code Combinations. Because some of these combinations may not exist, Oracle Projects requires activation of the Dynamic Insertion option in the Accounting Key FlexField. Dynamic Insertion allows new combinations to be created, as long as no customer dened cross validation rules are violated. Without Dynamic Insertion turned on, AutoAccounting would never be able to create new combinations, and hence AutoAccounting would fail with errors. AutoAccounting is organised into groups of related accounting transactions. These groups are called AutoAccounting Functions. In Release 12 there are a total of 36 AutoAccounting Functions. For each AutoAccounting Function, there are a number of AutoAccounting Function Transactions. Function Transactions allow AutoAccounting to generate different results under different circumstances. With the use of different function transaction, code combinations generated would be different for labor costs on revenue generating and non-revenue generating projects, between expense costs on indirect project and direct projects. The number of Function Transactions associated with functions may vary from a function to another function. During the implementation of Oracle Projects, AutoAccounting rules are dened to meet client specic business practices. These rules determine how AutoAccounting populates the individual Accounting FlexField segments.

Introduction
Oracle Projects offers an integrated project management solution to handle the complexities of projects and to manage the accounting practices for the various activities undertaken during each phase of the project. Governments and international regulatory authorities continue to impose complex and ever-changing regulations on organisations. Auditors have become very cautious and weary of the way accounting is done and they have started demanding strict compliance with the accounting standards. It has become the joint responsibilities of the project managers, nancials controllers and accounting managers to ensure that the software solutions being used for the project management activities are capable of adhering with these regulations. By using Oracle Projects, organisations can now be 100% compliant with the requirements of accounting standards while ensuring efcient handling of project activities.

Oracle Projects offers an integrated project management solution to handle the complexities of projects and manage the best accounting practices complaint with IAS.

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A UK Oracle User Group publication

There are three types of AutoAccounting Rules: Constant-based; Parameter-based; and SQL Select based
Constant-based: AutoAccounting Rules are used to directly populate the Accounting FlexField segment with a given value. Each time a given Constant-based AutoAccounting Rule is used, it will return the same value. Constant-based AutoAccounting Rules are commonly used to populate the Accounting FlexField segments with values that remain the same no matter the circumstances. Parameter-based: AutoAccounting Rules use parameters predened by Oracle Projects as their input. The parameters can be used to directly populate the Accounting FlexField segment or they can be used to match against values in an AutoAccounting Lookup Set. The matching value is then used to populate the Accounting FlexField segment. SQL Select-based: AutoAccounting Rules use the Oracle Database Structural Query Language (SQL) to determine which value to populate the Accounting FlexField with. SQL Select-based rules are intended for situations where client-specic business practices dictate that more than one parameter is necessary to determine the appropriate value to use. An example would be the situation where both the Project Type and Expenditure Type, taken together, determine the appropriate value to use.

Labor Cost Accounting Entry

COST WIP ACCOUNT LABOR CLEARING ACCOUNT DR CR

Expenses Report Cost Accounting Entry

COST WIP ACCOUNT EXPENSE CLEARING ACCOUNT DR CR DR CR DR CR DR CR DR CR DR CR DR CR DR CR DR CR DR CR

APPLICATIONS

Inventory Cost Accounting Entry

COST WIP ACCOUNT INVENTORY CLEARING ACCOUNT

Misc Transactions Cost Accounting Entry

COST WIP ACCOUNT MISC TRANS CLEARING ACCOUNT

Labor Revenue Accounting Entry

UNBILLED RECEIVABLES/UNEARNED REVENUE LABOR REVENUE ACCOUNT

Expense Report Revenue Accounting Entry

UNBILLED RECEIVABLES/UNEARNED REVENUE EXPENSE REPORT REVENUE ACCOUNT

Inventory Revenue Accounting Entry

UNBILLED RECEIVABLES/UNEARNED REVENUE INVENTORY REVENUE ACCOUNT

Misc Transactions Revenue Accounting Entry

UNBILLED RECEIVABLES/UNEARNED REVENUE MISC TRANS REVENUE ACCOUNT

Event Revenue Accounting Entry

UNBILLED RECEIVABLES/UNEARNED REVENUE EVENT REVENUE ACCOUNT

Invoice Accounting Entry

RECEIVABLES ACCOUNT UNBILLED RECEIVABLES/UNEARNED REVENUE

Cash Accounting Entry

CASH/BANK ACCOUNT RECEIVABLES ACCOUNT

Manual/Scheduled Journal Entries in Oracle General Ledger once the project has been accepted and revenue can be recognised
Labor Cost Capitalisation Accounting Entry
LABOR COST ACCOUNT COST WIP ACCOUNT DR CR DR CR DR CR DR CR

Accounting Entries
Following are some of the key accounting entries that were suggested during the lifecycle of a project which were compliant . to the IAS and GAAP Please note that this is not an exhaustive list of accounting entries and Oracle may automatically generates additional accounting entries depending on customer specic project transactions.

Expenses Report Cost Capitalisation Accounting Entry

EXPENSE REPORT COST ACCOUNT COST WIP ACCOUNT

Inventory Cost Capitalisation Accounting Entry

INVENTORY COST ACCOUNT COST WIP ACCOUNT

Misc Transactions Cost Capitalisation Accounting Entry

MISC TRANS COST ACCOUNT COST WIP ACCOUNT

About the Author

Amit Kumar Bothra is a Senior Oracle functional consultant with extensive experience in the Implementation of Oracle nancials, supply chain applications & Oracle Projects suites. With over 7 years in the IT Consultancy, Amit is an extremely experienced, clear, logical thinker with strong leadership and presentation skills. Amit comes from a Solutions Architecture background with proven analytical and problem solving skills. He has broad functional experience across many nancial modules such , as GL, AR, AP I-Expenses, Advanced Collections, Project Costing & Billing, and Oracle Time & Labor.

Conclusion
Oracle Projects provides an integrated project management solution which allows organisations to handle a variety of different types of projects. It also facilitates compliance with the prevailing IAS and GAAP accounting best practices, thus providing peace of mind and value for money for company senior management and executives.

iTrain is a specialist independent ERP change and transition management integration service provider. Throughout the UK market, iTrain delivers a variety of consulting and training ranging from Oracle Release 12 to 11i eBusiness suite, SAP Java, , Peoplesoft, to technical services across the complete ERP functional scope (Finance, HR & Payroll, Supply Chain, CRM). iTrains highly skilled consultants and trainers also have the exibility to assist you with any large or small projects your company wants to implement from an email integration to a full systems update. To learn more about iTrains services please contact [email protected]

OracleScene Issue 38 Summer 2009

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