Agility by Design - eprentise Blog

Designing an accounting flexfield is one of the most difficult processes in an Oracle implementation. A “good” chart of accounts has the following criteria:

1. The segments support important aspects of the business.
2. You are able to report on critical business components with standard reports without resorting to spreadsheets.
3. There is enough room to expand within each segment.
4. FSGs and other reports are easy to create.
5. Summary accounts and rollup groups fall naturally within ranges.
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   Read more: Into the Future (And Back Again)

Most of the changes to flexfields in Oracle Apps occurred between Version 10.7 and 11i. These changes included the addition of several APIs for the flexfields and the change of the name FlexBuilder to the Account Generator.

The most significant change is the ability in Release 12 to synchronize the context field value with the reference field value for descriptive flexfields. The example given in the documentation is that generating an expense report would refer to the context field for a country code and that would remain constant and specific to the user. If payment processing is done in another country, the context would not be derived from the payment processor’s country, but by the user who generated the original expense report. However, if the payment processor enters his/her own expense report, then the expense report would be synchronized to the country in which the payment processor resides. If the context field is not synchronized, the context information defaults at the time the record is created, even if the reference field value subsequently change.

The Release 12 documentation corrects an error from the Release 11 documentation in the key flexfield names. The Release 12 Flexfields Guide correctly refers to the code for the key flexfield for Sales Orders as MKTS and the Owning Application as Oracle Inventory and the code for the Sales Tax Location Flexfield as RLOC, and the owning application as Oracle Receivables. The other changes between Releases 11i and 12 are relatively minor. The documentation for Release 12 has been updated with some formatting changes, changes in referenced document names, and an update of some of the years from 2002 to 2007. Most noticeably, all references to prior versions and upgrades from prior versions have been omitted in the Release 12 documentation.