Your company has outgrown its current Chart of Accounts (COA).

Problem

A utility company has been live on Oracle E-Business Suite for approximately 10 years. They moved to EBS, but the accountants were adamant that the chart of accounts remain the same as the legacy system. They set up four segments: Company (2), Cost Center (2), Account (4), and Future (3). All values were numeric. Cost centers became the catch all for projects, departments, and locations. The company was running out of values for both the cost center segment and the account segment and did not want to reuse values. The company needed to retain all history.

The company used FlexField software to:

• Expand their Cost Center segment to 3 digits
• Expand their Account segment to 6 digits
• Add a Project Segment
• Add a Department Segment
• Add a Location Segment

As a result, the company was able to track by departments, locations, and projects. There was plenty of room to put their natural account values in ranges so that reporting and analysis was easier.

Consolidation requires a new COA structure.

Problem

An international financial services company had three instances of their Oracle E-Business Suites. One instance was for the European countries and the UK, another instance was for the US, and the third instance was for the Asia-Pacific region. In all, the three instances had approximately 30 modules of E-Business Suites. There were three different charts of accounts – one for each instance. They realized that the consolidation process would be much easier if the new instance had a common chart of accounts. With a common chart of accounts, all of the transactions from the sub ledgers would be able to be merged without writing translation scripts for each instance. They would also be able to write consistent interfaces to third-party systems from their single new instance. Finally, the performance for their new data warehouse would be significantly improved by not having to perform translation every time data was extracted from their E-Business Suite and loaded into the data warehouse.

Solution

The company designed a new global chart of accounts. They used ranges of values within the natural account segment to accommodate local statutory requirements. They finalized on the mappings from each of the three charts during their first test run. Before they went into production with their new chart of accounts, they used eprentise Consolidation software to merge their instances with the three separate charts of accounts. Then, in their target, consolidated instance, they changed each of the charts of accounts to the new global chart of accounts using FlexField software. They only had to create one set of interfaces to their third-party systems and greatly enhanced the performance on their OBIEE data warehouse.