You need to comply with regulatory requirements.

Problem

A prominent manufacturing and distribution company needed to change their chart of accounts a few years back. They followed Oracle’s recommendation, set up a new set of books with a new chart of accounts and used Oracle’s financial consolidation to consolidate their general ledger. However, when their auditor came to assess their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, he said that since their history and their subledgers did not use the same chart of accounts for their detail transactions and it was difficult to drill down on their accounts, they were non-compliant. Since Sarbanes-Oxley's inception in 2002, the company had complied by using third-party reporting tools, but management had finally made the decision that it would be more efficient to change the way they accounted for certain parts of the business at the source, the accounting flexfield. They were told that in order to make the changes they wished to make, a re-implementation of their E-Business Suite would be necessary, but they did not want to spend the time or the capital to get involved in a process that would likely last over a year. They needed a quick way to make fundamental changes to their accounting flexfield without the need for a re-implementation.

The company used FlexField software to restructure their accounting flexfield in a way that enabled them to save multiple millions of dollars in personnel and third-party software license costs over the next 3 years. Because their reporting, drill down and the transaction history was transparent (it looked like they had always used the new chart of accounts), the auditors and their compliance officers were pleased.