eprentise and Finance

Finance frequently feels the pain of a changing business. Statutory and regulatory requirements change, business reorganizations are common, and management needs additional visibility into operations on a real-time basis during the evolution of business processes. E-Business Suite, like most ERP systems, is not designed to handle continuous configuration modifications – that's where eprentise software comes in. Our software adds flexibility and functionality to your applications, enabling you to keep your EBS environment continually aligned to your changing business by providing Finance with the tools it needs to make time-sensitive changes to charts of accounts, calendars, and setup structures like operating units, legal entities, and business groups.

Armed with eprentise software, Finance teams are able to reduce the complexity of financial consolidation and reporting. Reducing valuable time and resources translates into a lower Total Cost of Ownership of E-Business Suite, increased return on investment, and an agile ERP system that aligns with the current business.

During the initial implementation of Oracle EBS, organizations designed charts of accounts (COAs) that reflected the existing regulatory requirements and the way they did business at the time. The initial implementation often mimicked the set up of the legacy systems that it was replacing and didn’t take advantage of the features of EBS. Everything was tracked in the COA rather than in the subledgers. The COA was not designed to track the different dimensions of business, and there was little or no governance in place to enforce enterprise standards (there was really no need because individual divisions or regions operated independently). As a result, it was difficult to get consistent reporting, financial consolidations were complex, and more importantly the current setup did not reflect changes in the business including acquisitions, mergers, or divestitures. After the initial implementation, organizations may have acquired new companies, added new product lines, or entered global markets with new localized regulatory requirements. Over time, new regulatory regimes emerged such as Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404, HIPAA privacy, ITIL, IFRS, J-SOX, Graham-Leach-Bliley, and changes in GAAP rules, among countless others. New ways of doing business were required: added transparency, increased security, and more reporting.

Organizations can improve the productivity of back-office services by consolidating EBS instances and establishing shared services centers for finance, accounting, payables, receivables, and purchasing. Although the cost savings may be significant, the undertaking may be daunting for some. Not only will the data in EBS instances need to merged, but organizations will also have to reengineer business processes. eprentise software was designed to make this process easy. Finance can take advantage of software designed for business users that decreases reliance on manual efforts and the complexities that come along with them. In particular, Finance can squeeze more productivity from back office operations by applying one simple, low-cost change to all EBS instances: adopting a single COA for all legal entities and sets of books (or ledgers in R12), regardless of their physical or virtual location.

By adopting a single COA for 11i or R12, organizations can utilize FlexField software from eprentise to standardize accounting practices, restructure transactions to accurately reflect changes in their businesses, and improve the accuracy and speed of reporting by reducing the use of spreadsheets and maintenance of cross validation rules. Period-end reporting becomes streamlined and efficient. Routine tasks that may have taken over a month can be reduced to days. Perhaps most importantly, business users will be able to run their own real-time reports, accessing data when they need to without relying on IT.