Oracle gets one view of financial truth by deploying a global Accounting Hub

Responsible for managing financial records and closing the quarterly books for a $40 billion-a-year global software company, the Oracle finance team had operated 32 different charts of accounts. This caused the team to use a variety of processes—not all of them consistent or supporting best practices—to globally harmonize the finance data.

The disconnected and heterogeneous set of systems was costly and complex to maintain—and prevented the team from easily maintaining reporting consistency. It also slowed down the global financial close process.

Oracle Finance used Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to deploy its Accounting Hub. The team chose Oracle Cloud ERP to reduce the cost and complexity of managing accounting at Oracle, while gaining consistency in reporting.

Oracle Finance deployed an Accounting Hub on Oracle Cloud ERP within nine months, immediately reducing the time needed for a financial close by one day and gaining additional visibility and control. Accounting Hub is a robust accounting engine that integrates and aligns information from virtually any source. With it, the team established a single source of trusted financial information with advanced reporting and analytical capabilities.

In the process, Oracle Finance eliminated 90 redundant ledgers and reduced allocations, while using the Account Monitor in the General Accounting dashboard to watch for potentially troublesome accounts during the close process. The Oracle Finance team uses Oracle Enterprise Data Management as a repository to explore changes to the global chart of accounts, streamline accounting hierarchies, generate what-if analyses, and retain audit trails of all changes.

With the Accounting Hub, Oracle Finance automated many accounting processes, delivering more accurate financial and accounting information to the company, faster. Oracle is the only company in the Standard and Poor’s 500 index that reports earnings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission within 10 days of the quarter’s end. The company’s goal is to eventually get to a one-day close.

For reconciliations or for researching accounting discrepancies, Accounting Hub allows the team to drill down from the general ledger to the subledgers where the transactions originated. Accounting Hub now enables incremental loads during the close process without the need to rerun the process, saving time and ensuring consistency in accounting entries.

From a corporate perspective, Accounting Hub has delivered better control and transparency in the ledger close cycle. Meanwhile, the team continues innovating in its use of the hub, including piloting a subledger with payroll transactions from around the world. This helps reduce manual journal entities, providing additional payroll transparency while delivering reliable audit and reconciliation data.