Update 20D

Revision History

This document will continue to evolve as existing sections change and new information is added. All updates appear in the following table:

Overview

This guide outlines the information you need to know about new or improved functionality in this update.

DISCLAIMER

The information contained in this document may include statements about Oracle’s product development plans. Many factors can materially affect Oracle’s product development plans and the nature and timing of future product releases. Accordingly, this Information is provided to you solely for information only, is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described remains at the sole discretion of Oracle.

This information may not be incorporated into any contractual agreement with Oracle or its subsidiaries or affiliates. Oracle specifically disclaims any liability with respect to this information. Refer to the Legal Notices and Terms of Use for further information.

Common Technology and User Experience

Common Financials Features

All Transaction Attributes in Simplified Workflow Rules Configuration Spreadsheets

Use the Simplified Workflow Rules Configuration feature to create workflow rules for Payables Invoice Approval and General Ledger Journal Approval workflows using spreadsheets. Download templates using the Manage Workflow Rules in Spreadsheet task to create and manage workflow rules as per your approval policies. This feature was introduced in update 18C. In update 20D, additional transaction attributes that are available in Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) have been added to the spreadsheet-based templates. Workflow administrators can use these additional attributes to define rules.

Optimization of Workflow Rule Evaluation

Optimize rule evaluation when parent and child attributes are used within the same rule in a workflow.

Refined User Experience for Key Lists of Values Search

This update introduces an enhanced user experience for additional lists of values. The change increases performance and expands the use of type ahead suggestions.

Rules Import from Oracle BPM for Payables Invoice Approval and General Ledger Journal Approval Workflows Using a Spreadsheet

Import rules from Oracle Business Process Management (BPM) for the Payables Invoice Approval and General Ledger Journal Approval workflows into spreadsheet-based templates. Using this import feature you can migrate existing BPM rules for these workflows and use the spreadsheets to view and update the rules. Previously, BPM rules had to be manually entered into the spreadsheets in order to use the Simplified Workflow Rules Configuration feature.

Service Excellence Continuing Investments

In this update, our on-going investment in service excellence includes improvements in performance, messages, usability and documentation. Refer to the What's New for more information. 

Intercompany

Attachments to Intercompany Batches and Transactions Using the Attachment SOAP Service

Use the Attachment SOAP service to create attachments for Intercompany batches and Intercompany transactions.

Configurable Intercompany Workflow Notifications

Configurable Workflow Notifications are available for use for the intercompany workflows for Intercompany transactions.

Oracle Financials Cloud now uses Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher for configurable email notifications. The email templates are optimized for mobile devices and are easily configurable. Choose from a comprehensive list of attributes to modify the email notifications according to your requirements. You can change both layout and content. This includes adding images, changing colors and styling, adding or removing attributes, or modifying text.

This feature was introduced in update 18A, with additional capabilities added in update 20B. In update 20D, there is a change in the opt-in method for this feature. Refer to the What's New document for details.

Rejected Intercompany Transactions with Marked as Reviewed Status

Mark rejected Intercompany transactions with the Rejection Reviewed status. Once the rejected Intercompany transaction is marked as Rejection Reviewed, the transaction no longer appears in the Requiring Attention tab of the Overview - Intercompany Transactions page.

REST APIs for Financials

Expenses

Foreign Currency Cash Advance Creation with Cash Advances REST API

Create cash advances in currencies other than your company’s ledger currency using the Cash Advances REST API.

Payables

Invoice Approvals and Notifications History REST API

View the invoice approval and holds notification history information using the Invoice Approvals and Notifications History REST API.

Receivables

Receivables Customer Account Site Activities REST API

View the activities on a customer account site using the Receivables Customer Account Site Activities REST API. Review the open receivable balances, transactions due, credits pending application, and the account activity history.

Financials

Advanced Collections

Configurable Collections Activity Management Notification

Use the enhanced workflow notification for activity management in Collections. You can use Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher templates to generate modern and unified look and feel email and in-application notifications. Modify templates to meet business requirements and policies.

Assets

Historical and Revalued Amounts Displayed Separately on Asset Reports for UK Government

The following reports are enhanced to display historical and revalued amounts separately.

• Asset Category Change Report
• Asset Transfer Report
• Asset Retirements Report

Budgetary Control

Carry Forward Open Purchase Orders for Budgetary Controlled Non-Sponsored Projects

Use the Carry Forward Open Purchase Orders process to move purchase orders associated with budgetary controlled non-sponsored projects from one budget year to another. The process automatically updates the budget date to the corresponding budget year for these purchase orders.

Configurable Budgetary Control Override Workflow Notifications

Use the enhanced workflow notification for Budgetary Control Override Notifications. You can use Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher templates to generate modern and unified look and feel email and in-application notifications. Modify templates to meet business requirements and policies.

Saved Search for Review Budgetary Control Balances

Reduce data entry for frequently reviewed control budget account balances by saving your search criteria in Review Budgetary Control Balances.

Cash Management

Configurable Cash Management Workflow Notifications

Use the enhanced workflow notifications for Cash Management workflows. You can use Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher templates to generate email and in-application notifications. Modify the templates to meet business requirements and policies.

Journal Reconciliation with Value Date

Reconcile journal lines to bank statements automatically using the value date as matching criteria in the Autoreconciliation process.

Notional and Physical Cash Pools

Create and manage notional and physical cash pools to review 'pool level cash positioning' and optimize liquidity management.

Expenses

Configurable Expenses Workflow Notifications

Use enhanced workflow notifications for expenses workflows. You can use Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher templates to generate a modern and unified look and feel for email and in-application notifications. Modify templates to meet business requirements and policies.

In Update 20D, there is a change in the opt-in method for this feature. Refer to the What's New document for details.

Delegate Assignment for Inactive Employees

Allow administrators to assign delegates for inactive employees to submit outstanding expenses. Assign project and account allocation access to delegates of inactive employees when required.

Descriptive Flexfields with SQL-Based Value Sets in the Expenses Mobile Application

Select valid values for descriptive flexfields based on SQL queries during expense creation using the Expenses mobile application.

Enforce Meals and Accommodations Policies in Expenses Android Application

Validate meals and accommodation expenses for policy violations within the Expenses Android application. The Android application performs the same validations that are enforced online. If your company policy permits submission of expenses with policy violations, provide a justification in the mobile application. If company policy does not allow an expense report submission with policy violations, you cannot submit an expense item. You must correct the expense item using the mobile application.

Expense Detail Capture from Receipts Using Expenses iOS Application

Capture expense details from receipts using image recognition in the Expenses iOS application.

Funds Release from Unused Spend Authorization Reservations

Release funds from a spend authorization with unused funds after travel is complete and expense reports are approved, to gain greater control of funds and manage travel budgets efficiently.

Search for Projects and Tasks to Assign to Expense Items in the Expenses Mobile Applications

Assign a project and task to an expense by using the searchable list of projects on the Add Expense screen in the Expenses mobile application. Employees can select projects from their list of recently used five projects or search the full project list.

Expenses Digital Assistant

Mileage Expenses and Refined Corporate Card Handling Using the Oracle Digital Assistant

Leverage continuously expanding capabilities for submitting expenses using the Oracle Digital Assistant. In addition to hotel, entertainment, meals, taxi, and miscellaneous expenses, employees can now enter the travel date and distance traveled to create mileage expenses. Employees can control whether to have their expenses automatically submitted or held until later for submission of a larger expense report. For example, employees with a corporate credit card may choose to hold off on submission until all their expenses for a trip are available. The digital assistant confirms use of a corporate card and alerts employees when it uses the enhanced logic to match to a card transaction during expense creation.

General Ledger

Balanced Manual Journals by Entered Currency

Optionally require the journal preparer to enter fully balanced manual journals to ensure that total debits and credits are equal for each entered currency. This enables organizations to ensure manual journals are balanced during journal creation, without requiring the journal posting process to generate additional lines to balance the journal.

Configurable Journal Workflow Notifications

Configurable Workflow Notifications are available for the Journal Workflow to generate the email and in-app notifications. These notifications use Oracle Business Intelligence templates.

You can modify the notification templates to display information based on your business requirements and policies. Choose from a comprehensive list of attributes to modify the notifications in accordance with your requirements. You can change both layout and content - add images, change colors and styling, add or remove attributes or modify text.

This feature was introduced in Update 17D, with additional capabilities added in Update 20A. In Update 20D, there is a change in the opt-in method for this feature. Refer to the What's New document for details.

Income Statement Accounts Average Daily Balance Tracking

Record and report on revenue and expense accounts using calculated and stored daily activity amounts, end-of-day balances, and average-to-date balances for periods, quarters, and years. Average balance tracking of income statement accounts facilitates reporting for financial services customers.

Manage Dependencies Between Chart of Accounts Segments Using Related Value Sets

Related Value Sets provide a new way to define dependencies between two segments in a chart of accounts to ensure only valid combinations are used during data entry. You can define these relationships immediately for new or existing charts of accounts. If you use Cross-Validation Rules to validate values for a segment based on another segment, you may consider converting them to Related Value Set rules to improve journal processing performance.

Prevent General Ledger Period Closure When Open Subledger Periods Exist

Prevent the closure of a General Ledger accounting period if the accounting period for any of the corresponding subledgers is still open, or if incomplete accounting entries or transactions exist for the period.  This ensures an effective period close process by validating all transactions are complete and not held up during the close.

Cost Management is now included in the list of subledgers along with the existing Payables, Receivables, Project Foundation and Revenue Management subledgers. By including the Cost Management subledger, the period statuses of the cost organization books are also checked and the General Ledger period close is prevented if any of the cost organization books associated with the primary ledger have not been closed.

Single Currency Journals

Optionally enforce single currency journals. This enables organizations to ensure that journals are separated by currency.

Joint Venture Management

Billing Retroactive Adjustments for Joint Ventures

Billing Retroactive Adjustments for Joint Ventures automatically reprocesses and redistributes joint venture transactions to create adjustments when an ownership definition is changed. 

This feature automatically:

• Identifies when an ownership definition changes, and marks the ownership definition for reprocessing.
• Selects and marks joint venture distributions associated with the changed ownership definition for reprocessing.
• Deletes any unprocessed joint venture distributions that have been marked for reprocessing.
• Reverses any draw from partner contributions for processed joint venture distributions.
• Reverses project capitalization information written into Project Costing for the joint venture distributions.
• Creates Receivables credit memos to reverse the invoiced distributions and updates the credit memo information on the joint venture distribution
• Redistributes the joint venture transactions using the ownership definition that has the new ownership percentage to create new joint venture distributions.

Joint Venture Accounting Manager Dashboard

Joint Venture Accounting Manager Dashboard provides metrics for joint ventures, joint venture transactions, and joint venture distributions. It provides analytics to help you easily monitor your joint ventures:

• Number of unapproved joint ventures
• Joint ventures that are active vs. not active
• Transaction amounts by transaction status
• Transaction counts by transaction status
• Distribution amounts by transaction status
• Distribution counts by distribution status

Partner Contribution Management for Joint Ventures

Use date-effective Joint Venture Partner Contributions to manage cash advances from joint venture partners to the managing partner to cover up-front and continuing costs related to a joint venture.

This solution enables you to:

• Define joint venture partner contributions.
• Identify Receivables invoices for partner contributions.
• Automatically draw from partner contributions.
• Mark the draw from partner contributions in the Receivables invoice that is sent to the partners to record the reimbursement from partners.
• Close the partner contributions.

Project Capitalization and Progress Management

Track project information from Project Management Cloud for joint venture transactions. Leverage this project information across the joint venture life cycle while processing capital expenditures, monitoring work in progress, and tracking the creation of resulting assets. Joint venture partners can review Receivables invoices for traceability to a specific project and task for their share of costs. Joint Venture Management creates cost transactions in Project Management, enabling project managers to have greater visibility to accurate capital expenditures and asset creation. Joint venture accountants save time and eliminate manual errors by leveraging automated processes.

Lease Accounting

Configurable Lease Options

Configure lease system options to align with specific organizational business practices. The lease administrator can add or update rates for calculating Right-of-Use and liability balances and maintain payment templates to simplify lease creation.

Lease Contract Activation

Activate lease contracts to complete the lease creation process. The activation process generates the lease booking transaction and includes the contract in the periodic accruals processing. These transactions are accounted for according to IFRS16 and ASC842. The activation process also stores the amortization schedule, calculated by either daily or periodic compound, as an attachment on the contract. Active contracts are available for viewing in read-only mode. Before activation, lease administrators can capture options, such as renewal options or early termination options for a lease.

Payables

Configurable Payables Workflow Notifications

Configurable Workflow Notifications are available for use for the following Payables workflows:

• Invoice Approval
• Payment Approval
• Hold Resolution
• Invoice Account Coding

Configurable Workflow notifications use Oracle Business Intelligence templates to generate the email and in-app notifications. You can modify the notification templates to display information based on your business requirements and policies. Choose from a comprehensive list of attributes to modify the notifications in accordance with your requirements. You can change both layout and content - add images, change colors and styling, add or remove attributes or modify text.

This feature was introduced in update 17D, with additional capabilities added in update 19D. In update 20D, there is a change in the opt-in method for this feature. Refer to the What's New document for details.

Electronic Invoices with File Attachments

Receive and process electronic invoices with file attachments in the invoice. Attachments can include supporting documents, such as time sheets for service invoices or usage reports for future reference or audit.

Payables Variance Drill Down in Payables to General Ledger Reconciliation Report

Use the Payables to General Ledger Reconciliation Report to drill down to details of Payables Variance amounts.

Payment Process Request Template Replication Across Environments

Use the Functional Setup Manager Export/Import service to move Payment Process Request templates from one environment to another. This allows system administrators to replicate PPR templates across environments more efficiently.

Project Attribute Sources for Withholding Tax Distributions

Create account rules based on project attributes for withholding tax distributions. Custom account rules help meet specific accounting and reporting requirements.

Purchase Order Drilldown from OTBI Using Predefined Payables Job Roles

Use predefined Payables job roles to drill down to purchase orders using deep links. A deep link is a URL to open a page without navigating through the application menu structure. Drill down from Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence, or OTBI, analyses to purchase orders, and view the related purchase order details.

Update Income Tax Type and Region Without Resubmitting Invoice for Approval

Invoice approval status remains unchanged when you update the income tax type and region on invoices that are reported in US 1099 report. You can update the income tax attributes on invoices that are already approved without resubmitting them for approval.

Receivables

Configurable Receivables Credit Memo Request Manual Entry Workflow Notification

Use the enhanced workflow notification for Receivables Credit Memo Request Requires Manual Entry. You can use Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher templates to generate modern and unified look and feel email and in-application notifications. Modify templates to meet business requirements and policies.

Credit Memo Creation in the Earliest Open Accounting Period

Record accounting entries for credit memos created from disputed invoices in the closest open accounting period to the invoice accounting period. This ensures that the revenue is created in an accounting period as close to the original transaction as practical.

Credit Memo Processing Using Oracle Receivables for Oracle Joint Venture Management

Automate the processing of credit memos for Joint Venture transactions using the Receivables integration with Joint Venture Cloud Management. This helps streamline credit processing for the respective joint venture partners.

Oracle Channel Revenue Management Integration with Oracle Receivables to Perform Claim Investigations

Use the Edit Receipt page to initiate claim investigations in Channel Revenue Management for non-invoice related underpayments and overpayments made by Receivables customers. This helps streamline claim processing and settle underpayments and overpayments, including processing of all settlement-related financial transactions.

Structured Payment Reference on Receipts Created Using Lockbox and Services

Include the structured payment reference on receipts created using lockbox and services. Set up Automatic Bank Reconciliation in Cash Management to match receipts based on the structured payment reference to improve automatic bank statement reconciliation.

Revenue Management

Accounting Rules for Revenue Contracts Using Item Attributes

Use item attributes, such as item category and item type, to derive segment values in Subledger Accounting rules for Revenue Management. Administrators can define accounting rules based on the attributes of the promised items to override default accounting of revenue contracts.

Pricing Dimension Assignment Based on Cost Amount, List Price, and Base Price of Performance Obligation

Address enterprise pricing policy requirements with additional pricing dimensions representing transaction cost amount, list price, or base price. For performance obligations identified by a template, pricing dimension is derived based on the total value of the amount attribute. These pricing dimensions are used to automatically assign standalone selling prices to the promises.

Subledger Accounting

Review and Correct Accounting Exceptions for Subledgers

The Review and Correct Accounting Exceptions for Subledgers feature is now enhanced to include multiperiod accounting errors.

Tax

Transaction Data Extract for Tax Partner Integration

Include additional data elements in the tax partner transaction data extract, such as identification of the project, identification of the task, purchase order number, lookup code of the vendor type, the vendor number, and the long postal code to allow advanced tax calculation.

Regional and Country-Specific Features

Financials for the Americas

Brazil

Additional Information in Fiscal Document Extract for Brazil

Generate fiscal document extract files for Brazil with additional information, such as certain descriptive flexfields and legal justification messages associated with your tax configuration.

Advanced Configuration Options to Generate Fiscal Documents for Brazil

Enable or disable fiscal document generation for Brazil for Receivables transactions based on event class, business unit, and document fiscal classification.

Mexico

Original Party Information in Electronic Accounting Reports for Mexico

Capture original party information in Payables invoice lines, including country, name, tax registration number, and universal unique identifier, using the regional information fields. Original party information is a legal requirement in Mexico on electronic accounting reports.

Financials for Asia/Pacific

Japan

Lockbox Payment Matching with Balance Forward Bills

Process customer payments using lockbox against transactions included in balance forward bills. This feature is applicable for customers who deliver balance forward bills and process their customer payments using the Zengin format for lockbox.

Thailand

Payment Condition Printed Automatically on Withholding Tax Certificate for Thailand

Enter the payment condition in the supplier profile instead of a regional information field on individual payments. This enables printing of the withholding tax certificate without having to enter the payment condition on each payment.