COLLABORATE 15Copyright 2015 by Murthy MamidannaPage 1 AUTO ACCOUNTING IN PROJECTS HOW WE MOVED FROM IT TO SLAMURTHY MAMIDANNA Lead ERP ArchitectCARTUS INTRODUCTION: Until E-Business Suite Release 12 was introduced, AutoAccounting was the way to configure accounting rules for Project Accounting. While AutoAccounting in Projects was by far the most flexible subledger accounting (SLA) setup within the financial modules, it came with limitations. Notable among the limitations is inability to derive multiple Asset accounts such as Receivables account or UBR account for a given journal. With the introduction of Subledger Accounting in Release 12 lot more flexibility has been added to account for transactions in Project Accounting. In this case study we will go over how we used the power of Subledger Accounting to 1. move from AutoAccounting rules to Subledger Accounting 2. Achieve more complex accounting requirements such as use of different Unbilled Receivable Account based on transaction level attributes. UNDERSTANDING AUTO ACCOUNTING: AutoAccounting in Projects is a configurable setup with three main components of setup. Those components are 1. Lookup Sets 2.Accounting Rules 3.Assign Accounting Rules to Accounting events. AutoAccounting rules are setup to derive a single accounting segment value for a particular accounting event. For example Segment1 of Supplier Invoice cost account. An AutoAccounting rule can derive a segment value in one of the following ways (See Figure 1), 1.By means of a constant value 2.A SQL Query returning a value 3.A transaction attribute from the transaction 4.Any of the 3 above providing an input value to a lookup set which has mapping to a segment value. COLLABORATE 15Copyright 2015 by Murthy MamidannaPage 2 Figure 1 This arrangement provides certain flexibility in deriving Account Segments. At our implementation we have setup AutoAccounting rules to derive segment values for the following accounting events.Misc Cost Supplier Cost Event Revenue Misc Cost Revenue Supplier Invoice Revenue Receivables Account Unbilled Receivables Unearned Revenue There are host of transaction attributes that are displayed for use in the derivation of a segment value. However, the only transaction attributes that can be used are those that are at the same detail level as the transaction or at a lower of detail level. So for example to derive Unbilled Receivables account one can use Project Number or Project Type or Organization ID etc., This is because the journal line of Unbilled Receivables is a sum of all the detail lines from the opposite side of the journal which may have different task numbers, expenditure types and so on. COLLABORATE 15Copyright 2015 by Murthy MamidannaPage 3 MIGRATING FROM AUTOACCOUNTING TO SLA Subledger Accounting provides a flexible configure rules to derive accounting in Subledgers. It is much more flexible compared to AutoAccounting in Projects. It will help to understand the components of configuration in SLA. Figure 2 demonstrates the configuration components of Subledger Accounting and hierarchy between those components. Figure 2. Although there is not a straightforward mapping between AutoAccounting setups in Projects and SLA, we can roughly map the configurations as shown in Figure 3 below. AutoAccounting Lookup SetSLA Mapping Set AutoAccounting Rules SLA Account Derivation Rules Assign AutoAccounting Rules SLA Journal Lines Definitions We used following approach to migrate from AutoAccounting Rules to SLA. We were able to migrate most of the AutoAccounting Rules using this approach. Lookup Sets: Lookup Sets and Mapping Sets in SLA are largely similar, except for mapping set comes with few extra bells and whistles. The input values of a mapping set can be setup to be validated with a value set or a lookup. Another feature of mapping set is we can provide a default value to use if no mapping is found for a particular input. If the mapping scheme is going to remain similar, which was the case in our implementation, we can export the lookups sets from the from File Export menu. We then use this file to format it for use by application such as dataload. COLLABORATE 15Copyright 2015 by Murthy MamidannaPage 4 Once we loaded the data into one environment, we can use the Oracle migration tool FNDLOAD to migrate data from one environment to another. FNDLOAD is an Oracle tool used to migrate Oracle setups such as Concurrent programs, Value sets etc., from one environment to another. More information on FNDLOAD can be found in System Administrators guide. AutoAccounting Rules: AutoAccounting Rules loosely map to Account Derivation Rules. Account Derivation rules can take input from a PL/SQL function (which is setup using a Custom Source) and lookup for an accounting segment value from the mapping set. So, if you have SQL as a source in AutoAccounting Rules, at the minimum they need to be converted to PL/SQL functions. We have to examine each of AutoAccounting Rule and then structure a new Account Derivation rule using AutoAccounting Rule as a basis. Since Account Derivation Rules in SLA are much more flexible there is room for adding complexity in creating the Account Derivation rule. We will discuss later in this paper about how we achieved one such requirement. Assign AutoAccounting Rules: This process is akin to assigning Account Derivation rules to Journal Lines Definition. A Journal line definition in SLA is used to define how accounting for a single Journal Line is derived. As in AutoAccounting, Journal Line is associated with a particular event type, for example Unbilled Receivable. Once we build Account Derivation rule, defining journal line definition is a one-to-one process, i.e., you would assign the Account Derivation rules to the same Accounting Event Types as you had AutoAccounting Rules assigned to. Deriving UBR/UER using Transaction Level Attributes: In AutoAccounting UBR (UnBilled Receivable) and UER (UnEarned Revenue) Journal line was always summarized as one Journal Line against multiple expenditure or event journal lines on the opposite side of the Journal. This prevented us from using a transaction level attribute such as Expenditure type, Task or Event Type to derive UBR or UER account. In SLA we can setup a Journal Line Definition to post either in Summary or Detail (See Figure 3). Figure 3. COLLABORATE 15Copyright 2015 by Murthy MamidannaPage 5 This setup will create one UBR line for every corresponding transaction journal line on the opposite side. This will allow us to be able to derive UBR differently using the transaction level attribute. We can then create an Account Derivation Rule that derives the account by using either a standard source or a custom source along with a mapping set. Whether we need to use a custom source along with mapping set or custom source or standard source in isolation will depend on the actual requirements to derive the UBR Account. As illustrated in Figure2 above, the building blocks for Account Derivation rule are Sources (Custom or Standard) and Mapping Set. CONCLUSION: An analysis of current autoaccounting rules in your environment along with an understanding of what SLA can offer will make migration from AutoAccounting rules to SLA an easy task. When compared to AutoAccounting, SLA offers much more flexibility in setting up rules for accounting. There are also very good resources on Oracle support site that help in better understanding of SLA. See Note IDs 790945.1, 797115.1. In addition by enabling Diagnostics in SLA (Profile option SLA: Enable Diagnostics) debugging an accounting issue is a breeze.