Would your FedAdmin Install like better traceability from gl_je_lines to source PO for FV Treasury Confirmation Journal Entries?

Posted on 12-Aug-10. Filed under: Enhancements | Tags: enhancement, gl, Treasury Confirmation |

Yes, I know the blog has been pretty stagnant lately.  We went live w/11i10 for USAF DEAMS on May 1st & lets just say I haven’t had any trouble being bored!!  Conversion of the legacy USAF data was successful, but not without a good bit of hard work & since then we’ve certainly kept busy w/some post-go-live issues, as with many new system implementations.

I wanted to see if I could get some thoughts from the community via the blog on if there would be a Federal Financials Community desire for Oracle to provide a better level of detail for Fed Financials Treasury Confirmation entries  posted to GL.  I posted a bit of info last year on the gl_je_lines traceability for Treasury Confirmations to source transactions here.  Current functionality is that the Treasury Confirmation entries are posted at the AP Invoice level of detail.  This allows for drill-down from FV Treasury Confirmation journal entries to the AP Invoice via the invoice_id.  However, we are struggling with the issue that we cannot uniquely drill-down to the invoice distribution line and the unique PO, Project, Task info from there.  If an invoice has multiple lines against multiple POs, we can’t develop a join to identify which POs are paid/confirmed via the Treasury Confirmation process.

We need this functionality because of reporting and feeds to external data warehouses (DWs) that we have where we want to be able to specify the status of accounting that a particular PO is in.  We use GL as the driving source for our information, pulling back to the subsidiary modules for add’l subsidiary detail as required.  We use GL as the baseline data source to mitigate the risk of feeding data to our external DWs that could result in out of balances with our GL balances/journals.  But due to the lack of ability for getting to the ap_invoice_distributions_all.distribution_line_number from the Treasury Confirmation gl_je_lines, whenever we have an invoice that is paying against multiple POs we have this issue since we can’t drill as needed.

To illustrate, say we have PO #F2010 123ABC for $1,000:

We want to be able to report:
$500 is still in Obligation (4801)
$100 is expensed – not paid (4901/2110)
$50 is is Disbursements in Transit (4901/2120) (DIT is the short time-period between when we submit the check/EFT to disbursing vs when the check is disbursed)
$350 has been disbursed/confirmed  (4902/1010)

We’re trying to work w/Oracle Development, but they are giving us some push-back that 1) this is an enhancement, which no other Federal Customers have asked for and 2) implementing a lower level of detail posting, would break some other customizations deployed by Fed Customers.  So what is that annual 22% in support fees for again?   

My thoughts on these are:

1) Well maybe no official enhancement request has been done, but I have talked w/some other clients who have struggled with this same issue,

2) As with many configuration options, it seems Oracle could provide the functionality to use or not use the detail posting, via a profile option setting or some other config setting. 
For example, create a profile option like “FV: Treasury Confirmation GL Posting Level – Options Invoice/Invoice Distribution”, then update the DIT posting package to post at the level defined in the profile option.  Ship the patch with the option as ‘Invoice’ (e.g. the current method).   This would allow for Fed Agencies needing to keep the functionality as-is to do that, but allow the add’l option as desired.

I’m definitely interested in any comments from others on this topic.  Would your agency/Fed Install benefit from and like a capability such as this, or are we just on an island?  Please comment in the post comments if you’re comfortable.  You can also email me if desired – larry.baugh@gmail.com

Thanks