Document History

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

Date Update Version Notes
29 NOV 2018 December 2018 Update Delivered new features in December 2018 update.
25 OCT 2018 November 2018 Update Delivered new features in November 2018 update.
27 SEP 2018 October 2018 Update Delivered new features in October 2018 update.
30 AUG 2018 September 2018 Update Delivered new features in September 2018 update.
22 AUG 2018 August 2018 Update Revised August 2018 update.
13 JUL 2018 July 2018 Update Revised July 2018 update.
24 MAY 2018 June 2018 Update Delivered new features in June 2018 update.
27 APR 2018 May 2018 Update Revised May 2018 update.
05 APR 2018 April 2018 Update Revised April 2018 update.
07 MAR 2018 March 2018 Update Revised March 2018 update.
05 FEB 2018 February 2018 Update Revised February 2018 update.
22 DEC 2017 January 2018 Update Delivered new features in January 2018 update.

December 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
29 NOV 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, December Update

This document outlines the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 23:00 UTC (15:00 PST) on Friday, December 7, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, December 21, 2018, also starting at 23:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center provides access to updated documentation. The updates will be available in the Help Center on December 7, 2018. Some of the links to new feature documentation included in this document will not work until after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server.

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service and the monthly update cycle.

Announcements

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

New EPM Automate Utility Version

A new version of the EPM Automate Utility, which includes the getdailymaintenancestarttime command, is available with this update. You use this command to display the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) at which the daily maintenance of the environment is scheduled to start.

You must install this version of the utility to use the new command.

Key Resources

Working with EPM Automate for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud

Data Management Dimension and Attribute Column Enhancements

Dimension and attribute columns can now accept a maximum of 300 characters. Formerly, the dimension column accepted a maximum of 80 characters, attribute columns 1-7 accepted a maximum of 70 characters, and attribute columns 8-14 accepted a maximum of 20 characters.

In addition, you can now import values into a maximum of 40 attribute columns. Formerly, you could only import a maximum of 14 attribute columns.

HsSetValue Accepts Additional Data Types

The HsSetValue function can now be used to set values from cells with Smart List, text, or date formats.

Key Resources

System Maintenance Task Options Enhancements

The Maintain FDMEE Data Tables option has been renamed to Maintain Data Tables by Application.

The new Maintain Data Table by Location option allows you to delete data for a specific location by period or category. You can still delete all locations for a target application by using the Maintain Data Tables by Application option.

A new Maintain Setup Data option has been added so that you can view and delete an orphan row or invalid data that cannot be accessed or deleted from the user interface. This data may include an orphan row from an import format, location, or data load rule. It can also include a duplicate row, or a Cloud user id or password defined for a local target application.

Key Resources

Administering Data Management for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud

Consolidation Report Enhancements

The Consolidation Report has been enhanced with several new features:

Key Resources

Supplemental Data Manager Governors

In Supplemental Data, you can set governors on form template sections and attributes, and selectable columns in the Data Analysis dashboard, to improve application performance. The system provides default settings, which you can decrease or increase up to the maximum value. It enforces the maximum limits when these objects are created.

Key Resources

Supplemental Data Support for Negative Number Colors

For Supplemental Data, you can specify whether to display negative numbers in Red or Black. You set the negative number color in User Preferences on the Application card.

Key Resources

Smart View Support for Dashboards

You can now open Oracle EPM Cloud dashboards in Oracle Smart View for Office.

Dashboards give you an overview to key information and let you change and save data. When you open a dashboard in Smart View, a new Excel workbook is launched with each dashboard object displayed in a separate worksheet. Chart objects are displayed in grid format. Only grid and chart objects are supported; other dashboard objects are ignored.

Key Resources

Upcoming Changes

Proposed Changes to Application-Level Access Control

Using Groups created in Access Control, EPM Cloud supports application-level access control for planning, consolidation and close, tax reporting, and Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud applications. In addition to the custom groups created in Access Control, access control screens list predefined identity domain roles (Service Administrator, Power User, User and Viewer) as groups.

Pre-Defined Roles and Groups in Forms Access Control Screen

With a view to simplifying security across EPM Cloud and to ensure that application-level access control can be seamlessly migrated across environments, Oracle plans to remove the ability to display predefined roles as groups in access control screens. After this change, you will no longer see predefined roles listed when you search for groups in access control screens.

NOTE: The proposed change will not affect how you create and manage groups or use them for application-level access control.

Before making this change, Oracle wants to evaluate the impact, if any, that the proposed change will have on your environments. If you are concerned that the proposed change will affect your environment, please create a service request explaining your use case.

Classic Dimension Editor

With a view to allowing customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update in 2019. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.

Renaming Close Manager Feature Set

With a future update, the “Close Manager” feature set name is changing to “EPM Task Manager”.  When the change is announced, the user interface and documentation will be updated.

Ability to Create New Composite Forms

To allow customers more time to adapt and move from composite forms to dashboards, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) to a future update in 2019. After this update all existing composite forms can still be edited and used. This change impacts only the creation of new composite forms in the service. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.

All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. No more enhancements will be made to the composite forms functionality.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Removal of Block Storage Cube Runtime Statistics

Starting in Release 19.02, run time statistics for Block Storage (BSO) cubes will no longer be available in the Database Properties module of Calculation Manager.

Load Data to P&L Accounts Using FCCS_ClosingBalance_Input

The 18.10 update contained a Valid Intersection rule to restrict users from using FCCS_ClosingBalance_Input to load data to P&L accounts.  This rule has been removed starting in 18.11, so users should be able to load to that member now. Alternatively, P&L data can be loaded to the YTD_Input View without requiring a rule to populate the relevant periodic movement.

Translation Override Rule Redirection

When you create a Translation Override rule, redirection does not work properly when you use a shared Parent account for the Source. The workaround is to specify the primary Parent account.

Simplified Dimension Editor and Metadata Validation

Some of the Simplified Dimension Editor errors (cells outlined in red) are false-positive errors (i.e. incorrectly reported as errors).

Data Storage errors for the following members should be ignored:

If you are using a Hybrid upgraded environment, the Simplified Dimension Editor does not show Dynamic Calc as an allowed value for Custom dimension parent member Data Storage. This issue does not occur in a newly installed Hybrid environment. You can use the Classic Dimension Editor, Import Metadata, or Smart View to change the Data Storage value.

In addition:

Consolidation Operator for Children of Dimension Name Members

Seeded dimension members must have the Consolidation Operator set as Ignore. None of the POV members should be set to Dimension member. Rather, always use Top Member to view aggregated values.

Calculation Status

When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.

Metadata Aliases

Ensure that no alias entries are “Equity”. The use of “Equity” as an alias will cause issues with refreshing the database.

Reconsolidating Data after Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Copying Data

When copying an entity with a Calculation Status of No Data, the target should also have a Calculation Status of No Data. The Copy Data process is incorrectly setting the Calculation Status to Impacted.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names/Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

Be aware of the following considerations:

If there are journals or Supplemental Data posted to those members, these changes can cause problems when accessing Journals or importing existing journals.

When you use ad hoc grids in Smart View with Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, do not add a root Period member on the grid. Make sure the root Period member is removed by either clicking Remove Only or selecting periods that are in the application and selecting Keep Only.  If a Period member is left on the grid, then any changes to data that you make will fail to properly set the impact status of the Entities.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

Setting the Aggregation Option for Dimension Children

All immediate children of the dimension name member must be set with an aggregation option of Ignore or Never.

Children under a Parent member that has the Label Only data storage property must have the aggregation operator set to Ignore.

Viewing the FCCS_VIEW_SYSTEM_MEMBERS

If you are using an Extended Dimensionality environment, users other than the Administrator can view the FCCS_VIEW_SYSTEM_MEMBERS and its hierarchy in the data form and Intercompany reports.

Refreshing the Database in Extended Dimensionality Environment

If you are using an Extended Dimensionality environment, when you refresh the database, an error message will be displayed if you exceed governor limits.

Viewing Members on Seeded Forms

If you are using an Extended Dimensionality environment, on seeded forms, use the View members, such as Periodic, QTD and YTD, instead of using functions to ensure the _RULE members are not accidentally added to the forms.

Unable to Refresh the Cube

A Cube refresh will not complete if a level 0 currency dimension member has the "Label only" data storage property, but this is not currently detected in the  Dimension Editor or Metadata Validator.

Setting the Data Storage Property

The Metadata Validator may not recognize if a level 0 data source dimension member is incorrectly set to "Never share" as the value for the default data storage and Consol data storage property. No validation message is displayed.

The Data Storage property for both the default and Consol data storage property should Shared, Store, Dynamic Calc for a Level 0 Datasource member.

Adding or Changing an Entity After Autonomous Consolidation Is Enabled

If a new entity is added when Autonomous Consolidation is already turned on, the entity and parents will not be consolidated after data is entered.  

If an entity name is changed when Auto Consol is turned on, the consolidation will fail when it reaches the amended entity.

Horizontal Scroll on a Non-Tabular Form

In Supplemental Data forms, the horizontal scroll does not work on a non-tabular form, which is intended only for use on a single record. Do not use non-tabular layout if the form is meant for more than one record.

Adding Shared Members in Smart View

When using Smart View, after adding a Shared Member, Refresh and Submit may not work correctly.

Do Not Use Member Formulas in View Member YTD

Using a Member formula in the View Member YTD will cause consolidation to fail.

Setting the Data Collection Period

In Supplemental Data, when setting the Data Collection Period (DCP), the Start, End, and Close dates must be inside the valid range.

Errors When Importing Accounts

Sometimes when importing an account, error messages may be generated because there are several accounts that reference an intercompany account in the Plug Account column but that account has yet to be encountered in the account file.

Try to reimport the account.

Exporting Data Collection Period Using Migration

In Supplemental Data, when SDM Data is exported through Migration by selecting a particular Data Collection Period (DCP), then all DCPs are incorrectly added to the listing file. Even though all DCPs are displayed on the snapshot selection, only the data for the selected DCP will be exported.

November 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
25 OCT 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, November Update

This document outlines the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Friday, November 2, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, November 16, 2018, starting at 23:00 UTC (15:00 PST). The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center provides access to updated documentation. The updates will be available in the Help Center on November 2, 2018. Some of the links to new feature documentation included in this document will not work until after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

Tips And Considerations

Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server.

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrownext to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service and the monthly update cycle.

Announcements

Option to Select Custom Top Member for System Calculations

For user-defined Custom dimensions, you now have the option to select the Custom dimensions for which Top Member processing will be applied. When selected, the System Calculation option applies to all scenarios and years.

Key Resources

Running Intercompany Reports

After you create an Intercompany report, you can now save it as a Job and run it a later time.  The Intercompany Reports page displays a list of available reports.

Key Resources

Displaying Member Names and Aliases in Journal Reports

The option to display member names and aliases in Journal Reports has changed.  You now specify these options as system settings in User Preferences under Tools.

Key Resources

New EPM Automate Utility Version

A new version of the EPM Automate Utility is available with this update. This version includes the following new commands

Additionally, this version includes enhancements to the following commands:

NOTE: In a future update, Oracle will make the simplified Provisioning Report as the default report that is generated from Access Control as well as using the provisionreport command. You will still be able to create the classic Provisioning Report using this command.

Key Resources

New Version of Oracle Smart View for Office

Oracle Smart View for Office 11.1.2.5.810 will be available in November 2018. This version includes new features such as:

This release also fixes a number of defects.

The Smart View 11.1.2.5.810 Readme, available on the Help Center, will contain a complete list of features and defects addressed in this version. You must install this version to ensure access to the new functionalities.

Key Resources

REST APIs for Managing Users

You can now use REST APIs to perform these user management-related operations:

Key Resources

Improved Search for Forms, Dashboards, and Infolets

Search functionality is now more intuitive when you search for forms, dashboards, and infolets. Before, Search displayed artifacts in context of their folder structure. Now, you can toggle between searching for these artifacts using a flat view or a hierarchical view.

Key Resources

Improved Performance While Uploading and Downloading Files

This update features improved performance while processing large files using the following EPM Automate commands:

Key Resources

Displaying the POV Member Selector for a Report

When you click Reports on the Home page, the Reports page enables you to select the report you want to display.  If you select the Show POV Options check box on the page and select a report that has a POV, a POV member selector window is displayed.

Your selection for this check box applies to all reports in the list that have a POV and persists for the current session, until you log out.

If you clear the Show POV Options check box (which is selected by default), the report launches directly, without displaying the POV member selector window. The POV members in the report are the most recently used members on the form, or the dimension's root if there are no most recently used members. Even if you launch a report directly and bypass the POV member selector window, when the report is displayed, you can still change the members in the POV by clicking a link in the POV and selecting different members.

Key Resources

Reopening Locked Schedules

When working on a Close Manager schedule, you can now reopen a locked schedule, if required.

Select the locked schedule, and then under Set Status, select Open.

Key Resources

Ability to Enter Hex Values to Customize Font Colors in Financial Reporting Reports

You can now enter hex values to customize the font color for text objects in Financial Reporting reports. You enter hex values (without the prefix) in the text editor in Financial Reporting Web Studio. Hex values can be entered in both the short RGB format and the long RRGGBB format.

Key Resources

Upcoming Changes

Classic Dimension Editor

With a view to allowing customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update in 2019. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.

Proposed Changes to Application-Level Access Control

Using Groups created in Access Control, EPM Cloud supports application-level access control for planning, consolidation and close, tax reporting, and Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud applications. In addition to the custom groups created in Access Control, access control screens list predefined identity domain roles (Service Administrator, Power User, User and Viewer) as groups.

Pre-defined Roles and Groups in Forms Access Control Screen

With a view to simplifying security across EPM Cloud and to ensure that application-level access control can be seamlessly migrated across environments Oracle plans to remove the ability to display predefined roles as groups in access control screens. After this change, you will no longer see predefined roles listed when you search for groups in access control screens.

NOTE: The proposed change will not affect how you create and manage groups or use them for application-level access control.

Before making this change, Oracle wants to evaluate the impact, if any, that the proposed change will have on your environments. If you are concerned that the proposed change will affect your environment, please create a service request explaining your use case.

Ability to Create New Composite Forms

To allow customers more time to adapt and move from composite forms to dashboards, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) to a future update in 2019. After this update all existing composite forms can still be edited and used. This change impacts only the creation of new composite forms in the service. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.

All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. No more enhancements will be made to the composite forms functionality.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Simplified Dimension Editor Errors

Some of the Simplified Dimension Editor errors (cells outlined in red) are false-positive errors (that is, they are incorrectly reported as errors).

Data Storage errors for Entity -> "FCCS_Global Assumptions" should be ignored. 

Consolidation Operator for Children of Dimension Name Members

Seeded dimension members that are children of the dimension names must have the Consolidation Operator set as Ignore. None of the POV members used for retrieving data should be set to the Dimension name member.

Calculation Status

When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.

Metadata Aliases

Ensure that no alias entries are “Equity”. The use of “Equity” as an alias will cause issues with refreshing the database.

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step. The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube: FX Rates – Average FX Rates – Ending Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise. Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts. If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature. When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension. If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

Copying Data

When copying an entity with a Calculation Status of No Data, the target should also have a Calculation Status of No Data. The Copy Data process is incorrectly setting the Calculation Status to Impacted.

Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Entity Member Names/Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

Be aware of the following considerations when working with metadata: Do not change a base member to which a journal has been posted into a parent member If there are journals or Supplemental Data posted to those members, these changes can cause problems when accessing Journals or importing existing journals. When you use ad hoc grids in Smart View with Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, do not add a root Period member on the grid. Make sure the root Period member is removed by either clicking Remove Only or selecting periods that are in the application and selecting Keep Only.  If a Period member is left on the grid, then any changes to data that you make will fail to properly set the impact status of the Entities.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue: Use the keyboard arrow keys to make your selection, then close and reopen the dialog; or Minimize and then reopen the dialog; or Use a different browser.

Translation Override Rule Redirection

When you create a Translation Override rule, redirection does not work properly when you use a shared Parent account for the Source. The workaround is to specify the primary Parent account.

October 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
27 SEP 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, October Update

This document outlines the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Friday, October 5, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, October 19, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center provides access to updated documentation. The updates will be available in the Help Center on October 5, 2018. Some of the links to new feature documentation included in this document will not work until after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

Tips And Considerations

Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server.

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrownext to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service and the monthly update cycle.

Announcements

New EPM Automate Utility Version

A new version of the EPM Automate Utility is available with this update. This version includes the renameSnapshot command, which enables you to rename a snapshot available in an environment to prevent the maintenance process from overwriting it. Customers who have small applications can use this command to archive snapshots in the environment subject to snapshot retention policies.

This version also includes updates to the rundailyMaintenance command, which has been enhanced to take skipNext as a new optional parameter. This parameter allows you to skip the next occurrence of the daily maintenance process. Use this parameter to prevent the daily maintenance process from interfering with long running ad hoc processes of unknown duration that you execute in an environment.

Key Resources

Intercompany Reports Currency Dimension Information

When you generate Intercompany Reports, the reports now display Currency information. The Currency dimension is displayed in the report header, which enables you to determine the Currency member used by the report.

Key Resources

New Consolidation Audit Trail Report

Administrators and Power Users can now run a Consolidation Report that provides a detailed audit trail of the consolidation process.

The report displays for a selected parent entity, the original reported closing balances and all the adjustments, including manual journal entries, Multi-GAAP adjustments and automatic eliminations generated by Intercompany elimination and consolidation rules, detailing the net contribution of each immediate child entity, and any variance.

The report is available in HTML, PDF, and XLS formats.

Key Resources

Journals Approval Option

Administrators have the ability to allow users with the user role to approve journals. The option applies to all journals.

If you disable this option, when a User tries to approve a journal, the system displays an error message that they are not authorized to perform the task.

Key Resources

Viewing Close Manager Tasks on the Welcome Panel

Administrators now have the ability to display either Close manager "Current Tasks" or "Current and Upcoming Tasks" in the Worklist and on the Welcome panel.

If administrators enable "Current and Upcoming Tasks", user can see items in the upcoming workflows, as well as items currently available to work on.

Key Resources

Working with Multiple Close Manager Schedules

Administrators can now perform various actions on multiple Close Manager schedules at a time. This can be helpful if your application has a large number of schedules.

You can perform these actions on multiple schedules: Set Status, Reassign Users, and Generate Report Binders.

Key Resources

New Server Setting in Financial Reporting Web Studio

A new server setting, "Export to Excel Using Default Sheet Name", controls Excel sheet names upon export. When set to false, the sheet name uses the Financial Reporting report name. When set to true, the sheet name uses the Excel default name (Sheet1, Sheet2, etc.)

Key Resources

Extended Dimensionality

If you want to use more than two Custom Dimensions, you must request the Extended Dimensionality update from Oracle Support.

When you make the request to update the environment with the Extended dimension applications, you must supply Oracle Support with the location URLs to update the application in the usual way. You also need to confirm to Oracle Support that you understand the following:

After the update is applied, you must create a new application. You cannot modify the number of dimensions in an existing application. When Extended Dimensionality is enabled, you will see the option to create four Custom dimensions. If the application is enabled with the Multi-GAAP reporting option, you will see the option to create three Custom Dimensions.

METADATA CHANGES 

In the update for Extended Dimensionality, the View dimension now has new seeded base members under a new seeded parent – FCCS_View_System_Members, which are suffixed with _RULE. These members are used internally and they are of the type Dynamic Calc.

In any of the existing forms, if the rows or columns are referencing View members using functions such as (ILvl0Descendants(View)), these _RULE members will also be queried. Since these members are Dynamic Calc, the performance of the forms will be slow.  Change the definition of the forms using one of the following options:

MIGRATION CONSIDERATIONS 

Extended Dimensionality is only available for new applications. The Migration Snapshot feature is not available between non-Extended Dimension and Extended Dimension applications.

You can, however, move certain artifacts to your new application.  See “Creating Extended Dimension Applications” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

NOTE:  For subsequent releases, if you have Extended Dimensionality, you must also request an update from Oracle Support.

Key Resources

Upcoming Changes

Proposed Changes to Application-Level Access Control

Using Groups created in Access Control, EPM Cloud supports application-level access control for planning, consolidation and close, tax reporting, and Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud applications. In addition to the custom groups created in Access Control, access control screens list predefined identity domain roles (Service Administrator, Power User, User and Viewer) as groups.

Pre-defined Roles and Groups in Forms Access Control Screen

With a view to simplifying security across EPM Cloud and to ensure that application-level access control can be seamlessly migrated across environments Oracle plans to remove the ability to display predefined roles as groups in access control screens. After this change, you will no longer see predefined roles listed when you search for groups in access control screens.

NOTE: The proposed change will not affect how you create and manage groups or use them for application-level access control.

Before making this change, Oracle wants to evaluate the impact, if any, that the proposed change will have on your environments. If you are concerned that the proposed change will affect your environment, please create a service request explaining your use case.

Classic Dimension Editor

With a view to allowing customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update in 2019. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.

Ability to Create New Composite Forms

To allow customers more time to adapt and move from composite forms to dashboards, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) to a future update in 2019. After this update all existing composite forms can still be edited and used. This change impacts only the creation of new composite forms in the service. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.

All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. No more enhancements will be made to the composite forms functionality.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Simplified Dimension Editor and Metadata Validation

Some of the Simplified Dimension Editor errors (cells outlined in red) are false-positive errors (that is incorrectly reported as errors).

Data Storage errors for Entity -> "FCCS_Global Assumptions" should be ignored

If you are using an Extended Dimensionality environment, the Simplified Dimension Editor does not show Dynamic Calc as an allowed value for Custom dimension parent member Data Storage. This issue does not occur in a newly installed Extended Dimensionality environment. You can use the Classic Dimension Editor, Import Metadata, or Smart View to change the Data Storage value.

In addition, the Metadata Validator warning message for the Data Source dimension’s system members incorrectly refers to “Never Shared” instead of “Never Share”.

Consolidation Operator for Children of Dimension Name Members

Seeded dimension members that are children of the dimension names must have the Consolidation Operator set as Ignore. None of the POV members used for retrieving data should be set to the Dimension name member.

Calculation Status

When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.

Metadata Aliases

Ensure that no alias entries are “Equity”. The use of “Equity” as an alias will cause issues with refreshing the database.

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

Copying Data

When copying an entity with a Calculation Status of No Data, the target should also have a Calculation Status of No Data. The Copy Data process is incorrectly setting the Calculation Status to Impacted.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names/Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

Be aware of the following considerations when working with metadata:

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

Translation Override Rule Redirection

When you create a Translation Override rule, redirection does not work properly when you use a shared Parent account for the Source. The workaround is to specify the primary Parent account.

September 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
30 AUG 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, September Update

This document outlines announcements in the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Friday, September 7, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, September 21, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center provides access to updated documentation. The updates will be available in the Help Center on September 7, 2018. Some of the links to new feature documentation included in this document will not work until after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

Tips And Considerations

Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server.

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service and the monthly update cycle.

Announcements

Security for Users to Run Consolidation Process

Users can now run the consolidation process, in addition to Power Users and Service Administrators. To consolidate data, you must also have Write access for the entity that you want to consolidate.

Key Resources

Data Load - Reverse Year-to-Date Value for Accounts Loaded in Replace Mode

When you load data to YTD_Input and use the Replace mode, the system loads the data and then reverses the YTD values for the Flow accounts that are not specified in the data load file.

Key Resources

Integrated, Comprehensive User Preferences

As an end user, you can now set your preferences for many aspects of the application in a comprehensive, integrated framework in the application. For example, from the Home page, select Tools, and then User Preferences to set your profile picture, select members for user variables, set preferences for ad hoc options and printed reports, and so on. The preferences you set override your administrator’s settings, and persist across sessions. However, you can always change your preferences or revert to the administrator’s settings if you want to.

Key Resources

System Settings and Defaults Moved to Application Settings

In a further effort to simplify how you manage administrator settings, administrators can now define all application settings and system defaults in one place in the application. For example, from the Home page, select Application, and then Settings to set email options, assign an owner to an application, or to enable currency options.

Previously, these settings were accessed from the Navigator menu on the System Settings and Defaults page. Starting with this update, the System Settings and Defaults link has been removed from the Navigator menu.

Key Resources

Uniform Time Zone Settings

The time format used throughout Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud is now based on the time zone setting that you specify in User Preferences under Tools.

Key Resources

Supplemental Data Set Governors

In Supplemental Data, you can set governors on the maximum number of Data Set Calculated and Dimension attributes to improve application performance. The system provides default settings, which you can decrease or increase up to the maximum value. It enforces the maximum limits when attributes are created.

Key Resources

Close Manager Support for Viewer Users

In Close Manager, users with the Viewer role can now have restricted access to Close Manager functionality. For example, auditors can be assigned the Viewer role to check that the close process has been followed correctly without having the ability to modify tasks. Administrators can assign users with the Viewer role to tasks, templates, schedules, and so on, and can also create teams of Viewer users.

NOTE: The Viewer role is optional. If you have existing Close Manager users with the User role, it is not necessary to reassign them.

Key Resources

Toolkit for Hyperion Financial Management Migration to EPM Cloud

EPM Cloud Migration Accelerator is an Oracle utility and whitepaper providing best practices for migrating HFM customers to EPM Cloud. The current version allows migration of Hyperion Financial Management 11.1.2.3 and 11.1.2.4 applications to EPM Cloud. The EPM Cloud Migration Accelerator combines software as well as best practices/recommendations for moving your HFM applications to the Cloud. This holistic guide identifies the recommended approach for every step of the process and helps facilitate a clean and smooth transition.

Key Resources

New EPM Automate Utility Version

A new version of the EPM Automate Utility is available with this update. This version includes the following commands:

Key Resources

Loading Data Using an Incremental File Adapter

Data Management now includes an incremental file adapter to optimize the data load process. The new Incremental adapter compares the source data file with a prior version of the source data file and identifies new or changed records and loads only this data set. The user has the option to sort the input source data file before making the comparison or they can provide a pre-sorted file for better performance.

Key Resources

Drilling Down from Summary Members

You can now drill down from Summary level grid members and view the detail source data that make up the number.

In order to use this feature you should select the Enable Summary Drill option in Data Management. After enabling this option and loading the data with Create Drill Region option set to Yes the Drill icon will be enabled at the summary level. Drill is limited to 1000 descendant members for a dimension.

Key Resources

Provisioning Changes to Simplify Role Usage

The following changes that affect provisioning are included in this update.

Upcoming Changes

Proposed Changes to Application-Level Access Control

Using Groups created in Access Control, EPM Cloud supports application-level access control for planning, consolidation and close, tax reporting, and Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud applications. In addition to the custom groups created in Access Control, access control screens list predefined identity domain roles (Service Administrator, Power User, User and Viewer) as groups.

Pre-defined Roles and Groups in Forms Access Control Screen

With a view to simplifying security across EPM Cloud and to ensure that application-level access control can be seamlessly migrated across environments Oracle plans to remove the ability to display predefined roles as groups in access control screens. After this change, you will no longer see predefined roles listed when you search for groups in access control screens.

NOTE: The proposed change will not affect how you create and manage groups or use them for application-level access control.

Before making this change, Oracle wants to evaluate the impact, if any, that the proposed change will have on your environments. If you are concerned that the proposed change will affect your environment, please create a service request explaining your use case.

Ability to Create New Composite Forms

To allow customers more time to adapt and move from composite forms to dashboards, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) to a future update in 2019. After this update all existing composite forms can still be edited and used. This change impacts only the creation of new composite forms in the service. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.

All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. No more enhancements will be made to the composite forms functionality.

Classic Dimension Editor

With a view to allowing customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update in 2019. Oracle will notify you at least two months prior to the removal of the feature.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Simplified Dimension Editor and Metadata Validation

Some of the Simplified Dimension Editor errors (cells outlined in red) are false-positive errors (i.e. incorrectly reported as errors).

Data Storage errors for the following members should be ignored:

If you are using a Hybrid upgraded environment, the Simplified Dimension Editor does not show Dynamic Calc as an allowed value for Custom dimension parent member Data Storage. This issue does not occur in a newly installed Hybrid environment. You can use the Classic Dimension Editor, Import Metadata, or Smart View to change the Data Storage value.

In addition:

Translation Override Rule Redirection

When you create a Translation Override rule, redirection does not work properly when you use a shared Parent account for the Source.

Workaround: Specify the primary Parent account.

Consolidation Operator for Children of Dimension Name Members

Seeded dimension members must have the Consolidation Operator set as Ignore. None of the POV members should be set to Dimension member. Rather, always use Top Member to view aggregated values.

Calculation Status

When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

Copying Data

When copying an entity with a Calculation Status of No Data, the target should also have a Calculation Status of No Data. The Copy Data process is incorrectly setting the Calculation Status to Impacted.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names / Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

When you use ad hoc grids in Smart View with Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, do not add a root Period member on the grid. Make sure the root Period member is removed by either clicking or selecting periods that are in the application and selecting Keep Only.  If a Period member is left on the grid, then any changes to data that you make will fail to properly set the impact status of the Entities.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

August 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
22 AUG 2018 Intercompany Matching Reports Updated document. Added new feature delivered in August 2018 update.
02 AUG 2018 Migration Updated document. Added consideration.
30 JUL 2018 New Documentation on Optimizing Business Rules Updated document. Added new feature delivered in August 2018 update.
30 JUL 2018 Intercompany Matching Reports Removed consideration.
30 JUL 2018 Updated Vision Sample Application Updated document. Revised feature description.
26 JUL 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, August Update

This document outlines announcements in the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Friday, August 3, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, August 17, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center provides access to updated documentation. The updates will be available in the Help Center on August 3, 2018. Some of the links to new feature documentation included in this document will not work until after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

Tips And Considerations

Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server.

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service and the monthly update cycle.

Announcements

Incremental Export and Import Behavior Change

In the initial 18.07 update, Oracle changed the behavior of  incremental export and import operations to prevent the selection of Essbase Data and a few other artifacts. Due to customer demand, Oracle reverted this change in a later 18.07 patch, which was applied to your test and production environments. The reverted behavior allows you to select all artifacts, including Essbase Data artifacts, during incremental exports and imports.

Due to this change, these artifacts can now be selected for incremental exports. These can also be imported from snapshots:

Key Resources

Ability to Create Journals for Entities with Different Parents

You can now create and post journal entries for entities that have different parents.

Key Resources

Enabling Auto-Creation of Blocks for Configurable Calculations

When you create configurable calculations, you can enable the Auto Create Blocks option to have the system automatically create missing blocks. This can resolve issues with missing data when you run configurable calculations.

Key Resources

Support for Journal Import and Export Tasks in Jobs

Journal import and export tasks are now available in the Jobs console. The tasks include Journal Import, Journal Export, Journal Template Import and Journal Template Export. You can select to run these jobs immediately or schedule them for a later date. Job status and logs are available from the Jobs console.

Key Resources

Enhancements to Close Manager and Supplemental Data User Interface

This update includes enhancements to the Close Manager and Supplemental Data user interface. Close Manager and Supplemental Data functions that you previously accessed from the Navigator have moved to the Home page under the Applications card.

From the Applications card, after you select Close Manager or Supplemental Data, you then use tabs on the left side of the main page to access functions such as Templates, Task Types, and Schedules in Close Manager, or Data Sets and Forms and so on in Supplemental Data.

Key Resources

Examples of new user interface:

Close Manager - List and Gantt Views

The Task List Hierarchy and Gantt Chart views that you previously accessed from the Navigator have moved to the main Close Manager interface. They are available as View types in the drop-down on the right side of the Close Tasks page.

Key Resources

Close Manager Expanded Search Functionality

Search functionality has been expanded for fields on the Worklist. Using the Search field, you can now search on all fields except Date.

Key Resources

Close Manager Drag and Drop Attachments

In Close Manager, you can now add one or more attachments to tasks by using drag and drop functionality from the Add Attachments dialog box.

Key Resources

Close Manager Task Assignees

In Close Manager tasks, the Related Tasks section enables you to view the predecessor and successors for a task. It also now shows the Task Assignees and Task Owners for the dependent tasks.

Key Resources

Close Manager Custom Currency Codes

The ability to create or edit Close Manager-specific currency codes is no longer supported effective with this update. If your application contains a Close Manager-specific currency code, it will remain in the application but will no longer be editable.

Supplemental Data - Power (Exponential) Calculation Added

In Supplemental Data and Close Manager, a new scripted calculation allows you to use POWER(x,y) to raise one number to the exponential power of another. The usage is: POWER(x,y), where x=BASE NUMBER, and y=EXPONENT. x and y can be attributes or calculations, as long as they are numeric.

Key Resources

Supplemental Data - Close Date in Supplemental Data Calculation

In Supplemental Data Manager, Close Date is now available as a selectable attribute for Calculation in Data Sets. It is available from the “Add Attribute” drop-down list on the Calculation tab of Data Set Attributes, and can be used in calculations.

Key Resources

Referential Integrity for Account Types in Posted Journals

To prevent a referential integrity problem with journals from occurring in an application, the system now prevents users from changing the Account Type of an account member that is used in a Posted journal. If you need to change the Account Type of a member used in a Posted journal, you must first unpost the journal.

Key Resources

Intercompany Matching Reports

Power Users no longer require access to Intercompany dimension members. They still require access to Intercompany Entity members.

New Server Setting in Financial Reporting Web Studio

Run Batch With Signed On User Credentials, a new server setting, is available in Financial Reporting Web Studio. When this setting is set to true, there is no prompt for a username and password in the Batch Scheduler; instead, the batch is run with the credentials of the user who is currently signed in.

To set this property, open Financial Reporting Web Studio and select File, and then Manage, and then Server.

NOTE: You must restart the environment to enable the new setting. You can restart an environment using the resetservice EPM Automate command or by modifying the maintenance start time. If you do not restart the environment, the setting will take effect after the next scheduled daily maintenance of the environment.

Key Resources

Financial Reporting Studio Desktop Client

Starting with this monthly update, Oracle will stop distributing the Financial Reporting Desktop Studio installer. The command line utilities associated with Financial Reporting Desktop Studio will also be discontinued starting with the 18.08 update.

NOTE: Existing installations of the Financial Reporting Desktop Studio and command line utilities will no longer work with Financial Reporting starting with the 18.09 update.

Use Financial Reporting Web Studio instead of Financial Reporting Studio Desktop Client.

New Infolets Designer Properties Panel

A new properties panel on the right side of the Infolets Designer enables you to view and work with various properties of infolets, such as the title, subtitle, chart type, size, and so on. The properties panel displays the properties of the infolet (and its displayed view) which is highlighted by the blue border.

To view the properties panel in the Infolets Designer, from the Home page, click Infolets, and then either create an infolet or edit an existing infolet.

Key Resources

Folder Support for Dashboards and Infolets

The listing pages for dashboards and infolets now support folders. Folders enable you to assign permissions to all artifacts within a folder rather than assigning permissions to each individual artifact. The listing pages for dashboards and infolets will look and behave the same as the listing page for data (forms). All three artifact listing pages (forms, dashboards, and infolets) use the same folder hierarchy and all artifacts and folders reside under a root folder called Library.

Search and Filter will also work for dashboards and infolets in the same way as they do for forms.

Key Resources

New Documentation on Optimizing Business Rules

Information on leveraging available Enterprise Management Cloud tools to diagnose and address performance issues with business rules is now available in the new "Optimizing Business Rules" section of Designing with Calculation Manager for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud.

Key Resources

Updated Vision Sample Application

An updated version of the Vision sample application is available starting with this update. The updated sample application contains features that were added in recent updates.

INFOLETS

The sample application now supports Infolets, which provide the dashboard capability to enable data visualization. As a Service Administrator, you can create infolets for any cube to provide enhanced graphical data presentation to users using charts and texts.

ABILITY TO ENTER DATA INTO SUPPRESSED ROWS 

The updated sample application allows Service Administrators to enable users to enter data in a web form for members on rows that are currently suppressed (because they have no data and the form layout option “Suppress Missing Data – Rows” option is selected).

NAVIGATION FLOWS

Service Administrators can set up connections that enable users to navigate across Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud environments to create unified business process flows across multiple environments. Cross-environment navigation flows allow users of multiple EPM Cloud environments to sign into one environment, and then seamlessly navigate to others without going through additional authentication processes. Service Administrators can create mashups of artifacts from various environments into a single unified business process flow for their users. Clusters, cards, and tabs can be brought together into a single flow. These cards and tabs can contain forms, reports, and  dashboards from various applications. Users will not see the clusters, cards and tabs in the process flow unless they are members of the groups to which these flows are assigned.

SMART FORMS

Three Smart Forms: one containing Excel formulas, one containing Excel functions, and one created in Smart View, are included.

REORGANIZED CLUSTERS AND CARDS THAT MATCH THE NEWEST EPM CLOUD INTERFACE

Clusters and cards in the sample application now match the current EPM Cloud interface.

Upcoming Changes

Ability to Create Composite Forms

To allow customers more time to adapt and move from composite forms to dashboards, Oracle will defer removing the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) to a future release update (January 2019 - 19.01). Oracle had previously announced that this feature will be removed in the June (18.06) update.

All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. There will be no more enhancements to the composite forms functionality.

Close Manager Calendar View

For users of Close Manager within Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, the Calendar view will not be supported effective with this August, 2018 (18.08) update.

Classic Dimension Editor

To allow customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle will defer the removing support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update. The current plan is to remove access to the Classic Dimension Editor starting with the 18.10 (October 2018) update to the service.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Migration

In 18.08, Lifecycle Management (LCM) migration to 18.07 will not be supported for Close Manager schedules, templates, tasks and task types. You also cannot restore an 18.08 update backup for Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud into 18.07 systems. The Journal artifacts in 18.08 are not compatible with 18.07. This covers the two week window when Test systems are upgraded to 18.08 and production is still on 18.07.

Only for Smart View for Office with Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus

A known issue with Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus patch 16.0.10228.20051 updated through the insider slow channel prevents the use of Smart View for Office with Microsoft Office 365. This Microsoft patch was pushed to users who signed up for monthly channel updates between June 12 and June 14, 2018.

Workaround: Do not update Microsoft Office 365 with patch 16.0.10228.20051 if you are using Smart View for Office with Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus. Instead, use Microsoft Office 365 monthly channel Version 1806 (Build 10228.20080), which contains the fix for this issue.

Financial Reporting User Preferences

All existing customers will be migrated to the new Financial Reporting Repository (implemented in the 18.05 update for new customers). The process does not migrate Financial Reporting user preferences.

Workaround: Each end user must manually set Financial Reporting user preferences when using the Repository for the first time.

Simplified Dimension Editor and Metadata Validation

Some of the Simplified Dimension Editor errors (cells outlined in red) are false-positive errors (i.e. incorrectly reported as errors).

Data Storage errors for the following members should be ignored:

In addition:

Importing Tab-Delimited Journals

If you create a Journal Job that imports a tab-delimited journal from the server (Inbox), the job fails and journals are not imported.  Importing tab-delimited journals works correctly as a Local import.

Consolidation Operator for Children of Dimension Name Members

Seeded dimension members must have the Consolidation Operator set as Ignore. None of the POV members should be set to Dimension member. Rather, always use Top Member to view aggregated values.

Consolidation Rules - Errors in Seeded System Rules

The seeded consolidation rules do not properly cater for disposals of investments in all cases, notably full disposals after acquisitions over several periods.

Calculation Status

When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.

Metadata Aliases

Ensure that no alias entries are “Equity”. The use of “Equity” as an alias will cause issues with refreshing the database.

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

Copying Data

When copying an entity with a Calculation Status of No Data, the target should also have a Calculation Status of No Data. The Copy Data process is incorrectly setting the Calculation Status to Impacted.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names / Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

When you use ad hoc grids in Smart View with Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, do not add a root Period member on the grid. Make sure the root Period member is removed by either clicking or selecting periods that are in the application and selecting Keep Only.  If a Period member is left on the grid, then any changes to data that you make will fail to properly set the impact status of the Entities.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

July 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
13 JUL 2018 Financial Reporting User Preferences

Updated document. Added consideration.

28 JUN 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, July Update

This document outlines announcements and upcoming changes in the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Friday, July 6, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, July 20, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center provides access to updated documentation. The updates will be available in the Help Center on July 6, 2018. Some of the links to new feature documentation included in this document will not work until after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

Tips And Considerations

Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server.

Key Resources

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service and the monthly update cycle.

Announcements

Manage Ownership Enhancements

For the following Ownership Management actions, if the process takes longer than 60 seconds, then the remainder of the process will be continued in the background and the user can navigate to other screens if required. To view the progress of the process, open the Jobs console.

Key Resources

New EPM Automate Utility Version

A new version of the EPM Automate Utility is available with this update. This version includes the copyfilefrominstance command, which copies a file from a source environment to the environment (target) from which you run the command.

This version also includes changes to the following commands to make them consistent with other file operation commands:

Key Resources

Migration Export Scenarios: Clone and Incremental Export

Migration has been enhanced to differentiate two export scenarios:

Backup to create a snapshot that can be used to clone an environment, for example to migrate an application from a production instance to a test instance for troubleshooting or additional development work.

When you backup the environment, you create a snapshot of the entire environment, similar to the daily maintenance snapshot, by exporting the application with all of its data and artifacts including artifacts belonging to Document Repository, Data Management, Calculation Manager, Relational and Essbase data, and Groups and Membership.

Export to create an incremental backup of specific artifacts in an environment. Generally, you use incremental snapshots to create backups that can be used to update another environment. For example, you can export artifacts that you tested in a test environment to create an interim snapshot, which you can import into a production environment.

Artifacts that can be exported only as a part of backup operation are greyed out and cannot be selected during export.

Unavailable Artifacts for Incremental Export

Key Resources

Changes to Labels and Threshold Values in Activity Report

Oracle has lowered the display threshold for the following metrics in the Activity Report to 2 seconds.Additionally, the labels of these metrics have been modified to reflect these changes.

Key Resources

Option to Show Hidden Files in the Financial Reporting Web Studio Repository

By default, hidden artifacts are not displayed in Financial Reporting Web Studio. If you need to edit an artifact that is hidden, you can now "unhide" the artifact and edit it directly in the Financial Reporting Web Studio repository.

Key Resources

Simpler Member Selector

To select items in the Member Selector, you are no longer required to click the checkmark. You can now simply select an item by clicking on it or by selecting the checkmark as before.

Only for Smart View for Office with Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus

A known issue with Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus patch 16.0.10228.20051 updated through the insider slow channel prevents the use of Smart View for Office with Microsoft Office 365. This Microsoft patch was pushed to users who signed up for monthly channel updates between June 12 and June 14, 2018.

Workaround: Do not update Microsoft Office 365 with patch 16.0.10228.20051 if you are using Smart View for Office with Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus. Instead, use Microsoft Office 365 monthly channel Version 1806 (Build 10228.20080), which contains the fix for this issue.

Upcoming Changes

Financial Reporting Studio Desktop Client

As announced in preceding Readiness Documents, Oracle will stop distributing the Financial Reporting Desktop Studio installer starting the 18.08 update (August 3, 2018 for test and August 17, 2018 for production environments). The command line utilities associated with Financial Reporting Desktop Studio  will also be discontinued starting with the 18.08 update.

NOTE: Existing installations of the Financial Reporting Desktop Studio and command line utilities will no longer work with Financial Reporting starting with the 18.09 update.

Oracle recommends that you transition to using Financial Reporting Web Studio as soon as possible. Please send questions and concerns to Oracle using the Provide Feedback option in the service.

Classic Dimension Editor

With a view to allowing customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update. The current plan is to remove access to the Classic Dimension Editor starting with the 18.10 (October 2018) update to the service.

Key Resources

Composite Form Creation Capability

To allow customers more time to adapt and move from composite forms to dashboards, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) to a future release update (January 2019 - 19.01). Oracle had previously announced that this feature will be removed in the June (18.06) update.

All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. There will be no more enhancements to the composite forms functionality.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Moving Seeded Members

You can move seeded members to a different location within the hierarchy, and reorder them either under the same parent or under a different parent. After you upgrade to 18.07, seeded members may be reset to their original positions and you must reorder them again.

Note: After moving to 18.07, seeded member movement changes you make will be retained during subsequent updates.

Consolidation Rules - Errors in Seeded System Rules

The seeded consolidation rules do not properly cater for disposals of investments in all cases, notably full disposals after acquisitions over several periods.

Calculation Status

When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.

Metadata Aliases

Ensure that no alias entries are “Equity”. The use of “Equity” as an alias will cause issues with refreshing the database.

Exchange Rate Type for Plug Accounts

The Exchange Rate Type must be the same for an Intercompany account and the plug account associated with it. For example, if the source accounts have an Exchange Rate Type of “No Rate”, then the Plug account Exchange Rate Type must be “No Rate”. If the source accounts are any of the three Historical Exchange Rate Types, then the plug account must also be one (any) of the Historical Exchange Rate Types.

Intercompany Matching Reports

When a Power User has no access to an Entity or Partner in the report, the report displays “#noaccess”, and it also does not display the Variance.

If a Power User has access to all members in the report except an Entity or one of the Intercompany Account members, the system displays “An error occurred while processing”. The error occurs because the Power User requires security access to both the Entity and Partner, and the Intercompany Account members.

Translation Rules

When you create a translation rule and specify redirection to different members, the Source POV can be any members, including parent members, and seeded and system calculated members. You cannot select parent members only as part of the Source selection. The Redirection POV must be a base member and not a system calculated member. If you create a translation rule with no redirection, using only parent members in the Source selection is not allowed.

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

Copying and Clearing Data

Be aware of the following issues relating to copying and clearing data:

Change in Calculation of CTA for Net Income / Retained Earnings Current Accounts

In the August, 2017 update (17.08), the seeded Net Income hierarchy included a new member named “Retained Earnings Current – Opening Balance – FX-CTA” as a sibling of Net Income. Opening Balance calculation was done for the new member, which was automatically added during the upgrade process. Due to this change, if you have not yet done so, you must reconsolidate your historical data by running the Consolidation process.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names / Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

When you use ad hoc grids in Smart View with Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, do not add a root Period member on the grid. Make sure the root Period member is removed by either clicking or selecting periods that are in the application and selecting Keep Only.  If a Period member is left on the grid, then any changes to data that you make will fail to properly set the impact status of the Entities.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

Financial Reporting User Preferences

All existing customers will be migrated to the new Financial Reporting Repository (implemented in the 18.05 update for new customers). The process does not migrate  Financial Reporting  user preferences.

Workaround: Each end user must manually set Financial Reporting  user preferences when using the Repository for the first time.

June 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
24 MAY 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, June Update

This document outlines announcements, upcoming changes, and considerations in the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Friday, June 1, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, June 15, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center provides access to updated documentation. The updates will be available in the Help Center on June 1, 2018. Some of the links to new feature documentation included in this document will not work until after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

NOTE: You can import backup snapshots into environments with the same, the preceding or the next update versions. For example, you can import backup snapshots from release 17.08 into releases 17.07 and 17.09. For more information about migration, see Administering Migration for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud.

Tips And Considerations

Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server.

Key Resources

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service and the monthly update cycle.

Announcements

Power Users Can Lock and Unlock Data

Starting with this update, power user can lock and unlock data.

Referential Integrity for Configurable Consolidation Rules

To prevent a referential integrity problem with configurable consolidation rules from occurring in an application, the system now verifies and prevents the deletion of any metadata member that is referenced in the rules.

Key Resources

New Version of Oracle Smart View for Office

Oracle Smart View for Office 11.1.2.5.800 will be available by mid-June. This version includes new features such as:

This release also fixes a number of defects.

The Smart View 11.1.2.5.800 Readme, available on the Help Center at the time of release, contains a complete list of features and defects addressed in this version. You must install this version to ensure compatibility with the June 2018 update features and to access the new functionalities.

Key Resources

Updates to Snapshot Retention Policy

The daily maintenance process has been enhanced to prevent large accumulation of snapshots (over 150 GB) in EPM Cloud environments.

By default, the snapshots that you create through the export process or upload to an environment are stored for a period not exceeding 60 days after which they are automatically removed. Starting with this update, the daily maintenance process will automatically remove snapshots prior to sixty days, oldest first, to prevent the total size of all snapshots from exceeding 150 GB, which may adversely impact your environment. The daily maintenance snapshot, irrespective of its size, is always retained in EPM Cloud environments.

Key Resources

Forms Listing as a Hierarchy in Navigation Flows Artifact Library

Forms listed within the artifact library in Navigation Flows are now displayed in a hierarchical manner.

More Intuitive POV Bar in Dashboards

The Go arrow in the POV for dashboards (which commits changes made on the page) displays only if the user has made changes. Changes to the page display in yellow.

Specify a Maximum Email Attachment Size When Scheduling Batches

In Financial Reporting, you can now specify a Maximum Email Attachment Size so that you can email more books using the Batch Scheduler.

Key Resources

Remove Time Stamp From File Name When Bursting Batch Reports

In Financial Reporting, you now have the option to remove the time stamp from the zip file names created by batch job outputs to external directory. This change does not apply to normal batch output in Financial Reporting.

Key Resources

Upcoming Changes

New Data Exchange Card in Oracle EPM Cloud

To facilitate easier access to Data Management features, starting with the 18.07 update, EPM Cloud will feature a new Data Exchange card in the Application Cluster. This card will launch a page from which you can access these Data Management features:

Classic Dimension Editor

With a view to allowing customers more time to familiarize themselves with the Simplified Dimension Editor, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of support for Classic Dimension Editor to a future update. Current plan is to remove access to the Classic Dimension Editor starting with the 18.10 (October 2018) update to the service.

Key Resources

Composite Form Creation Capability

To allow customers more time to adapt and move from composite forms to dashboards, Oracle has decided to defer the removal of the ability to create new composite forms (forms that comprise multiple simple forms) to a future release update (January 2019 - 19.01). Oracle had previously announced that this feature will be removed in the June (18.06) update.

All customers are advised to use dashboards in place of composite forms. There will be no more enhancements to the composite forms functionality.

Financial Reporting Studio Desktop Client

Oracle is committed to providing a simple and intuitive user experience. To achieve this, Financial Reporting Web Studio, available since March 2016, will become the only environment for designing and building reports.

Oracle is providing additional time for users to transition from Financial Reporting Desktop Studio to Financial Reporting Web Studio. Tentative plans call for functional parity between Financial Reporting Web Studio and Financial Reporting Desktop Studio in 2018, at which time, support for the Desktop Studio will transition to the Web Studio and distribution of the Desktop Studio will cease. This transition is tentatively planned for the 18.09 update (September 07, 2018 for test and September 21, 2018 for production environments).

Oracle recommends that you transition to using Financial Reporting Web Studio at the earliest opportunity. Please send questions and concerns to Oracle using the Provide Feedback option in the service.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Consolidation Rules - Errors in Seeded System Rules

The seeded consolidation rules do not properly cater for disposals of investments in all cases, notably full disposals after acquisitions over several periods.

Calculation Status

When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.

Metadata Aliases

Ensure that no alias entries are “Equity”. The use of “Equity” as an alias will cause issues with refreshing the database.

Changing the Exchange Rate Type

When you change the Exchange Rate Type for an account from “No Rate” to “Historical Amount Override” or “Historical Rate Override” in the releases prior to patch 18.04.64, the shared member is not created under FCCS_Historical Accounts. You must set the account back to “No Rate”, and then change to “Historical Amount Override” or “Historical Rate Override” to create the Historical Amount or Rate accounts.

Exchange Rate Type for Plug Accounts

The Exchange Rate Type must be the same for an Intercompany account and the plug account associated with it. For example, if the source accounts have an Exchange Rate Type of “No Rate”, then the Plug account Exchange Rate Type must be “No Rate”. If the source accounts are any of the three Historical Exchange Rate Types, then the plug account must also be one (any) of the Historical Exchange Rate Types.

Intercompany Matching Reports

When a Power User has no access to an Entity or Partner in the report, the report displays “#noaccess”, and it also does not display the Variance.

If a Power User has access to all members in the report except an Entity or one of the Intercompany Account members, the system displays “An error occurred while processing”. The error occurs because the Power User requires security access to both the Entity and Partner, and the Intercompany Account members.

Translation Rules

When you create a translation rule and specify redirection to different members, the Source POV can be any members, including parent members, and seeded and system calculated members. You cannot select parent members only as part of the Source selection. The Redirection POV must be a base member and not a system calculated member. If you create a translation rule with no redirection, using only parent members in the Source selection is not allowed.

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

Importing Journal Artifacts

When you import Journal artifacts into Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud through Migration, errors may occur and the journals are not imported.

To work around this issue, after the import process fails, log out and log back in as an Administrator. From the Navigator, select Migration, and then the Snapshot tab. Expand the application. Expand Relational Data, select Journals, and click Import.

Adding Base Members From Dimension Editor

If you add a base member using the classic Dimension Editor and change the initially displayed Data Storage property on the Member Properties tab, please also check the Consol cube Data Storage option on the Member Formula tab. Ensure that the Data Storage option matches between the two settings. If it does not match, the member might not be usable. The Data Storage options can also be easily viewed and changed in the Simplified UI Dimension Editor.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

Copying and Clearing Data

Be aware of the following issues relating to copying and clearing data:

Change in Calculation of CTA for Net Income / Retained Earnings Current Accounts

In the August, 2017 update (17.08), the seeded Net Income hierarchy included a new member named “Retained Earnings Current – Opening Balance – FX-CTA” as a sibling of Net Income. Opening Balance calculation was done for the new member, which was automatically added during the upgrade process. Due to this change, if you have not yet done so, you must reconsolidate your historical data by running the Consolidation process.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names / Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

Be aware of the following considerations:

If there are journals or Supplemental Data posted to those members, these changes can cause problems when accessing Journals or importing existing journals.

May 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
27 APR 2018 Consolidation Rules - Errors in Seeded System Rules

Updated document. Added new consideration delivered in May 2018 update.

26 APR 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, May Update

This document outlines announcements, defects fixed and considerations in the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Friday, May 4, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, May 18, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center, which provides access to updated documentation, has a new look and feel. The updates will be available on May 4, 2018. Some of the links to new feature documentation included in this document will not work until after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

NOTE: You can import backup snapshots into environments with the same, the preceding or the next update versions. For example, you can import backup snapshots from release 17.08 into releases 17.07 and 17.09. For more information about migration, see Administering Migration for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud.

Tips And Considerations

Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server.

Key Resources

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect. You can also access Oracle Customer Cloud Connect directly from Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud by clicking the User Assistance icon.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service and the monthly update cycle.

Announcements

Seeded System Consolidation Rule-Sets

This update provides nine system rule-sets for Ownership Elimination adjustments. The seeded rules are created by the application.

NOTE: Three of the rule-sets replace the previous three hard-coded rules available in prior updates. If you deployed any of the three previous rules, you will need to re-deploy them and also review the other six rules.

The seeded system rule-sets are as follows:

Key Resources

New EPM Automate Utility Version

A new version of the EPM Automate Utility is available with this update. This version includes the runDailyMaintenance command, which enables Service Administrators to run the daily service maintenance process as needed. For example, Service Administrators can use this command to update their service as soon as a patch to an environment is available instead of waiting for the daily maintenance window.

Key Resources

Microsoft Excel Version Usage in Activity Report

The Activity Report has been enhanced to include the Microsoft Excel Versions in use and the number of users who use them.

Key Resources

Retain Last Accessed Tab in Navigation Flow Cards

When working with cards in navigation flows that have multiple tabs or sub tabs, the last tab accessed by a user will be retained the next time the user accesses the card in the same session.

Key Resources

Enhancements to Dashboards

Dashboards have been enhanced in several ways:

Key Resources

Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud Clusters and Cards as Navigation Flows Targets

EPM Cloud source subscriptions can now customize navigation flows to access Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud clusters and cards (note that Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud is only a target service when connecting subscriptions). Clusters and cards can now be directly selected from Oracle Account Reconciliation Cloud using the Add Existing Card/Cluster option.

Key Resources

Removal of Support

Close Manager Calendar View

For users of Close Manager within Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, the Calendar view will not be supported effective with the August, 2018 (18.08) update.

Classic Dimension Editor

Effective with the June 2018 (18.06) update, the Dimensions link in the Navigator will link to the Simplified Dimension Editor, which was released with the 17.05 update (May 2017). Consequently, the Classic Dimension Editor will not be supported starting with the June 2018 update to the service (June 1, 2018 for test and June 15, 2018 for production instances).

Key Resources

File-Based Integration of Data Management with Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud

Oracle Fusion Financial Cloud Budgetary Control and Encumbrance Accounting is now fully integrated with Data Management.

This enhancement brings the integration of Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud on par with the current, out of the box, file-based integration. As a result, the file-based integration is being phased out starting the September update to the service.

If you are using file-based integration between Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud, Oracle recommends that you adopt this new integration as soon as possible.

Financial Reporting Studio Desktop Client

Oracle is committed to providing a simple and intuitive user experience. To achieve this, Financial Reporting Web Studio, available since March 2016, will become the only environment for designing and building reports.

Oracle is providing additional time for users to transition from Financial Reporting Desktop Studio to Financial Reporting Web Studio. Tentative plans call for functional parity between Financial Reporting Web Studio and Financial Reporting Desktop Studio in 2018, at which time, support for the Desktop Studio will transition to the Web Studio and distribution of the Desktop Studio will cease. This transition is currently planned for the 18.06 update (June 01, 2018 for test and June 15, 2018 for production environments).

Oracle recommends that you transition to using Financial Reporting Web Studio at the earliest opportunity. Please send questions and concerns to Oracle using the Provide Feedback option in the service.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Consolidation Rules - Errors in Seeded System Rules

The seeded consolidation rules do not properly cater for disposals of investments in all cases, notably full disposals after acquisitions over several periods.

Calculation Status

When you change Ownership Data that uses a Consolidation rule and then consolidate, the Calculation Status is not correct for the partner and entity.

Dashboard Folders

In a future update (tentatively planned for the June (18.06) update), Service Administrators will have the ability to organize dashboards in folders. These folders will enable Service Administrators to apply security and permissions to folders rather than to each dashboard.

Existing dashboards will be visible under the root folder in dashboards and infolets listing pages after this new feature is introduced. The form folders available in the environment will also be available for organizing dashboards because folders are shared across artifact types. All folders will be managed using a unified folder management screen.

Metadata Aliases

Ensure that no alias entries are “Equity”. The use of “Equity” as an alias will cause issues with refreshing the database.

Migrating Rules with Shared Members

When you perform a Migration extract of a rule that contains a Target Redirection to a shared member, the extract file does not include information on the shared Dimension for that rule. When you import the extracted file, the rule is not created properly.

Changing the Exchange Rate Type

When you change the Exchange Rate Type for an account to a Historical Override Exchange Rate Type  (for example, from “No Rate” to “Historical Amount Override”), the shared member is not created under FCCS_Historical Accounts. When you change the Exchange Rate Type from “Historical Amount Override” or “Historical Rate Override” to another Exchange Rate Type, the system does not delete the shared members from FCCS_Historical Accounts.

Workaround:  When you change an Exchange Rate Type, you must manually add or delete the members from the Historical Override shared hierarchies.

Exchange Rate Type for Plug Accounts

The Exchange Rate Type must be the same for an Intercompany account and the plug account associated with it. For example, if the source accounts have an Exchange Rate Type of “No Rate”, then the Plug account Exchange Rate Type must be “No Rate”. If the source accounts have any of the three Historical Exchange Rate Types, then the plug account must also have the Historical Exchange Rate Type. The plug account does not have to be the exact same Historical type, but it must be one of the Historical Exchange Rate Types.

Intercompany Matching Reports

When a Power User has no access to an Entity or Partner in the report, the report displays “#noaccess”, and it also does not display the Variance.

If a Power User has access to all members in the report except an Entity or one of the Intercompany Account members, the system displays “An error occurred while processing”. The error occurs because the Power User requires security access to both the Entity and Partner, and the Intercompany Account members.

Member Formulas in the Simplified Dimension Editor

In the Simplified Dimension Editor, when you add a member formula for a member that has all the Data Storage (Default/Consol/Rates) properties the same, such as Dynamic Calc, the system incorrectly changes the Consol Data Storage value to Store, and displays it as a non-compliant value.

Translation Rules

When you create a translation rule and specify redirection to different members, the Source POV can be any members, including parent members, and seeded and system calculated members. You cannot select parent members only as part of the Source selection. The Redirection POV must be a base member and not a system calculated member. If you create a translation rule with no redirection, using only parent members in the Source selection is not allowed.

Auto Reversal Journals

If an auto reversal journal has an Approved status, you cannot unpost the corresponding auto-reversing journal. If the auto reversal journal is Rejected, then you can unpost the auto-reversing journal.

Importing Journal Artifacts

When you import Journal artifacts into Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud through Migration, errors may occur and the journals are not imported.

To work around this issue, after the import process fails, log out and log back in as an Administrator. From the Navigator, select Migration, and then the Snapshot tab. Expand the application. Expand Relational Data, select Journals, and click Import.

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. Resolve the member alias conflict, refresh the database and then enable the feature.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

Adding Base Members from Dimension Editor

If you add a base member using the classic Dimension Editor and change the initially displayed Data Storage property on the Member Properties tab, please also check the Consol cube Data Storage option on the Member Formula tab. Ensure that the Data Storage option matches between the two settings. If it does not match, the member might not be usable. The Data Storage options can also be easily viewed and changed in the Simplified UI Dimension Editor.

Copying and Clearing Data

After copying data from actual to forecast, if you select the Rate option along with the Data option when clearing the forecast data, the system will clear the data as per the POV specified, but it also clears the Rate data for all Scenarios and not just the rate data as per the POV specified.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

Change in Calculation of CTA for Net Income / Retained Earnings Current Accounts

In the August, 2017 update (17.08), the seeded Net Income hierarchy included a new member named “Retained Earnings Current – Opening Balance – FX-CTA” as a sibling of Net Income. Opening Balance calculation was done for the new member, which was automatically added during the upgrade process. Due to this change, if you have not yet done so, you must reconsolidate your historical data by running the Consolidation process.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names / Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

Be aware of the following considerations:

If there are journals or Supplemental Data posted to those members, these changes can cause problems when accessing Journals or importing existing journals.

April 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
05 APR 2018 Support for Infolets Updated document. Revised feature description.
05 APR 2018 Changing the Exchange Rate Type

Updated document. Added new consideration delivered in April 2018 update.

05 APR 2018

Copying and Clearing Data

Updated document. Revised description.

28 MAR 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, April Update

This document outlines announcements, defects fixed and considerations in the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (15:00 PDT) on Friday, April 6, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, April 20, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center, which provides access to updated documentation, has a new look and feel. The updates will be available on April 6, 2018. Some of the links to new feature documentation included in this document will not work until after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

Tips And Considerations

Reminder: Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server.

NOTE: You can import backup snapshots into environments with the same, the preceding or the next update versions. For example, you can import backup snapshots from release 17.08 into releases 17.07 and 17.09. For more information about migration, see Administering Migration for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud.

See Backing Up and Restoring an Environment Using the Maintenance Snapshot in Getting Started with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for Administrators for detailed procedures.

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service and the monthly update cycle.

Announcements

Additional Charts in Activity Report

The Activity Report has been enhanced to include the following charts that help you understand the processing load in your environment:

Number of User Interface Requests by Hour

Duration of User Interface Requests by Hour

Number of Essbase Operations By Hour

Duration of Essbase Operations By Hour

CPU Usage

Memory Usage

Key Resources

See Using Activity Reports and Access Logs to Monitor Usage in Getting Started with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for Administrators.

Migration and Audit Cards Moved to Tools Cluster

Starting with the 18.04 update, the Migration card and Audit card will be moved to the Tools cluster in the Home page.

The Migration card enables Service Administrators to access and manage lifecycle management-related activities such as exporting and importing artifacts and data, working with snapshots, and viewing the Modified Since and Migration Status Report has been moved to the Tools cluster.

The Audit card allows Service Administrators to activate audit trails to track changes to artifacts and data.

Previously, this card was included in the Application Cluster.

Key Resources

Support for Infolets

Infolets, a new dashboard capability to enable data visualization, are now available in Financial Consolidation and Close. Infolets enable Service Administrators to provide enhanced graphical data presentation using charts and texts. Service Administrators can create infolets for any cube.

Infolets are interactive and use progressive disclosure to display high-level, aggregated, essential information for quick consumption at a glance. Users can act upon the information in the infolets as needed. They can be flipped and resized to display up to three charts or sets of values.

Service Administrators can create an infolets page that contains one or more infolets. An Infolets page houses a container that manages the space occupied by the infolets and rearranges them depending on the size of the browser and the size of the infolets.

Service Administrators can customize the application interface to enable end users to access infolets from the Home page using the Navigation Flow Designer.

NOTE: Although you can design infolets on the 18.04 Test environment, they will not work in Production before 18.04 is applied. If you try to apply the infolets in Production 18.03, the infolet dots will be displayed, but you may not see any content upon accessing the infolet pages. When 18.04 is applied to the Production environment, you will be able to access infolets in the Navigation Flows.

Key Resources

Support for Subtitles in Infolets

Service Administrators can now add subtitles to infolets after the infolet header. The infolet header remains the same for all views of an infolet, but you can now add an optional subtitle which can be customized to display different text for each view of an infolet. To add subtitles to an infolet, open an infolet in the Infolets Designer and hover over the upper right corner of the infolet to view the Infolet Menu. Under Layout, select Subtitle.

Key Resources

For more information, see Using the Infolets Designer in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

New Financial Reporting Explore Repository

For new subscriptions, Financial Reporting has implemented a new Explore repository, which is very similar to the existing Explore repository.

Existing subscriptions will be migrated to the new Explore repository in a near term release. The Explore repository documentation has been updated.

Key Resources

See Working with Financial Reporting for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud.

New Row and Column Suppression Behavior

Service administrators can use the Smart View Suppression Behavior option to change suppression behavior when both the Smart View No Data/Missing and Zero suppression options for rows, or columns, or both are selected.

If the Smart View Suppression Behavior option in the web application is set to:

Legacy—Only suppresses rows or columns containing either all No Data/Missing or all Zeros. Does not suppress rows or columns containing a combination of No Data/Missing and Zeros. For example, in Smart View, if both the No Data/Missing and Zero suppression options are selected for rows, and a row contains both zeroes and Missing labels, then the row is displayed; it is not suppressed.

Standard—Suppresses rows or columns containing all No Data/Missing or all Zeros, or a combination of both. For example, in Smart View, if both the No Data/Missing and Zero suppression options are selected for columns, and a column contains both zeroes and Missing labels, then the column is suppressed; it is not displayed.

Tips And Considerations

This feature was introduced with the 18.03 update.

Key Resources

Configurable Consolidations

You now have the ability to develop consolidation and elimination adjustment rules specific to your application. You can create rules for consolidation requirements that are not already provided by the system seeded rules. You can create one or more rule-sets, each defining a Source POV and Global conditions and representing a “consolidation adjustment journal.” Within each rule-set, you can then define individual rules, each representing the individual detail lines of the journal. Source POV members can also be re-directed within the rules to post to alternative target members based on one or more conditions. You can deploy the consolidation rules when needed.

Key Resources

For more information, see About Configurable Consolidation Rules in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Exporting Ownership Management Information

You can now import and export Ownership Management information. 

Key Resources

For more information, see Importing and Exporting Ownership Data in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

New Seeded Member in Other Comprehensive Income Hierarchy

The seeded Other Comprehensive Income hierarchy in the Account dimension now includes a base member named FCCS_OR_OBFXCICTA, Other Comprehensive Income – Opening Balance – FX – CICTA.  It is used to carry forward Opening Balance for all revenue and expense accounts within Other Reserves (the parent member of Total Other Comprehensive Income).

Key Resources

For more information, see FX Calculations in Other Comprehensive Income Hierarchy in the Seeded Dimension Members section in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Support for Custom Automated and Event Monitoring Integrations

Close Manager now includes the ability to create Process Automated and Event Monitoring tasks for external applications. A new EPM Adapter allows you to create connections and integration flows in Integration Cloud Service using Oracle EPM Cloud and other cloud and on-premises applications.

Key Resources

For more information, see Creating Custom Close Manager Integrations in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Support for XLSX Format in Close Manager and Supplemental Data Manager Reports

When you generate reports for Close Manager and Supplemental Data Manager, the output format options now include XLSX format, in addition to PDF, HTML, and XLS formats. 

Key Resources

For more information, see Generating Custom Reports for Close Manager and Supplemental Data Manager in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Removal of Support

Classic Dimension Editor

Effective with the June 2018 (18.06) update, the Dimensions link in the Navigator will link to the Simplified Dimension Editor, which was released with the 17.05 update (May 2017). Consequently, the Classic Dimension Editor will not be supported starting with the June 2018 update to the service (June 1, 2018 for test and June 15, 2018 for production instances).

Key Resources

File-Based Integration of Data Management with Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud

Oracle Fusion Financial Cloud Budgetary Control and Encumbrance Accounting is now fully integrated with Data Management.

This enhancement brings the integration of Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud on par with the current, out of the box, file-based integration. As a result, the file-based integration is being phased out starting the September update to the service.

If you are using file-based integration between Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud, Oracle recommends that you adopt this new integration as soon as possible.

Financial Reporting Studio Desktop Client

Oracle is committed to providing a simple and intuitive user experience. To achieve this, Financial Reporting Web Studio, available since March 2016, will become the only environment for designing and building reports.

Oracle is providing additional time for users to transition from Financial Reporting Desktop Studio to Financial Reporting Web Studio. Tentative plans call for functional parity between Financial Reporting Web Studio and Financial Reporting Desktop Studio in 2018, at which time, support for the Desktop Studio will transition to the Web Studio and distribution of the Desktop Studio will cease. This transition is currently planned for the 18.06 update (June 01, 2018 for test and June 15, 2018 for production environments).

Oracle recommends that you transition to using Financial Reporting Web Studio at the earliest opportunity. Please send questions and concerns to Oracle using the Provide Feedback option in the service.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Changing the Exchange Rate Type

When you change the Exchange Rate Type for an account to a Historical Override Exchange Rate Type  (for example, from “No Rate” to “Historical Amount Override”), the shared member is not created under FCCS_Historical Accounts. When you change the Exchange Rate Type from “Historical Amount Override” or “Historical Rate Override” to another Exchange Rate Type, the system does not delete the shared members from FCCS_Historical Accounts.

Workaround:  When you change an Exchange Rate Type, you must manually add or delete the members from the Historical Override shared hierarchies.

Restructuring Cubes

After you upgrade to 18.04, you must run the Restructure Cubes job, due to a change in the position of the Entity dimension that will result in significant performance gains.  First run the Restructure Cubes job for the Consol cube and then re-run it for the Rates cube. 

NOTE: If you import an LCM zip file that is created from a prior release, after the LCM import process, the Entity dimension reverts to its original position.  To correct the dimension order, after the import process, navigate to the Enable Features screen and click Enable, without making any other changes. Then proceed with the Restructure Cube steps.

Also, if you import an LCM zip file created in this release to a previous release, you must perform the same steps.

Key Resources

For details, see Restructuring Cubes in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Configurable Consolidation Rules

If you were using 18.03 with Ownership Management enabled and the three Configurable Consolidation seeded rules deployed, after you upgrade to 18.04, the seeded rules will be displayed as Undeployed.

Setting the Factor in Configurable Consolidation RuleSets

If the None entry is selected in the first of the Rule-Set factor drop down boxes, ensure that the second drop down box has no selection (i.e. no entry / null and not None). If the second drop down box has a selection, then the factor cannot be saved in the individual rules.

Exchange Rate Type for Plug Accounts

The Exchange Rate Type must be the same for an Intercompany account and the plug account associated with it. For example, if the source accounts have an Exchange Rate Type of “No Rate”, then the Plug account Exchange Rate Type must be “No Rate”. If the source accounts have any of the three Historical Exchange Rate Types, then the plug account must also have the Historical Exchange Rate Type. The plug account does not have to be the exact same Historical type, but it must be one of the Historical Exchange Rate Types.

Intercompany Matching Reports

When a Power User has no access to an Entity or Partner in the report, the report displays “#noaccess”, and it also does not display the Variance.

If a Power User has access to all members in the report except an Entity or one of the Intercompany Account members, the system displays “An error occurred while processing”. The error occurs because the Power User requires security access to both the Entity and Partner, and the Intercompany Account members.

Member Formulas in the Simplified Dimension Editor

In the Simplified Dimension Editor, when you add a member formula for a member that has all the Data Storage (Default/Consol/Rates) properties the same, such as Dynamic Calc, the system incorrectly changes the Consol Data Storage value to Store, and displays it as a non-compliant value.

Translation Rules

When you create a translation rule and specify redirection to different members, the Source POV can be any members, including parent members, and seeded and system calculated members. You cannot select parent members only as part of the Source selection. The Redirection POV must be a base member and not a system calculated member. If you create a translation rule with no redirection, using only parent members in the Source selection is not allowed.

Auto Reversal Journals

If an auto reversal journal has an Approved status, you cannot unpost the corresponding auto-reversing journal. If the auto reversal journal is Rejected, then you can unpost the auto-reversing journal.

Importing Journal Artifacts

When you import Journal artifacts into Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud through Migration, errors may occur and the journals are not imported.

To work around this issue, after the import process fails, log out and log back in as an Administrator. From the Navigator, select Migration, and then the Snapshot tab. Expand the application. Expand Relational Data, select Journals, and click Import.

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. To work around this issue, log off, and then log back in. Resolve the member alias conflict and refresh the database.

NOTE:  If you try to refresh the database without re-logging into the session, a server crash may occur.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

For more information, see Member and Alias Considerations in the Enabling Ownership Management in Applications section in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Adding Base Members From Dimension Editor

If you add a base member using the classic Dimension Editor and change the initially displayed Data Storage property on the Member Properties tab, please also check the Consol cube Data Storage option on the Member Formula tab. Ensure that the Data Storage option matches between the two settings. If it does not match, the member might not be usable. The Data Storage options can also be easily viewed and changed in the Simplified UI Dimension Editor.

Copying and Clearing Data

Be aware of the following issues relating to copying and clearing data:

Change in Calculation of CTA for Net Income / Retained Earnings Current Accounts

In the August, 2017 update (17.08), the seeded Net Income hierarchy included a new member named “Retained Earnings Current – Opening Balance – FX-CTA” as a sibling of Net Income. Opening Balance calculation was done for the new member, which was automatically added during the upgrade process. Due to this change, if you have not yet done so, you must reconsolidate your historical data by running the Consolidation process.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names / Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

Be aware of the following considerations:

If there are journals or Supplemental Data posted to those members, these changes can cause problems when accessing Journals or importing existing journals.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

March 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
07 MAR 2018 FX Calculations in Other Comprehensive Income Hierarchy Updated document. Added new feature delivered in March 2018 update.
07 Mar 2018

ClearEmptyBlock Rule

Updated document. Added new feature delivered in March 2018 update.
02 MAR 2018 Updated EPM Cloud Application Creation Page Updated document. Revised landing page for this feature.
23 FEB 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, March Update

This document outlines announcements, considerations and defects fixed in the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (14:00 PST) on Friday, March 2, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, March 16, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center, which provides access to updated documentation, will also be available on March 2, 2018. Some of the links in this document may be available only after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

Reminder: Backing up the daily maintenance snapshot and restoring the environment as needed are self-service operations. Oracle recommends that you download the maintenance snapshot every day to a local server. See Backing Up and Restoring an Environment Using the Maintenance Snapshot in Getting Started with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for Administrators for detailed procedures.

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com. In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service as well as the monthly patch cycle.

Announcements

Updated EPM Cloud Application Creation Page

The first time you log in, you'll see an updated screen displaying these Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud solutions from which to choose:

To create a Financial Consolidation and Close application, select Start under Finance, then select Financial Close, and then select the type of application you want to create.

The New Application Creation Page

Key Resources

For detailed application creation information, see Creating an Application in Administering Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Supplemental Data Manager Multi-Cube Support

When you work with Supplemental Data Manager forms, you now have the option to select the cube from which to use dimension members. For example, when you are validating supplemental data, you select the cube from which the data needs to be validated.

During the Refresh Database process, metadata is copied to Supplemental Data Manager. In addition to leaf-level members, non-leaf level members are now copied, and the corresponding parent node name is displayed in Supplemental Data Manager.

Key Resources

See “Validating Supplemental Data” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Reporting Translation Process

Translating to reporting currencies is now required for all periods. Correct presentation of translated opening balances for historical accounts requires the cumulative translation of prior periods.

If prior periods in the current year have not yet been translated, they will be translated before the selected period. If there are prior years that have not been fully translated, the user will need to translate in sequence each year that has not yet been translated and then translate the current year. This requirement is the same as for the consolidation process.

Key Resources

See “Translation Process” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Provisioned Users Audit Report

A script is now available to automate the process of creating an audit report for provisioned users. This report shows the users and associated roles or groups that changed since the last time the report was generated.

Key Resources

See Scenario 13: Creating Provisioned Users Audit Reports in Working with EPM Automate for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for detailed information.

New Server Setting in Financial Reporting Web Studio

A new property has been added to the Server Settings in Financial Reporting Web Studio. The "Maximum Number of Page Members For Excel Report" property allows you to specify the maximum number of page dimension members that can be exported to Microsoft Excel. The default value for this property is 100.

Key Resources

Designing with Financial Reporting Web Studio for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud

Smart View Support for Integrated Business Process Navigation Flows

Smart View now supports integrated business process navigation flows.

Using integrated business process navigation flows, Service Administrators can configure shared connections that enable Smart View users to navigate across any combination of the supported EPM Cloud subscriptions.

Key Resources

Service Administrators: See “Connecting Subscriptions in EPM Cloud” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud for information on setting up integrated business process navigation flows.

Smart View users: See these topics in the Oracle Smart View for Office User's Guide for information on connecting:

ClearEmptyBlock Rule

A new rule, ClearEmptyBlock, is now provided by default to enable you to remove empty blocks from the database. You can launch the rule at any time from the Rules card, or from the EPM Automate process. It is recommended that you automate the rule to run periodically, for example, just before the consolidation process of every month.

FX Calculations in Other Comprehensive Income Hierarchy

The seeded Other Comprehensive Income hierarchy in the Account dimension includes a base member named FCCS_OR_OBFXCICTA, Other Comprehensive Income - Opening Balance - FX - CICTA. It is a sibling of Total Other Comprehensive Income and a child of Other Reserves.

This member is populated with the sum of the Opening Balance of the Other Comprehensive Income accounts, and a single FX and single FX-to-CICTA entry is made to this account based on a calculation of the values for the Total Other Comprehensive Income statement.

Removal of Support

Classic Dimension Editor

Effective with the June 2018 (18.06) update, the Dimensions link in the Navigator will link to the Simplified Dimension Editor, which was released with the 17.05 update (May 2017). Consequently, the Classic Dimension Editor will not be supported starting with the June 2018 update to the service (June 1, 2018 for test and June 15, 2018 for production instances).

Key Resources

For detailed information on using the Simplified Dimension Editor, See “Editing Dimensions in the Simplified Dimension Editor” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

File-Based Integration of Data Management with Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud

Oracle Fusion Financial Cloud Budgetary Control and Encumbrance Accounting is now fully integrated with Data Management.

This enhancement brings the integration of Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud on par with the current, out of the box, file-based integration. As a result, the file-based integration is being phased out starting the September update to the service.

If you are using file-based integration between Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud, Oracle recommends that you adopt this new integration as soon as possible.

Financial Reporting Studio Desktop Client

Oracle is committed to providing a simple and intuitive user experience. To achieve this, Financial Reporting Web Studio, available since March 2016, will become the only environment for designing and building reports.

Oracle is providing additional time for users to transition from Financial Reporting Desktop Studio to Financial Reporting Web Studio. Tentative plans call for functional parity between Financial Reporting Web Studio and Financial Reporting Desktop Studio in 2018, at which time, support for the Desktop Studio will transition to the Web Studio and distribution of the Desktop Studio will cease. This transition is currently planned for the 18.06 update (June 01, 2018 for test and June 15, 2018 for production environments).

Oracle recommends that you transition to using Financial Reporting Web Studio at the earliest opportunity. Please send questions and concerns to Oracle using the Provide Feedback option in the service.

Defects Fixed

Software issues addressed each month will be posted to My Oracle Support.

Considerations

Auto Reversal Journals

If an auto reversal journal has an Approved status, you cannot unpost the corresponding auto-reversing journal. If the auto reversal journal is Rejected, then you can unpost the auto-reversing journal.

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. To work around this issue, log off, and then log back in. Resolve the member alias conflict and refresh the database.

Note:  If you try to refresh the database without re-logging into the session, a server crash may occur.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

For more information, see “Member and Alias Considerations” in this topic:  https://docs.oracle.com/cloud/latest/financial-consol-cloud/AGFCC/migrating_ownership_mgt.htm#AGFCC-GUID-F200B598-0A2D-4458-BA92-C2B43D3588B7

Importing Journal Artifacts

When you import Journal artifacts into Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud through Migration, errors may occur and the journals are not imported.

To work around this issue, after the import process fails, log out and log back in as an Administrator. From the Navigator, select Migration, and then the Snapshot tab. Expand the application. Expand Relational Data, select Journals, and click Import.

Adding Base Members from Dimension Editor

If you add a base member using the classic Dimension Editor and change the initially displayed Data Storage property on the Member Properties tab, please also check the Consol cube Data Storage option on the Member Formula tab. Ensure that the Data Storage option matches between the two settings. If it does not match, the member might not be usable. The Data Storage options can also be easily viewed and changed in the Simplified UI Dimension Editor.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

Copying and Clearing Data

After copying data from actual to forecast, if you select the Rate option along with the Data option when clearing the forecast data, the system will clear the data as per the POV specified, but it also clears the Rate data for all Scenarios and not just the rate data as per the POV specified.

Change in Calculation of CTA for Net Income / Retained Earnings Current Accounts

In the August, 2017 update (17.08), the seeded Net Income hierarchy included a new member named “Retained Earnings Current – Opening Balance – FX-CTA” as a sibling of Net Income. Opening Balance calculation was done for the new member, which was automatically added during the upgrade process. Due to this change, if you have not yet done so, you must reconsolidate your historical data by running the Consolidation process.

Comprehensive Income CTA Accounts

If you configure a Comprehensive Income CTA account (CICTA) to capture CTA adjustments, the CICTA values are not correctly translated to reporting currencies other than the Entity and Parent Currency.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names / Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

Be aware of the following considerations:

If there are journals or Supplemental Data posted to those members, these changes can cause problems when accessing Journals or importing existing journals.

February 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date Feature Notes
05 FEB 2018 Defects Fixed Updated document. Added defect information.
26 JAN 2018   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, February Update

This guide outlines the announcements, fixed issues and considerations in the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC (14:00 PST) on Friday, February 2, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, February 16, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center, which provides access to updated documentation, will also be available on February 2, 2018. Some of the links in this document may be available only after the Oracle Help Center update is complete.

NOTE: You can import backup snapshots into environments with the same, the preceding or the next update versions. For example, you can import backup snapshots from release 17.08 into releases 17.07 and 17.09.

Key Resources

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at  EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com.  In the body or title of the email, state that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service as well as the monthly patch cycle.

Announcements

Support for Auto-Reversing Journals

You can now create auto-reversing journals. A new option is available on the Create Journal screen where you can select Auto-reverse as the journal type. When an auto-reversing journal is posted, an auto reversal journal is automatically created in the next period reversing all the adjustments corresponding to the journal.

You can also create auto-reversing journal templates, and run reports on auto-reversing journals.

Key Resources

See “Creating Autoreversing Journals” in Working with Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Journal Attachments

When you perform a journal action such as Submit, Approve, Post, or Reject, you can attach additional information supporting the action performed. You can attach a document such as a text, Word or Excel file, pdf, audio, video or image file to the journal. You can view or download attached documents on the Journal History page.

Key Resources

For information, see “Working with Journals” in Working with Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Enabling the Balance Calculation

When you create a new application, the system includes an entry for the Balance Calculation on the Consolidation Process page. The Balance Calculation ensures that the Balance Sheet is balanced (Total Assets = Total Liabilities and Equity). By default, the calculation is disabled for all Scenarios.

To enable the Balance Calculation:

  1. On the Home page, click Application, and then click Consolidation.
  2. Select the Consolidation Process tab.
  3. From the Local Currency tab, select the Balance the Balance Sheet calculation.
  4. From the right panel, under Disable by Scenario, use one of these methods:
  1. Click Save to save the rule.

For existing applications, the Balance Calculation is enabled by default. If you want to disable the calculation, you can add an entry to disable it for one or more specific Scenarios.

Key Resources

For information, see “System Calculations” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Exporting Tasks From Close Manager Task Lists to Excel

Close Manager Users are now able to export tasks from a Task List to Microsoft Excel. From the Task List, you can export selected rows, or export all the rows in the table. The export file is formatted for Excel.

Key Resources

See “Exporting Tasks” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Selectable Parameters for EPM Integrations

When you are using EPM Cloud Integrations through Close Manager, many parameters for automated integrations are now selectable from drop-down lists, which eliminates the need to manually enter values. For example, for the Run Business Rule pre-built integration, you can select from a list of business rules, such as ForceConsolidate or ForceTranslate.

Key Resources

See “Pre-Built EPM Cloud Integrations” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

Integration Tasks for Uploading and Downloading Files Within EPM

In Close Manager, you can use pre-built integration tasks to upload and download files to automate data extract from one service to import into another service. For example, you can export data from Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud and import it into Oracle Tax Reporting Cloud.

Key Resources

See “Uploading and Downloading Files Within EPM Services” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

New EPM Automate Utility Version

A new version of the EPM Automate Utility is available with this update. This version includes the upgrade command, which automatically downloads and silently installs the newest version of the EPM Automate Utility. After you run the login command to initiate a session, the utility identifies the current installed version. If the installed version is not the newest available, you can run this command to download and install the latest version.

Key Resources

See "EPM Automate Utility Commands" in Working with EPM Automate for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for detailed information.

Application-Level Provisioning for Data Management

Application-level provisioning is now available for Data Management. This enhancement allows Service Administrators to grant the following roles to users who have the User or Viewer identity domain role. Granting these roles allow Users and Viewers to participate in the data integration process using Data Management.

Key Resources

See "Managing Application-Level Provisioning" in Administering Access Control for Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for detailed information.

Removal of Support

Classic Dimension Editor

With the March 2018 (18.03) update, the Dimensions link in the Navigator will link to the Simplified Dimension Editor, which was released several months ago. Consequently, the Classic Dimension Editor will not be supported starting with the March 2018 update to the service (March 2, 2018 for test and March 16, 2018 for production instances).

Key Resources

For detailed information on using the Simplified Dimension Editor, See “Editing Dimensions in the Simplified Dimension Editor” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

File-Based Integration of Data Management with Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud

Oracle Fusion Financial Cloud Budgetary Control and Encumbrance Accounting is now fully integrated with Data Management.

This enhancement brings the integration of Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud on par with the current, out of the box, file-based integration. As a result, the file-based integration is being phased out starting the September update to the service.

If you are using file-based integration between Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud, Oracle recommends that you adopt this new integration as soon as possible.

Defects Fixed

Check this list again for the latest information when the update is applied to your test environment.

Defect Number

Description

27350021

The Override rate is now used for primary and shared entities and aggregated to parent entities of both.

27129399

Power Users can generate Intercompany Reports if they have access to all the entities and partners used in the report.

27353517

In Close Manager, graphs on the Compliance dashboard are now exported correctly to Excel.

27261080

Loading data in each month will not affect consolidation performance.

27255075

Users can generate Close Manager Report Binders without selecting any tasks.

27338211

In Close Manager, switching between tasks using the Next and Previous buttons displays the information correctly.

27235098

Users are now allowed to export tasks from the Task List to Excel.

27231950

In Data Management, empty journal entries are now exported correctly to FCCS.

27340363

In Data Management, when using an FCCS application, a data load rule no longer has different target options depending on the language of the web browser.

26405218

In Data Management, the French version of the File Selection window now shows Télécharger (Download button) and Charger (Upload button).

27267369

In Data Management, the application snapshot no longer fails with the "EPMFDM-140223:EXPORT FAILED FOR SYSTEM SETTING" error.

27314175

In Data Management, the Source Value field in Data Load Mappings now has a maximum length of 80 characters instead of 75.

26955559

A provider error no longer occurs when launching business rules from Smart View.

25678319

When working with user variables in Smart View, the order of the children members available for selection is now consistent with the order specified in the Planning web application.

27227923

In an ad hoc grid, all members selected for a POV are retained after changing the POV member for a dimension, and then changing the alias table to “None.”

27159164, 27239819

In cases where duplicate aliases exist in a hierarchy but their parent member does not have an alias, Smart View now displays the member name as the qualified name and the friendly name as the alias.

25217541

In Smart View, hierarchy member indentation and expansion are now correctly displayed when the “Suppress hierarchy” and “Start Expanded” options are enabled in Planning.

27334131

Refreshing a previously-saved Smart View ad hoc grid no longer causes an "invalid display POV" error.

27227593

Users no longer get an "error executing query" when running a book if the book has a level 0  list and descendants for the book Point of View.

26598697

Users no longer get an "error executing query" when running a book if the book has a level 0 list, descendants for the book Point of View, and level 0 members.

26921808

Financial Reporting Web Studio no longer times out.

27266649, 27271949

In Financial Reporting Web Studio, you can now successfully close the Select Members page.

27281312

Batch scheduler reports that are set up with a bursting file now successfully send emails after they are run.

Considerations

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

If there are conflicts with aliases of existing members, an error is displayed that the system cannot enable the feature. To work around this issue, log off, and then log back in. Resolve the member alias conflict and refresh the database.

NOTE:  If you try to refresh the database without re-logging into the session, a server crash may occur.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Key Resources

For more information, see “Member and Alias Considerations” in this topic:

Importing Journal Artifacts

When you import Journal artifacts into Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud through Migration, errors may occur and the journals are not imported.

To work around this issue, after the import process fails, log out and log back in as an Administrator. From the Navigator, select Migration, and then the Snapshot tab. Expand the application. Expand Relational Data, select Journals, and click Import.

Adding Base Members from Dimension Editor

If you add a base member using the classic Dimension Editor and change the initially displayed Data Storage property on the Member Properties tab, please also check the Consol cube Data Storage option on the Member Formula tab. Ensure that the Data Storage option matches between the two settings. If it does not match, the member might not be usable. The Data Storage options can also be easily viewed and changed in the Simplified UI Dimension Editor.

Smart View Summary Dialog Display

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

Copying and Clearing Data

After copying data from actual to forecast, if you select the Rate option along with the Data option when clearing the forecast data, the system will clear the data as per the POV specified, but it also clears the Rate data for all Scenarios and not just the rate data as per the POV specified.

Change in Calculation of CTA for Net Income/Retained Earnings Current Accounts

In the August, 2017 update (17.08), the seeded Net Income hierarchy included a new member named “Retained Earnings Current – Opening Balance – FX-CTA” as a sibling of Net Income. Opening Balance calculation was done for the new member, which was automatically added during the upgrade process. Due to this change, if you have not yet done so, you must reconsolidate your historical data by running the Consolidation process.

Comprehensive Income CTA Accounts

If you configure a Comprehensive Income CTA account (CICTA) to capture CTA adjustments, the CICTA values are not correctly translated to reporting currencies other than the Entity and Parent Currency.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names/Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

Be aware of the following considerations:

If there are journals or Supplemental Data posted to those members, these changes can cause problems when accessing Journals or importing existing journals.

January 2018 Update

Revision History

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

Date What's Changed Notes
22 DEC 2017   Created initial document.

Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud, January Update

This guide outlines the announcements, fixed issues and considerations in the upcoming Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud update.

Monthly Update Schedule

Oracle will apply the latest updates to your test environments starting at 22:00 UTC-8 (2:00pm Pacific Time) on Friday, January 5, 2018 and to your production environment on Friday, January 19, 2018, also starting at 22:00 UTC-8. The updates will be applied to your environments during the first subsequent daily maintenance.

The Oracle Help Center, which provides access to updated documentation, will also be available on January 5, 2018.

NOTE: You can import backup snapshots into environments with the same, the preceding or the next update versions. For example, you can import backup snapshots from release 17.08 into releases 17.07 and 17.09.

Key Resources

Please Join Oracle Cloud Customer Connect

Please take a moment to join the Cloud Customer Connect forums for EPM Cloud services. Oracle Cloud Customer Connect is a community gathering place for members to interact and collaborate on common goals and objectives. This is where you will find the latest release information, upcoming events, or answers to use-case questions. Joining takes just a few minutes. Join now!

https://cloud.oracle.com/community

NOTE: The Settings and Actions menu now contains a link to Cloud Customer Connect. To access this link, from the Home page, click the down arrow next to the user name (in the upper right-hand corner of the screen), and select Cloud Customer Connect.

Give Us Documentation Feedback

We welcome your comments and suggestions to improve the content of the What's New document and the product documentation. Please send us your feedback at  EPMdoc_ww@oracle.com.  State that you are inquiring or providing feedback, and indicate for which EPM Cloud service as well as the monthly patch cycle, in the body or title of the email.

Announcements

Validating Metadata Option

This update includes an option to validate metadata. You can run a metadata validation report at any time to ensure that your metadata is valid. If metadata errors occur, the report displays the dimension name, the member name in [Parent].[Child] format, and the error description. You can use the Dimension Editor to fix the errors.

For example, if an error occurs that an Entity dimension member has a Consolidation Operator of other than “Ignore”, in the Dimension Editor, select the member and change the Consolidation Operator property to “Ignore”.

Steps to Enable

To validate metadata:

  1. On the Home page, click Application.
  2. Click Overview, then from Actions, select Validate Metadata.
  3. Click Run to validate the metadata.
  4. Expand a dimension to see the invalid results for the dimension. The results are displayed in [Parent].[Child] format with the error description.
  5. Navigate to the Dimension Editor to fix the metadata errors.

Restructure Cube Job

You can now run a Restructure Cube job in the Jobs console. When you select this option, the system performs a restructure of a Block Storage cube (BSO) to eliminate or reduce fragmentation, rebuild indices and remove empty blocks.

Steps to Enable

To run the Restructure Cube job:

  1. From the Home page, click Application, and select Jobs.
  2. Click Schedule Jobs.
  3. From the General tab, click Restructure Cube.
  4. From Cube, select the cube to restructure.

Relocate EPM Cloud Environments from One Identity Domain to Another

Oracle Cloud Account Administrators can now move an environment from its current identity domain to another. Unifying multiple EPM Cloud environments under one identity domain helps simplify user management and single sign on configuration. It also supports seamless cross-environment navigation.

Oracle Cloud Account Administrators may relocate an environment from its current identity domain to another if the target identity domain is provisioned to the same customer account and is in the same data center.

In addition to requesting the relocation of instances from My Services, additional service environment-specific tasks must be completed.

NOTE: You can relocate an environment only if it was provisioned after May 1, 2016. Environments that were provisioned prior to this date cannot be unified to use one identity domain.

Key Resources

New EPM Getting Started Guides

Starting with the December update (17.12), Service Administrator and end-user “getting started” information for all EPM Cloud Services is available from the following new guides:

Getting Started with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for Administrators contains information on the tasks that Service Administrators can perform with EPM Cloud Services. This guide, which provides common administrative information for all EPM Cloud services, is now the primary source for tasks related to EPM Cloud administration including managing users and roles, setting up single sign-on, and backing up and restoring environments. This guide replaces the following guides:

Getting Started with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud for Users introduces end-users to Oracle EPM Cloud and provides information that enables them to quickly become proficient. This guide replaces the following guides:

Links in the Cloud Help Center and Oracle Learning Library have been modified to direct users to these guides. Please change your personal bookmarks and shortcuts so that they point to these new guides.

NOTE: Oracle Enterprise Data Management Cloud content is documented in several common Enterprise Performance Management Cloud guides. The service will be available in early 2018.

Removal of Support

Classic Dimension Editor

With the March 2018 (18.03) update, the Dimensions link in the Navigator will link to the Simplified Dimension Editor. Effective March 2018 (March 2, 2018 for test and March 16, 2018 for production environments), the Simplified Dimension Editor will be the only interface available to edit and manage dimensions.

For detailed information on using the Simplified Dimension Editor, See “Editing Dimensions in the Simplified Dimension Editor” in Administering Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud.

File-Based Integration of Data Management with Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud

Oracle Fusion Financial Cloud Budgetary Control and Encumbrance Accounting is now fully integrated with Data Management.

This enhancement brings the integration of Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud with Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud on par with the current, out of the box, file-based integration. As a result, the file-based integration is being phased out starting the September update to the service.

If you are using file-based integration between Oracle Fusion Financials Cloud and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management Cloud, Oracle recommends that you adopt this new integration as soon as possible.

Defects Fixed

Check this list again for the latest information when the update is applied to your test environment.

Defect Number

Description

27215592  

The Journal History dialog now opens correctly even if users have been deleted from the system.

26587052  

An administrator can unpost or reject a journal even if the Posted By User column is not valid.

26484227

You can import journals even if the journal user no longer exists in the user table.

26940836

Member formulas now correctly handle any number divided by zero in Exchange Rate calculations.

27031284

In Close Manager, an ID that is a member of both the Assignee and Approver teams can now claim a task.

27234042 

In Close Manager, the viewer of an organization unit assigned to a task can now open Task Actions for the task.

25405772

The Refresh the Database option now performs correctly even if there are no shared members under the Historical Override accounts.

26791407

You can now run a metadata validation report to find member property issues and ensure that your metadata is valid.

26274809

Approvers now receive an email notification when a journal is unposted.

26796660

You can now use functions in user variable attribute dimensions.

27152908

In Data Management, an error no longer occurs when reading an import expression for a data or amount column.

27009032

In Data Management, a data load no longer fails when an import mapping encounters UTF8 Byte Order Mark (BOM) characters.

27026977

Source filters associated with data load rules are now saved correctly.  

26985098

In Smart View, dimension members are no longer duplicated when zooming in, zooming out, or refreshing the parent member of a dimension.

26982965

In free-form mode, Smart View can now retrieve dynamic time series members that are shared members without using qualified names.

Considerations

Reconsolidating Data After Upgrading

After you upgrade to 18.01, the first time you want to re-consolidate and re-translate any entity for a specific Scenario, Year and Period combination, you must run the Compute Rates task rule. Refresh the database and make sure that that Data Status is SC, showing that the cells are impacted. Then launch Consolidation and Translation. Subsequent re-consolidation / re-translation of the same Scenario, Year and Period combination does not require this step.

The Data Storage property has changed from Dynamic Calc to Never Share for these rate accounts in the Rates Cube:

Additionally, due to a change in calculation for Opening Balance for Retained Earnings Prior, you may require reconsolidation of existing data if Opening Balance Adjustment entries have been made, but not otherwise.

Also, enabling the Ownership Management feature requires a reconsolidation of existing data in order to populate the Proportion member of amount in the Consolidation dimension.

Balance Calculation

TIP: By default, the system automatically processes the Balance Calculation, which can impact consolidation performance.  To improve performance, you can disable the Balance Calculation so that the system does not automatically balance the Balance Sheet for you.   You can select one or more scenarios to disable.  If you do not want to have the calculation run for any scenarios, select all scenarios for disablement.  You can then create a new balance account member and write a custom calculation to run as needed.

Key Resources

See the “Balance the Balance Sheet” and “Creating Configurable Calculations” sections in the Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Administrator’s Guide.

Ownership Management Enablement

Enabling the Ownership Management feature entails adding seeded accounts, which causes a restructuring of your application. Depending on the size of your application, the restructuring could take a considerable length of time. This can be expected to take as long as manually refreshing the database after adding accounts.

When the Ownership Management feature is enabled, you will need to reconsolidate all existing data in your application in order to re-populate the Proportion member in the Consolidation dimension.

If you enable the Ownership Management feature, you may not be able to open some existing Financial Reporting reports due to metadata changes for Ownership Management.

Adding Base Members from Dimension Editor

If you add a base member using the classic Dimension Editor and change the initially displayed Data Storage property on the Member Properties tab, please also check the Consol cube Data Storage option on the Member Formula tab. Ensure that the Data Storage option matches between the two settings. If it does not match, the member might not be usable. The Data Storage options can also be easily viewed and changed in the Simplified UI Dimension Editor.

Smart View

SUMMARY DIALOG DISPLAY

In Internet Explorer, you may experience issues using the Open Summary dialog in Smart View. To work around this issue:

USING FIREFOX ESR 52.4.2 WITH SMART VIEW

Mozilla Firefox has phased out support for XUL-based add-ons such as Smart View. Only add-ons and extensions built with new web extension technology will work in newer versions of Firefox. Therefore, Smart View 11.1.2.5.710 and newer only supports Firefox versions up to ESR 52.4.1. If you want to continue using Firefox with Smart View 11.1.2.5.710 and newer, do not upgrade your Firefox browser.

If your Firefox browser is set to automatically install updates, Oracle recommends changing the setting to “Check for updates, but let me choose whether to install them.” See the Firefox help for instructions on changing this setting.

Copying and Clearing Data

If you try to clear a shared entity, the base entity and all shared entities do not get cleared. To work around this issue, clear the primary entity in order to clear all shared entities.

After copying data from actual to forecast, if you select the Rate option along with the Data option when clearing the forecast data, the system will clear the data as per the POV specified, but it also clears the Rate data for all Scenarios and not just the rate data as per the POV specified.

Change in Calculation of CTA for Net Income/Retained Earnings Current Accounts

In the August, 2017 update (17.08), the seeded Net Income hierarchy included a new member named “Retained Earnings Current – Opening Balance – FX-CTA” as a sibling of Net Income. Opening Balance calculation was done for the new member, which was automatically added during the upgrade process. Due to this change, if you have not yet done so, you must reconsolidate your historical data by running the Consolidation process.

Comprehensive Income CTA Accounts

If you assigned an account as a CICTA Redirection Account, after you upgrade, the Redirection account attribute that you selected may be missing.

If you configure a Comprehensive Income CTA account (CICTA) to capture CTA adjustments, the CICTA values are not correctly translated to reporting currencies other than the Entity and Parent Currency.

Self Service Upgrade

It is strongly recommended that you do not use the Upgrade Application Content settings in this update. Although a new Upgrade screen is available in Daily Maintenance, this feature is not fully functional.

Editing Dates in a Data Collection Period

In a Data Collection Period in Supplemental Data, editing Start, End, and Close Dates may result in an error that the date is outside the valid range.

Entity Member Names/Aliases with ICP Property

When you create an Entity with the ICP property enabled, the maximum length of the member name is 76 characters instead of 80, to allow for the ICP prefix.

Working with Metadata

Be aware of the following considerations:

If there are journals or Supplemental Data posted to those members, these changes can cause problems when accessing Journals or importing existing journals.