inlumi blog

For the few of us who use Oracle EPM products with a Mac, working with Smart View has up until now required some complications. It has meant running a virtual PC and using Excel or Word on that. In June 2019 in the EPM Cloud release, Oracle introduced a Smart View that you could use natively on Mac. Can I finally turn off my virtual PC? It’s time to give the Mac version a go. Here’s my take on Smart View for Mac.

For a long time, the norm in consolidation tools was to use 12 dimensions. As the tools have evolved and new tools have become well established on the market, this is not a hard limit anymore, and more dimensions can be used. Recently, I had the pleasure to develop a special purpose Oracle HFM application for a financial institution with 14 custom dimensions, making the total number of dimensions 22. The main driver for the amount dimensions is the granular reporting requirement set by the regulator. You can read the customer story here.

This time around, I’m writing about elimination of percentage of completion (POC). This concerns companies with long-term projects and who choose to book the revenue based on the POC. Instead of booking the revenue once when the entire project is finished, revenue is booked gradually as the project progresses based on the share of the incurred cost of the estimated total cost and estimated margin.

How many people can say that they truly understand the cash flow statement? How many people - when asked to design a cash flow statement in a financial consolidation and reporting tool - would know where to start?

There is an elimination where automation becomes especially handy because part of the elimination bookings typically lasts for years. Profit on fixed assets emerges when some fixed asset – tangible or intangible – is sold by one group company to another for a higher price than the book value in seller’s books is. The asset stays the same, so the higher selling price must be eliminated from the group’s figures. One element to eliminate is the intergroup profit and the other is the overstated assets and too high depreciation.

Over the next few posts I’ll write about automating common group eliminations in consolidation tools. The first – and perhaps the simplest – in the series is the elimination of Profit on Inventory (POI).

Do you have hundreds or even thousands of members in your dimensions? Users easily lose time looking for the single member that they need to complete their reporting. The most effective way to handle this is with Quick Sort.

Have you ever needed to change a default currency of an entity in HFM? Do alarm bells ring about database corruption and data loss? To clear any doubt around it: you can change a default currency of an entity in HFM, but you should proceed with caution. In this blog I’ll explain how you can do it.