These are features and modules that deliver high value that you may not be using now, or that you may not be using to their fullest capabilities. And you can add them without giving up your day job, disrupting the operations of the finance department, or even asking for more budget (for customers with Oracle Cloud EPM Enterprise subscriptions, there are no additional license fee or cost implications).
1. IPM Insights:
Intelligent Performance Management (IPM) Insights, available with Planning (and later this year with Financial Close), helps automate financial analysis to improve decision-making and forecasting. It uses machine learning to identify patterns across large amounts of financial and operational data.
It can quickly:
- Uncover deviations in forecasts compared to actuals or predicted values
- Detect unusual patterns like anomalies or outliers
- Reveal hidden bias in forecasts submitted by planners
This approach offers many benefits, including:
- Dramatically cutting time spent on manual tasks like gathering data, running reports, and searching for issues and exceptions
- Supporting a culture of data-driven analysis and decision-making
- Shifting focus to collaboration and action instead of data preparation
2. Narrative Reporting:
Narrative Reporting, available for Planning and Financial Close use cases, provides finance (and other) teams with a secure, collaborative environment for preparing financial reports such as quarterly business reviews and performance summaries. Its strength is in complementing numerical financial information with explanatory text that provides business context. It helps teams create reports that combine properly formatted tables, graphs, and prose with a high level of fit and finish—suitable for an annual report, for example. It offers:
A centralized, collaborative, and secure authoring environment that includes the easy reuse of prior reports
A report writer to import charts and tables from Oracle Cloud EPM, Oracle Cloud Financial Management, and Oracle Essbase
GenAI (coming soon)—Narrative Reporting is being enriched with embedded GenAI that can create draft narratives as well as visuals (charts, graphs) to make the authoring process more productive (see for yourself in the demo shared in this story)
This approach offers many benefits, including:
- Eliminating annoying, seemingly endless email cycles and document-version-control headaches
- Restricting access to sensitive financial data based on user roles
- Offering visibility into reports’ progress and status
- Easily producing and distributing executive briefing books (and other books of financial record)
3. Transaction Matching:
Thousands of customers use Oracle Cloud EPM’s Account Reconciliation because it offers an effective way to accelerate the financial close process while ensuring the accuracy of financial statements and containing risk. However, only a subset of customers have deployed transaction matching. Transaction matching automates high-volume, labor-intensive, complex reconciliations. It is ideal for balance-sheet reconciliations (e.g., intercompany) and operational reconciliations (e.g., expense reimbursements). It offers:
- An auto-match engine that can match millions of transactions in minutes
- Flexible matching rules for individual transactions or groups of transactions
- Suggested matches, which you can choose to accept or decline
- Integration into period-end reconciliation to provide evidence of reconciliation at a point in time and meet compliance requirements
- Automatic creation of a journal to resolve variances found in the matching process
Benefits include:
- Easy configuration
- Significant productivity benefits for the finance team
- Elimination of manual processing errors, improving the quality of reconciliations
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