REPORTS: The next-generation reporting capabilities for Oracle EPM Cloud
Reporting and financial analysis are the starting point of modern business. That is why Oracle is constantly evolving and updating its financial and reporting tools. While you may already be aware of the different reporting tools that Oracle can offer you, I want to take the opportunity to share with you, the new generation reporting capabilities and its potential. This new tool is called Reports.
So… what is this new Reports? Well, to be honest, this is not a new tool; it has been part of Narrative Reporting business process for the past four years. Reports is now integrated into the EPM Cloud Platform applications (Planning, Financial Consolidation and Close, Tax Reporting, and Free Form) business processes and will eventually, replace the legacy Financial Reporting (FR).
This is great news for those who have worked with FR and know it
is not an easy tool to work with. And do not worry, you will have plenty of
time to migrate your content from Financial Reporting to Reports.
Reports
will be a more user-friendly, robust report development framework along with a
power report viewer experience. The tool will be managed on the first tab of
the Reports card in your workspace.
Now, let us check some of the new features:
- A single location to manage reports, books, and documents, including security definitions and bursting definitions:
1. From your homepage or navigator click on the Reports card to open the tool.
2. Reports tab: here you can create new reports, manage folders, and assign security permissions (6).
3. Financial Reporting Tab: in this tab, you will find all the existing FR reports. FR will be still available and can be used in your application.
4. Documents tab: you can administer PDFs and MS Word documents in Books, CVS files for bursting definitions and PDFs from bursting jobs.
5. From this drop-down list, you will have the option to create Reports, Books and Bursting definitions.
- Data Sources are automatically created based on the EPM Cloud application cubes that are on your instance:
NOTE:
1. They are automatically updated when the model is re-deployed and deleted if the model or application is deleted.
2. Reports is embedded in each business process, with single instance reporting. You cannot point to other EPM Cloud instances. You will need to use Reports in Narrative Reporting for cross-cloud reporting.
3. Reports is not available for On-Premise products, only cloud platform business processes. Financial Reporting will continue to be used to connect to On-Premise EPM products, as Oracle has no plans to move Reports to on-premises at this time.
- You can add multiple sheets and the possibility to create hidden sheets to hide a grid from being displayed in the report.
- Design and preview the results of an individual grid or chart without having to run the entire report.
- Enhanced Charting: Who does not love a nice chart on a financial report?
Reports will allow you to insert 17 types of charts. Have a look of the full list here.
- Enriched
report viewer experience:
You can now select alias tables and members label display.
- Insert
Separator Row/Column:
- Better
prompts, POV control, text functions and headings.
Text
functions editor:
Prompt editor:
- Use data source features in your reports such as dynamic member selection functions, substitution variables, cell text and file attachments, UDAs, and Attributes.
- New Intelligent Narrative Generation
You can now create conditional Text and display it when previewing a report in HTML format. You can drill from the text to a new browser tab containing the related zoom-enabled grid for further analysis capability.
Are you now wondering what will happen to your FR reports? Well, you can migrate Financial Reporting reports to Reports doing the following:
- In-place migration where you can migrate all.
- Individual reports migration.
- Importing Financial Reporting report files that were exported locally from the Explore Repository.
What are the differences?
After going through lots of screenshots you are now wondering what the difference is between the legacy Financial Reporting, the new Reports and Narrative Reporting as a separate product.
Well, here a few points:
1. Reports will not include Notes and Disclosure Management. These functions are only available in Narrative Reporting. (And there are no plans to add additional Narrative Reporting components to the platform).
2. Reports do not have annotations or commentary capability like FR. This function is only available in Narrative Reporting. Notes are not migratable from FR annotations.
3. Reports is an EPM instance-specific. For multisource grids, you will need to use Narrative Reporting.
4. At the moment, you cannot export Reports to Excel. However, Report export/import, as well as bursting reports to Excel, are planned for the Spring timeframe.
5. Reports does not have change tracking. This function is only available in Narrative Reporting.
Finally, the new generation of reporting capabilities is available from the 5th of February 2021, in your Test environment and from the 19th of February 2021 in your Production environment.
Thank you for reading and please feel free to share this content and leave your comments!
You can read many other useful Oracle EPM Cloud and NetSuite ERP blogs posted by my colleagues at Brovanture here.
Until next time,
Cristina.
Comments
Post a Comment