Key takeaways
- We’re embedding AI agents in Oracle Fusion ERP to help finance and accounting professionals improve financial monitoring.
- Ledger Agent makes it easy for financial professionals to establish monitoring conditions that generate alerts when financial thresholds are triggered.
- Ledger Agent enables higher levels of automation, drastically reducing the amount of investment needed in periodic and ad-hoc reporting.
This demo shows how the Ledger Agent in Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP can transform the way accounting teams monitor financial conditions using AI-powered automation and natural language interactions.
What you’ll see
The demo follows Alex, an assistant controller, as he uses the Ledger Agent, part of Oracle Fusion Cloud Financial Management, to monitor changes in accounts payable (AP) liability without technical headaches or lengthy investigations. Keep an eye out for these three key moments:
1. Setting the monitoring prompt: Alex is freed from the tedium traditionally associated with this kind of financial surveillance—there’s no waiting for IT teams to produce reports or working through subledger transaction inquiries.He uses plain language to set a monitoring prompt that tracks quarter-over-quarter increases in AP liability in Oracle General Ledger. The prompt specifies details like the change threshold in AP liability and the account for monitoring.
2. Alert and investigate: Later, the Ledger Agent detects a significant increase in AP liability and alerts Alex to the change. Clicking on the alert, Alex gets a summary with supporting details that explain the variance (defined as the difference between the budgeted amount and actual AP liability). Alex uses natural language to dig into details, getting transaction specifics and access to source documentation like purchase orders. He sees approval comments on the PO that help him quickly understand the root cause—and that the spend is approved and part of corporate plans.
3. Support the financial close: Comparing the source documents, Alex notices that there are unbilled shipments that are likely to trigger a large invoice close to quarter end, potentially complicating financial close. Since he’s done the work to understand that the expenditures are legitimate, he leaves a note in the ledger to help his colleagues working on period-end close avoid delays and unnecessary investigations.
Why it matters
The automation of labor-intensive processes can dramatically increase finance departments’ ability to make meaningful contributions to their organizations’ strategic goals. When accounting professionals are tied up with routine reconciliations, reporting, or financial close complications, they can’t focus on higher-value areas like risk management, cost optimization, or growth.
The Ledger Agent tackles this challenge by using AI to maintain constant oversight of financial activity. Instead of relying on periodic reporting or manual reviews, it continuously scans transactions using prompts defined in plain language. It can spot subtle differences, analyze massive data volumes in seconds, and flag issues without complex report writing or cumbersome data exports.
These advances are possible because of three important technical aspects of the Ledger Agent. First, it reads data directly from Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, connecting financial information from Oracle General Ledger with supporting details from subledgers like Oracle Payables, Oracle Receivables, Oracle Accounting Hub, Oracle Revenue Management, and others. This lets it analyze and interpret information in near real time, highlighting potential problems sooner, creating more comprehensive summaries, and easily surfacing transaction-level detail. Second, the Ledger Agent respects role-based security in Fusion Applications, ensuring that users only see data permitted by their security entitlements. And third, the agentic experience enables finance and accounting teams to interact with their data using natural language.
Summing up
By adopting AI, finance organizations can work faster, catch issues sooner, and focus on delivering more value to the organizations they serve. The Ledger Agent helps accounting teams improve oversight by automating thorough reviews of financial transactions and summarizing issues that need attention. It also provides a natural language experience for Oracle General Ledger, eliminating the need for massive amounts of report writing, data extraction, and offline analysis. It is a big step forward from traditional approaches that required IT resources and time- and labor-intensive analysis. This is just one example of how we’re using AI to advance touchless operations in finance and bring the vision of a continuous close closer to reality.
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