Journal Changes in Financial Consolidation and Close

Watch the Customer Connect recording presented by Margaret Reed and Rich Wilkie. A copy of the presentation can be downloaded from this link, too.

This session covered two enhancements for the Journals feature in Cloud EPM Financial Consolidation and Close:

  • Unbalanced Journals – available as part of the 23.04 update, this enhancement provides the capability to create and post unbalanced journals.
  • Granular Assignment of Journals – A “First Look” at a feature that is part of the 23.06 update, this enhancement allows you to assign journal functionality on a more granular basis via added application roles for journals.

Unbalanced Journals

Unbalanced Journals is an enablement feature through either application creation wizard or  enable features. Once enabled, this cannot be disabled.

Unbalanced Journals – Validations, Import/Export and Reporting

  • For unbalanced journals there are no balanced validations
  • For balanced journals the balancing validation remains for both applications enabled for unbalanced journals and those not enabled for unbalanced journals
  • For reporting, you can filter Balance Type
  • For Import and Export, the Balance Type property is assigned to each journal for applications that have unbalanced journals enabled
  • You cannot import journals from an unbalanced journal enabled application to one that is not enabled for unbalanced journals

Journal Security

New Application Roles
There will be new roles that can be assigned and unassigned as needed. For example, a customer can have an Administrator who isn’t able to create journals.

There will be six new application roles for existing functionality

  • Consolidation Journals – Create
  • Consolidation Journals – Submit
  • Consolidation Journals – Approve
  • Consolidation Journals – Post
  • Consolidation Journals – Un-Post
  • Consolidation Journals – Manage Periods

Upon upgrade, all users will inherit the roles that give them the same functionality as with the current pre-defined roles. Customers will be able to enable and disable these roles by group or by user.

New Functionality by Role and Action/Journal Status

There will be a new application role that will not be deployed upon upgrade.

This role can be assigned to any user/group that are Service Admins, Power Users or Users.

  • The new role will be Consolidation Journals – Auto-Post after Approval
    • This role will enable a journal to be automatically posted after approval.  This role should be assigned to someone who has the Consolidation Journals – Approve

Because we have separate roles for both Create and Submit journals, we will have an additional action and status for journals.  This will allow for an additional level of approval.

  • Action – Complete
    • This will be used by a user who has Create but not Submit
    • When the user selects Complete, an email will be sent to the user(s)/group(s) that have Submit role and modify access to the members in the journal
    • There will be a new status for the journals called (Completed)
    • If a user has create and submit roles, they can still use complete action, but it is not mandatory.

If the auto-post after approval role is not assigned then the email for posting will go to the user who took the submit or complete action.