Funds Checking, Budgetary Control and Budget Integration with GL for Oracle Project Management
Astounding as it may seem, when Oracle launched Oracle Project Management (PJT), it surprised many people by actually stating in the associated manuals that some functionality had in fact disappeared, if users adopted the financial planning model that is available in PJT. Throughout the manuals there are statements to this effect.
What this actually means is that if an organisation wishes to use Budgetary Controls, where by project budgeted funds are checked when users attempt to raise a requisition, they can not use the PJT financial planning model (planning resource lists, etc.) or vice versa. The same applies to budgetary integration between Oracle Projects and General Ledger.
This is highly irritating to organisations that want both and has not helped the cause of PJT, delaying the adoption of this functionally rich application. Organisations have been forced to choose between the two and prioritise where the biggest benefit lies. This adversely affects sectors where budgetary control (aka Funds Checking) is important, such as Higher Education & Research. This is far from ideal and it has vexed the consultants at Prōject for some time.
However, we now have an idea that may overcome this problem. I would stress that at this stage it is an idea and work in progress.
The idea is to use a Budget Approval Workflow and Budget Calculation Extension to create a Budget that can be used for Budgetary Control or Integration. Here’s how we see this working:
- Define a financial plan (budget) in PJT (see point 1 below)
- Submit this financial plan for approval
- This will fire a budget approval workflow. This is regardless of the need for actual approval or not; this can be defined according to an organisation’s approval needs
- The budget approval will then fire a Budget Calculation Extension
- This budget calculation extension will create a baselined budget that can be used for Budgetary Control or Integration i.e. akin to creating a budget in the Professional Forms, using Resource Lists rather than Planning Resource Lists
As previously mentioned this is still in the feasibility stage and we are searching for organisations and users that may have tried to do the same thing. A couple of key areas to contend with are:
- How do you map your Planning Resources Lists in PJT with your Resource Lists defined in Oracle Project Costing and how do you maintain this mapping?
- The testing regime required to ensure this is all feasible and could be applied as a generic solution.
We are continuing to look at this, so hopefully more will follow soon.
Its true that this is a challenge. Another challenge I, even with existing funds check is that it only checks for cost commitments for Purchase orders and supplier invoices and that too only for cost which will be expensed immediately to project upon receipt of goods. This is very limiting feature for organizations, which are Project manufacturing based. You can not control cost for “Inventory” based purchasing and later on issuing the costs to projects.
Anyone has some solution for this?
This is true, funds checking is only fired at point of entry for AP/PO transactions. Transactions that are costed within Projects, such as Misc Transactions and Inventory issues are only funds-checked when they are costed. The downside of this is that the transactions have already hit the project.
One could customise the inventory issues form to reference pa_bc_packets / project balances at point of entry. However, this would need to be quite sophisticated as it would need to take into account burdening, currency etc. What you are essentially trying to do is pre-cost expenditures.
Alternatively, upon commiting a projects issue in Inventory a form personalisation could be triggered that does a rough check against the project balance and presents the user with a warning or even prevents them from proceeding. The same logic could be applied to Misc Transactions. Please get in touch if you require more info on this solution.
Kind regards,
Andy.
So your problem is entering POs with an Inventory destination and then issuing the stock to Projects at a later date? If so, this would require a customisation to Purchasing to reserve funds when the PO is created, track the commitment and customise Inventory to reverse it when the stock is issued to Projects. One simple alternative that may help (although is not ideal) is to load manual commitment batches into Projects in line with your purchasing to inventory and then reverse the batches when stock is issued to projects.
I am looking at the feasibility of replacing Grants Accounting with Projects. I am looking at the gaps in functionality between the two modules and would like some confirmation that Budgetary Control/Funds Checking is available in Projects. It appears from this exchange that it is only available for AP/PO Transactions – could you confirm what the situation is please? You don’t mention it in your Oracle projects for Grants Users document.
Maxine
Apologies for delay in responding to your post
Budgetary funds checking is available in Oracle Projects, and it only works for subcontract / purchases i.e. it does not work for any transactions that are batch processed (costed) in Oracle projects itself i.e. processes similar to GMS: Costing and Funds Checking for Miscellaneous Transactions” in Grants do not exist in Oracle Projects. Instead OP has “PRC: Distribute costs for Miscellaneous Transactions” which does not check funds. You could try to customise processes in OP to do the funds checking using costing extensions
One thing to bear in mind with Oracle Projects, as per the subject of this blog, is that if you adopt the Oracle Project Management financial planning model funds checking does not work as standard, hence the reason for the blog really i.e. I believe there is a potential way round this.
Hope this helps
Barry
After I initially commented I clicked the -Notify me when new comments are added- checkbox and now each time a comment is added I get four emails with the identical comment. Is there any way you may take away me from that service? Thanks!