Objective:

This training article is intended to discuss

• Account Monitor, and
• Account Inspector

Account Monitor:

Account Monitor provides Oracle Fusion General Ledger users with a tabulation of self-selected accounts and balances, with self-defined deviations from standards for those balances. The users can see anomalies against the thresholds that they define. Account Monitor provides efficient monitoring and tracking of key account balances in real time and is continually updated, at every level of the dimension and hierarchy. It is a powerful tool for real time, multidimensional account analysis. It is available in the General Accounting Dashboard and in the Financial Reporting Center.

A user defines tolerance rules in order to create self-monitoring accounts. The output from the rules is presented in tabulation with various options as to what is shown or hidden. Any accounts that exceed the tolerance limits are automatically displayed, and therefore, eliminate the surprise of account anomalies during your close process and enable your accountant to initiate an appropriate business or accounting response to the implicit situation.

When you select a balance, you can drill down through the multilevel hierarchies, or up to the next parent value level. You can navigate directly to any level in the hierarchy and to any detail, the complete details of which are discussed below in detail.

Hence Account Monitor offers following benefits-

• Comparison with last period/year or budgets
• Exception based tracking
• Drill to detail balances and subledger transaction details.
• Query by example
• Embedded intelligence- System decides according to the account type that whether the changes are good or bad for the organization (e.g. - Sales are increasing means good and expenses are increasing means not a healthy sign. So system will automatically mark it as Green or Red).
• Threshold limits

The Account Monitor allows efficient monitoring and tracking balances of key accounts in real time. Both current and comparative balances are displayed and the change (%) column accesses whether the balance variance is favorable or not which will be shown with an example in below discussions.

To get into the account monitor screen navigate to General accounting dashboard and select the appropriate data access set.

We can create account groups for monitoring the balances based on various requirements. 

Click on View > Account Group > Create

Name the group and time option as per requirement. Point to be noted is that we can create multiple account groups but system will show only one group at a time which is set as default. What value we want to compare is determined by Comparison options. There are various options available. In case we want to compare budget we are required to input the budget scenario which we have already discussed in my previous article.

In this case we want to compare Original Budget scenario which we have defined

To add accounts click on add icon. Input the ledger, Company (in this case we want to track for all company values), Department (in this case we want to track for all department values), and A/C (in this case we want to track Stationary a/c). When we want the display is determined by Change box where if selected Always Display, then the system will display it always. However if selected other options as shown above we need to provide the threshold limit. On achieving the threshold limit the system will display the account.  It is advisable to select Always display option which will help in tracking the variation rigorously. Click on Save and close available from Save button dropdown.

Here we can see the variation of Stationary as compared to budget allocated. The embedded intelligence highlights the % Change as RED .

To drill down click on All company values We can see which company value is responsible for increasing the cost of Stationary items.

To further drill down Click on All department values

We can now see that in Company 01 the department 001 is responsible for pushing the cost.

If we want a graphical representation Click on Show graphs

To further drill down Click on amount highlighted

We get further details about the such as in which accounting period this expense occurred.

To further drill down Click on period activity

We get the journal details. To further drill down to original journal entry Click on Journal as 

So we get the entire journal where the expense was booked.

Account Inspector:

Account Monitor is fully integrated with the online multidimensional analysis tool called the Account Inspector. With the Account Inspector, the user can:

• Perform ad hoc multidimensional pivot table analysis
• Review charts based on the Account Monitor data
• Use drill down from the Account Monitor from any parent value to the next parent or child value
• Perform drill down from any child value to detail balances, journal lines, and subledger transactions

To get into the account inspector click on account monitor drop down and select Account Inspector 

Below is the Account Inspector page

Right side is the area of all point of views or dimensions like Accounting period, amount type, balance amount, currency, etc on which we can do the analysis. We can drag and drop from left to right and vice versa as shown below. However at any point of time the analysis area should have one row and one column.

From here if we want to drill down, we can do so. For instance Click on amount

So we get the details of journal directly. To further drill down we can click on period activity as already shown in case of Account Monitor. So we have observed that this tool helps in performing multidimensional analysis at one go.

Anjan Mukerji

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