As with any other General Ledger system, Oracle Fusion too allows you to define accounting year and the periods within that year. It is a very normal practice to setup periods on a monthly basis. The question is why just a month, why not quarter. With the period frequency that you define in General Ledger, it means that you can track the balances at that frequency. For example, the management might want to see month by month trending of sales by line of business. For example, a company such as Fusion Pracitces Ltd, might want to see how much revenue is being made by their Consulting Business, how much by their Training Business and how much by their Support Business. For this, if the GL Periods are defined monthly, then you will be able to see from your Fusion General Ledger the trending of performance for each line of business within the company on a monthly basis.

Before reading this article, I believe you have already understood the GL Chart of Accounts concept in Fusion Financials. If not, then you need to read the articles linked here.

Adjusting periods in Fusion General Ledger

The periods when defined monthly, have to be closed after each month, so that users can not fudge the transactions going backwards. This is required for audit & control purposes.  But sometimes, either mistakes can be made, or reconciliation errors found after  the periods have been closed. To manage this situation, the implementors can define the adjustment periods. These adjusting periods can either be Quaterly or Annually, which means you can make adjustments at the end of every Quarter or at the end of every year.
In Fusion GL, you also have another option to define how many adjusting periods that you need. In this case, implementor have to themselves go and define those adjusting periods themselves after deciding the number of adjusting periods they need. If you select Quaterly or Annually adjusting periods, then Fusion GL will auto generate these Adjusting periods in the calendar for you.

Historic Periods

If your company has multiple countries in implementation, then you will be running translations to translate balances from one currency into another, normally the group Head Quarter’s currency. In this case you need to specify a calendar start date that is a full year before the start date of the year of the first translation period for your ledger. This is so, because the translation cannot be run in the first period of a calendar. You also need to consider your data migration needs before you define the first period, because you may wish to load balances of last 5 years into the system. This is important because you cannot add previous years once the first calendar period has been opened.

EBusiness Suite Considerations

Organizations which have multi-country implementations will normally define multiple calendars in the system. In Oracle Fusion Financials a calendar can have one period frequency and a period type only. Therefore, if you have a calendar in Oracle EBS with more than one  period type in it, then you must create  separate calendars with unique calendar and period type combination.

Opening the periods

From operational perspective, once you have opened the period or made it future enterable, then it is difficult to change your period status because the transactions might have been entered against those periods. Therefore caution must be exercised for opening the GL Periods.

In this article, we will see how Fusion GL generates the periods allowing you to define your calendar.

When defining the calendar, you will need the following ingredients

1. Start Date

2. Period Frequency

3. Adjusting Period Frequency

4. Period Name Format

Specifying these items will help the system automatically generate a calendar with its periods

First, go to the screen to define the calendar.

Navigator- Setup & Maintenance--> Search for Manage Accounting calendars

Specify the name of the Calendar, start date, period name Format, the first period and the adjusting period frequency.

Fusion Financials will automatically generate the calendar for you, with defaulted names. In this case, I chose to change the period names (e,g; ADJ1, ADJ2,etc) for adjusting periods.

You can add more years to the calendar by clicking Add Year.

Thereafter change the names of Adjusting periods for next year.

Repeat these steps for any other calendar that you need to define for your implementation.

Anil Passi

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