Project Partners Blog

Executing multiple projects for one customer is common practice for many project-based organizations. But what happens when the time comes to invoice your customer for work performed? Native Oracle Projects allows you to generate only one invoice per project. So, multiple projects lead to multiple invoices. For many organizations, this involves hundreds, maybe thousands of invoices being processed each month. Invoicing for such complex situations is extremely daunting, expensive and time consuming. Each invoice needs to be generated, approved, issued, mailed, processed, reconciled and audited. Not only is this a time and money waster for you but your customer is on the receiving end of this accounting nightmare.

Native Oracle Project Billing does a good job of calculating and generating your draft invoices but many companies need the power to consolidate invoices at a higher level than a project. Seeing this requirement over and over, Project Partners developed a solution to streamline the often complex project invoicing process. It is called Project Partners Consolidated Invoicing. Consolidated Invoicing is included in the Project Partners Invoicing product offering designed to simplify the various customer billing mandates facing project organizations today.

Consolidated Invoicing is a simple solution that does not involve changes to your current Oracle Projects setup or configurations. This solution simply extends the standard invoicing functionality of Oracle Project Billing and Oracle Receivables, therefore requiring no additional training for your users. By utilizing the same invoice processes and review screens currently in use by your project managers and accountants today, such as Invoice Review, Generate Draft Invoices, Interface to Receivables, Autoinvoice import etc., Consolidated Invoicing allows you to consolidate multiple project invoices into one single invoice. You can issue one monthly invoice to a customer at a summary level, with back-up details that break the charges down by project. Your options for consolidation include invoicing across multiple projects, programs, agreements, contracts, or customer “bill to” levels.

With Consolidated Invoicing, project invoicing can be simplified and your project managers and accountants can refocus on activities that add real value to your organization. In addition, your customers receive one invoice from which to pay and the reconciliation of your customer accounts becomes almost seamless. Customers that have implemented this solution have seen time savings of up to 100 hours per invoicing cycle which translates to a cost savings of up to 80%. A solution any project based organization with many projects should consider. Make your project invoicing easier using Project Partners Consolidated Invoicing.

Stay tuned for future blogs on Credit Memo Consolidation and Invoice Formatting and Printing – two additional offerings included in Project Partners Invoicing designed to make project billing easy!

Invoice Consolidation Overview:

Oracle Project Foundation

New Concurrent Process

• ADM: Purge Obsolete Projects Data.

 

iSetup

• New API to enable migration of setup entities across instances. iSetup also handles standard and comparison reporting of master entities in addition to data migration.

 Improved Diagnostics

• All R11i diagnostics scripts are now available for R12.1.1.  In addition, some new scripts have been added to support new R12.1.1 functionality and architecture changes.

 

Oracle Project Costing 

• Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Expenditures via Subledger Accounting
• Contingency Worker Clearing Projects to allow CWK to charge multiple projects
• Additional Project Information in Oracle Time and Labor (Project Name and Task Name)

 

Oracle Project Billing 

• Cascading Billing Schedule Overrides from project to all tasks or top task to all tasks
• Agreement Definition Enhancements
  • Start Date
  • Customer order number and accounting reference
  • Billing sequence number
  • Advance Required checkbox
  • 15 additional descriptive flexfield attributes (bringing the total to 25)

Prepayment Receipt Applications

• Advance payment receipts entered in Oracle Receivables can now be associated with Agreements. “Apply Receipt” button allows the receipts to be associated with the Agreement.
• Receipts are automatically applied to the Project invoices when they are interfaced to Oracle Receivables.
• Allows cash to be identified to a specific agreement up front, and automatically draw down that cash balance.
• When the advance is required, total funding cannot exceed the amount of advance payments associated with the agreement.  Therefore billings cannot exceed advance amounts.
• A client extension is available to determine which customers are required to provide an advance payment. The advance required flag will be enabled or disabled for the Agreement. A new security function allows the flag to be overwritten.

 Federal Budgetary Accounting for Project Revenue

• Additional journal entries are available in Subledger Accounting for the required Federal Budgetary entries.

Date Effective Funds Consumption

• Project Type option that requires cost and event transaction dates to fall within the agreement start and end dates.
• Transactions are only billed against the agreement if the entire transaction amount can be funded (no partial recognition) for both revenue and invoicing.
• Without enabling this option, revenue generation supports partial billing for transactions.

 New Parameters for MGT: Invoice Review

• Project Status
• Project Closed After Date
• Project Range

New Parameters for MGT: Unbilled Receivables Aging

• Project Status
• Project Closed After Date
• Project Range

 

Oracle Project Management 

New Audit Process for Project Performance Reporting Setup

• AUD: Project Performance Reporting Setup

New Parameters for Refresh Project Performance Data Process

• Actual or All Amounts (Plan and Actual)
• Workplan Version
• Financial Plan Version

 

Workplan Enhancements

Ability to Delete Published Workplan Versions (except the latest published version, baseline version, and workplan versions included in a program hierarchy)

 Usability Enhancements

• Update Work Breakdown Structure page is now obsolete.
• View, maintain, and update a workplan structure from the Update Tasks page.
• Where no latest published workplan version exists, the current working version displays on the Update Tasks page when navigating to the Workplan Tasks.
• Indent or outdent multiple workplan tasks in a single step.
• Confirmation, information, and warning messages appear on HTML pages during Apply Latest Progress as well as the Submit Progress processes. Messages include status information during processing and the availability of the latest progress information.

 New Public API for Creating, Maintaining, and Deleting Programs

 

New set of public API procedures:

• Designate a project as a program and indicate whether projects linked to the program can belong to multiple programs.
• Create links from a program to one or more projects
• Update links from a program to one or more projects
• Delete links from a program to one or more projects

Budgeting And Forecasting Enhancements

 Enhanced Automatic Calculation and Derivation Logic

• For plan lines that do not have a specified a quantity, the amount is no longer copied to the quantity field with the rate value set to 1.
• Rate now has a lower precedence than quantity and amount in automatic calculations.  The rate will be re-derived when the quantity, rate and amount are entered at the same time for a plan line.
• When the burden multiplier is overridden by updates to the raw cost or burden cost, subsequent calculations of the burden cost will use the override burden multiplier.  The same is true when the markup percent is updated by changes to plan line components:  the override markup percentage will be used in revenue calculations.

Enhanced Handling of Override Rates on Budget / Forecast Lines

• Override rates for a planning transaction on Edit Budget and Edit Forecast pages.

o   Raw Cost Rate

o   Budened Cost Rate

o   Bill Rate

• Override rates are applied to all existing and new periodic lines for the planning transaction.
• Average rates fields on these pages are now disabled for entry and are used for display only.

 Simplified Addition of Planning Elements and Resources

• New but unbudgeted tasks and resources can be added to a budget or forecast version.
• Add either all new tasks and planning resources or new tasks only to the current plan version.

Self Service Expenditure Inquiry

• Ability to drill into expenditure details from the Financials tab.

 Reporting Pack for Generation and Distribution of XML Publisher Reports

• A reporting pack is a set of report templates and recipients by project role.
• The Generate Reporting Pack concurrent program emails the reports generated from the report templates based on pre-defined intervals.
• The report template establishes each report’s layout and content.
• New reports templates are configured using XML Publisher tools.
• New or modified reports can be added to an existing reporting pack or be used to create an entirely new report set.
• Predefined data definition files that contain XML tags for performance measures and project data are provided.

Predefined Reports:

• Project Change Document Report
• Project Committed Cost Report
• Project Cost Detail Report
• Project Cost Labor Report
• Project Cost Summary Report
• Project Earned Value Report
• Project Financial Summary Report
• Project Forecast Summary Report
• Project Revenue At Risk Report

Budget Integration with Federal Budget Execution and/or 3rd Party Budget

• The budget integration workflow supports integration with the Federal Budget Execution module..
• The workflow can be customized to interface budget lines to external budgeting applications.

Microsoft Project 2007 Certification

• Integration with Microsoft Project 2007 is supported.

Project Performance Reporting: Additional Measures

YTD, QTD and At Completion calculated measures are available on the following pages:

• Performance Overview Period-to-Date
• Summary/Analysis
• Task Summary/Analysis Resource Summary/Analysis

Project Performance Reporting: Inter-Project Revenue / Billing Amounts

Inter project revenue / billing amounts are available on the following pages:

• Project List View Workplan Cost
• Exception Reporting Performance Overview
• Task Summary/Analysis Resource Summary/Analysis
• Period-to-Date Summary/Analysis

 

Supplier Cost Dashboard

Subcontractor Payment Controls

Support for Pay when Paid Scenarios

• A new “Pay when Paid” payment term for subcontracts automatically places holds on all subcontractor invoices under that subcontract until the corresponding customer payment is received.
• Subcontract Payment Controls workbench allows project manager to manage the holds, with visibility into both the customer invoices and the related subcontractor invoices.
• Workflow notifications about the receipt of the customer payment allow the project manager to automatically or manually release the subcontract invoice.
• Associations between the customer invoices and the subcontractor invoices may be automatically maintained based on the billing of project expenditures for cost-plus contracts, or may be manually maintained for fixed price contracts.

Payment Controls for Subcontract Deliverables

• Support for the tracking and monitoring of subcontract deliverables that place automatic holds on subcontractor invoices in the case of noncompliance.
• Oracle Procurement Contracts allow a subcontract administrator to specify payment impact controls that will take effect when a subcontract deliverable is not met.
• From the Subcontractor Payment Controls workbench, the project manager can view a checklist of the all the current subcontract deliverables, to assist in evaluating the subcontractor status prior to releasing monthly progress payments.

Oracle Project Resource Management

Resource Search Enhancements

• Resource Search by Email Address
• Resource Search by Person Type
• Streamlined Navigation on Staffing Home

 Cross Validation of Project and Assignment Dates

• Requirement start dates are equal to or greater than the project start date and less than the project end date and that finish dates are equal to or less than the project end date but greater than the project start date.
• Assignments cannot be added beyond the project end date.
• A project team role end date cannot be beyond the project end date. If the roles are created before the project end dates are entered, users will receive an error if they later try to enter an end date that is earlier than the end date for existing roles.
• When project transaction dates are moved corresponding assignment dates are validated against the new project dates. If the new project transaction dates fall outside the dates for existing assignments, users are given an option to shift the assignment dates or cancel the date adjustment.

 Defaulting of Work Patterns’ From and To Dates

• Work pattern from and to dates will default from the requirement start and end dates.

Improved Exception Handling of Maintain Project Resources Process

• PRC: Maintain Project Resources delivers improved exception handling and notification when it encounters errors while processing employee records.

New Public APIs for Resource Management

The new PJR APIs fall into the following four categories:

• Requirement Public APIs
• Assignment Public APIs
• Candidate Public APIs
• Competence Public APIs

Organization Authority: Obsolete Forecast Authority

• Removes the forecast authority functionality from the organization authority form
• Removes existing security data relating to forecast authority.
• Replaces the PJR forecast functionality with the new HTML based forecasting functionality. The new forecasting functionality has its own security mechanism and does not honor the old forecast authority model.
• Improves the performance of security calls to organization authority because the existing security data is being removed.

Oracle Grants Accounting

Award Budgeting Enhancements

 Budget period validations

• Budget periods will not be validated across award budgets when those awards fund a single project.
• Flexibility to establish award budgets based on the actual duration of the award, while not being confined based on the existing budgets already established for the project.

 Automatic summarization of project budgets

• With the new budget period validations, automatically summarize to a project budget viewable in Project Status Inquiry.
• Two profile options have been added to identify the budget entry methods that will be used to summarize the project budgets.

 Budget Line Sorting Option

• Sort budget lines by Resource name, or by effective dates for budgets with date range periods.  Provides the flexibility to view the budget lines by period or by budgeted resource.

 Award Status Inquiry Enhancements

 View by budget period

• Allows the Find Award Status window to be limited to a single period, range of periods, or inception to date for a particular award.
• Reflects the budget periods entered on the award budget.

 GL and PA Date Parameters on Find Expenditure Items window

• GL and PA date parameters have been added to the Find Expenditure Items window.

 GL Date Parameters on Find Commitments window

• GL Date parameters have been added to the Find Commitments window.

Note: These notes were compiled from version 3.7 of the Oracle E-Business Suite Release Content Document for Projects

One of the biggest challenges that Project Managers (PMs) face in managing a project is weeding out mischarges to their projects. This issue is particularly aggravated in the following industries:

1. Construction industry:  Due to very thin margins on project work, any mischarges if not controlled and quickly reversed can wipe out the margins for the project
2. Any Cost Reimbursable type of contract particularly with the Government:  because these charges don’t get caught and then when they show up on invoices, the client starts disputing the invoices based on these mischarges, causing delays in payments and cash flow issues for the project.

The advent of Project Partners User Interface Applications ( a new product that allows you to provide Microsoft(R) Excel based user interfaces for 1 or more related project functions), has provided the ability to provide this critical function for project managers via an easy to use Excel interface for users of Oracle E-Business Suite Projects applications. The following section provides an overview of this solution.

An Excel worksheet will be setup that will allow Project Managers to pick their projects and specify expenditure types and the period for which they would like to review detailed charges.

All charges of the type specified (or all types) and in the current period will then be displayed to the PM with appropriate information for each cost transaction charged. The PM then has the ability to specify “Approved” or “Questionable” for each of the charges. Mass functions for both of these states will be provided to make life easier for the PM.

The screen will also filter out any transactions that had been previously approved by the PM.

This new Status field will be stored as a DFF against the Expenditure Items in Oracle Projects. A perdiodic (nightly) alert will be sent to the HelpDesk/IT/Project Accountant group if “questionable” transactions are found on any project. This group will review the transactions in Oracle’s standard Expenditure Inquiry screen and take appropriate action to research and either clear or transfer out the questionable charges. If the Transactions are cleared as being correctly charged, they are updated in the status field with a “Cleared” status and the PM can subsequently review and approve them.

An additional benefit of this approach, is that when invoices are generated and presented for review to the PMs, they can have a quick report (or another Project Partners User Interface Applications worksheet) wherein they can pull up any “Questionable” charges on the invoice and ensure that they are eliminated or cleared before the invoice goes out to the client.

This is a an example of how Project Partners User Interface Applications, combined with the expertise from Project Partners resources, can help you make life simpler for your Project Managers.

That’s it for now and remember:

There is no better way to manage a business than to Manage by Project.

PS: I welcome all comments / trackbacks / pingbacks / queries to my nascent venture here. I will try and respond to your comments, etc in future entries.

Large project based organizations working in a multi-national, multi-currency environment struggle with how best to deal with currency issues when managing projects and reporting project and organization financial performance.

When dealing with currencies in a project environment, the following types of currencies come into play:

1. Functional Currency: The currency in which the financial books are maintained
2. Contract Currency: The currency in which the contract for the project is written
3. Project Currency: The Currency in which the project is managed. This may be different from the functional currency and very often may even be the contract currency.
4. Cost Currency: The currencies in which cost is incurred.
5. Revenue Currency: The currency in which revenue is accrued, this very often is the functional currency in which the project is setup.
6. Invoice Currency: The currency in which the project is to be invoiced.
7. Reporting Currency: This is the one currency in which all financial information across all projects is consolidated for management reporting.

Project based organizations run the gamut on the maturity scale in dealing with currencies. Some organizations are taking the first steps in expanding beyond current national boundaries and the issues involved keep them within their current currency boundary and they tend to execute solely in their primary currency only. On the other end of the scale are experienced multi-nationals that execute projects requiring serious hedging of currencies in order to maintain their margins.

Today we will address organizations from the lower end of the scale to those somewhere in the middle. In order to execute and manage effectively, the following currency setups are suggested for projects:

1. Project Currency = Functional Currency: This removes 1 level of complexity from the project manager’s plate and allows them to manage the project without the additional burden of currency management.
2. The Contract and Invoice Currencies should be as specified by the client. This is something that is typically negotiable with the client to determine who incurs the currency risk, the project organization or the project client.
3. The Budget Currency should be the project/functional currency and all budget v/s actual variances should also be managed in the project currency. This makes the budgeting process easier.
4. Costs may be accrued in any currency and revenue should be incurred in the functional currency to keep things nice and simple.

In light of this setup, let’s tackle reporting at two levels: single project reporting and organizational reporting.

Single Project Reporting
Reporting for a project is primarily for project management purposes and hence all financial reporting for the project manager should be provided in the project/functional currency. As budgets and forecasts are also defined in the project/functional currency, it makes all variance reporting easy.

Organization Reporting
Reporting for project organizations is typically accomplished in the following currencies:

1. Functional Currency: This works well for organizations (and rollups) that are within a currency boundary.

2. Global Reporting Currency: This is a currency in which financial information is consolidated across currency boundaries for management reporting. This currency is typically set to the currency in which the organization maintains it’s primary or management offices.

Setup and Maintenance of Global Reporting Currency
1. As mentioned above, the functional currency of the organizations main office location should be setup as the global reporting currency for ease of management reporting.

2. Exchange rates for converting projects from other currencies to the Global Reporting currency should ideally be setup with

a. Conversion rates to the global reporting conversion should be setup as fixed rates for any given year. This allows management and project managers to measure the performance of the project without including variances due to currency fluctuations.

b. Conversion rates will also be needed for future months/years in order to convert budget and forecast amounts for projects. These future amounts should be refreshed yearly based on the latest rates at the end of a given fiscal year. This may require budget/forecast amounts to be reconverted to use the new rates.

Any variations from the management reporting numbers so derived will differ from the financial numbers from the official books due to exchange rate variances.

Following this simplified approach allows any project organization to expand into international arena while protecting their project managers and leaving the currency issues to experts in the finance organization.

That’s it for now and remember:

There is no better way to manage a business than to Manage by Project.

PS: I welcome all comments / trackbacks / pingbacks / queries to my nascent venture here. I will try and respond to your comments, etc in future entries.

This is the first entry in what I hope will be a long running log of business cases, issues, solutions and anecdotes that I encounter in my day/s as someone who runs a project based business, implements ERP solutions for Project based businesses and advises users in project based environments. Here is a partial list of areas that I will cover in my entries:

1. Advantages and Issues in managing by Project
2. Project Management Processes
3. Project Management Discipline and determining where you stand.
4. What to look for in an automation solution for your project needs.
5. How Oracle Projects can help
6. Implementing Oracle Projects
7. Issues/Solutions in implementing/Running Oracle Projects
8. New Functionality in Oracle Projects FP.M and how it can help you
9. What’s new in Release 12 for Oracle Projects
10. Thoughts on Oracle Fusion Applications
11. Good practices in implementation services
12. Project Partner Products and Services that will make your life easier

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