Oracle Project Accounting Details

What is Project Costing ?

Oracle Project Costing helps you improve the bottom line of your projects by integrating and controlling all project costs. You can effectively manager project budgets, streamline processing, automate resource sharing administration and capitalize assets more efficiently.

Project Costing module helps in calculating the cost and accounting of a project. It also interacts with other modules such as Payables, Purchasing to interface costs related to a project.

What is Project Billing? 

Oracle Project Billing helps improve cash flow and project profitability by streamlining and managing your billing process. You can easily review and manage invoices, revenue, and funding for all your projects.

Project Billing module helps in calculating the revenue and billing of a project. It helps in generating invoice for a customer project based on the customer agreement on that project, typically based on agreed upon bill rates, payment terms etc. Invoice is generated to the customer based on the number of hours worked on the project. Project Billing also helps to perform milestone billing based on the percent of work done. Revenue and Invoice accounting is also done using project billing.

What is Project Foundation?  

Oracle Project Foundation provides the common foundation (functionality) shared across the products in the Oracle Enterprise Project Management Solution. The purpose of Oracle Project Foundation is to package all the common elements of Oracle Projects into a single place.

Oracle Project Foundation accompanies all of the Oracle Projects applications providing you with a rich set of features, including:

•         Period Definition

•         Calendar Definition

•         Organization Definition

•         Resource Definition and Reporting

•         Project and Organization Security

•         Project and Task Definition

•         Organization Forecasting

•         Utilization

•         Archive and Purge

Oracle Project Foundation also facilitates the integration of Oracle Projects suite with other Oracle Applications including Oracle HRMS, Oracle Financials, Oracle CRM, and Oracle Supply Chain applications.

Basically, Project Foundation provides the basic infrastructure and components for the Costing and Billing to work. For Costing and Billing to work we need basic infrastructure /components like Projects, Tasks, WBS(Work Break Down Structure) etc, Cost Rate Schedules, Bill Rate Schedules. These structures are created using Project Foundation APIs and hence the name ‘Foundation’.

What is Oracle Project Planning & Control (a.k.a. Oracle Project Management pre-12.2.5)?  

Oracle Project Planning and Control is an integrated part of Oracle Projects, a comprehensive set of solutions that can help you predictably and successfully deliver global projects by integrating, managing and providing insight into enterprise project information.

Project Management module helps project managers to manage the project effectively by providing them the visibility of a project ( how the project performs, what is the status of the project, any issues in the project etc). The functions involve Project Tracking, Performance Tracking and other standard project management functions. 

In release 12.2.5, the product name, Oracle Project Management is changed to Oracle Project Planning and Control which better reflects the ability to provide project managers the visibility and control they need to deliver their projects successfully, improve profitability, and operate more efficiently. The application consolidates project information into one repository: work plans, progress, issues, changes, documents, costing information, budgets, actuals and forecasts, performance, and status reports. The solution empowers project managers to plan the work, assign resources, forecast to completion, and communicate to stakeholders, while streamlining the collaborative execution of project work.

What is Project Resource Management? 

Oracle Project Resource Management enables companies to manage human resource deployment and capacity for project work. Built using Oracle’s proven self-service model, Oracle Project Resource Management empowers key project stakeholders, such as project managers, resource managers, and staffing managers, to make better use of their single most critical asset: their people.

Project Resource Management module helps project managers to effectively manage the schedule of the project using the available resources. It helps in scheduling of the resources across various tasks of the project based on the resource availability. It also provides capabilities to staff various resources in an organization to a project by raising resource requirements. Project managers also can raise resource requirements for a particular open position in a project and can also mention the resource competencies required for that position.

With this application, you can manage project resource needs; profitability and organization utilization by locating and deploying qualified people to your projects across your enterprise. As a result, you can improve customer and employee satisfaction, maximize resource utilization and profitability, and increase your competitive advantage.

What is Project Contracts? 

Oracle Project Contracts addresses budgetary constraints, contract margins, flow down of contract information to subcontractors, and prioritization of deliverables. The Contract Organizer window provides a single entry point to access and define contract documents. Through the Contract Organizer window, you can access different functional regions including authoring, deliverable tracking, funding, hold management, contract revisions, and other contract related activities.

Oracle Project Contracts supports the contract management needs of project driven organizations, including commercial and government contractors, agencies, and subcontractors. These organizations operate in a project centric environment characterized by:

• Changing contract specifications.

• Volatile demand and long lead-times.

• High percentage of procure-to-contract components and services.

• Contractual requirements for billing.

• Incremental funding in multiple currencies.

• Compliance of government regulations.

What is Oracle Mobile Project Manager for Oracle E-Business Suite?

With Oracle Mobile Project Manager for Oracle E-Business Suite, project managers and staff can monitor project status and take action on the go.

•         View and search my projects list

•         Monitor overall project status in dashboard view

•         Contact team members and customer contacts

•         View open payments summary with drilldown to supplier invoices

•         View open receivables summary with drilldown to customer invoices

•         View open issues and change orders

•         Monitor alerts for budget exceptions and past due transactions

•         Collaborate in transaction context using device features like email, phone, and text

Oracle Mobile Project Manager for Oracle E-Business Suite is compatible with Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1.3 and 12.2.3 and above. To use this app, you must be a user of Oracle Project Costing, with mobile services configured on the server side by your administrator. Users of Oracle Project Billing and Oracle Project Planning and Control get additional capability for customer billing, issues, and change orders.

What is Oracle Project Procurement?

Oracle Project Procurement enables project managers and project buyers to collaborate and align their activities when planning, tracking and managing the acquisition of products, materials and services needed to complete a project. Built using the power of Endeca for EBS, the application integrates project management information from Oracle Project Planning and Control, project cost information from Oracle Project Costing and procurement documents, supplier and buyer information from Oracle Sourcing and Procurement. This combined information provides key insights, metrics and access to common actions necessary to support decisions and ensure strategic alignment of procurement activities with the project’s objectives.

Use Project Procurement’s project procurement plan to plan and track acquisitions needed to complete your projects. Use specialized analysis tools to explore your plans and your procurement history with suppliers and items and ensure selection of the best options. With command centers for both project management and project buyer users built on the same, integrated information, you can make decisions using up-to-date and common measures that enhance project execution and minimize project wastage.

Oracle Project Accounting FAQs:

1)       How Project accounting interacts with Accounts Payables module?

o    Project related Supplier invoices are created in Accounts Payables module. This is a cost against the project and hence has to be transferred from payables to oracle projects. To interface the supplier costs, PRC: Interface Supplier Costs process can be run. This process fetches all the approved and yet to be interfaced invoices to the projects module.

o    These invoices are transferred to Projects module as expenditure items. Each eligible invoice distribution in an invoice is transferred as an expenditure item to projects module. The cost of the item is same as the invoice distribution amount.

2)       How Project accounting interacts with Purchasing module?

·         Project related Purchase Orders are created in Oracle Purchasing module. This is a cost against the project and hence has to be transferred to oracle projects.

·         There are 2 ways to do this.

1)      Create a Supplier invoice against the PO. Then interface the supplier invoice to projects module.

2)      In-case when we cannot wait for an invoice to be created, we will have to transfer the PO cost directly to projects. This can be done by creating a Purchase receipt against that PO. Then interface the receipts directly to projects module.

·         To interface the Purchase Receipts, PRC: Interface Supplier Costs process can be run. This process fetches all the receipts matched against the project related PO.

·         Receipt distributions are interfaced to projects module as expenditure items.

3)       Explain the cost distribution process in project costing

o    Project costing module calculates costs for expenditure items which are not yet costed. For example the timesheets transferred from OTL module are interfaced as un-costed expenditure items. The costs for those timesheets are yet to be calculated.

o    Cost can be derived by the use of cost rates setup against the project. Cost rates can be setup against a specific organization, Job or an employee. For example if 8 hours is worked on a project in a day and the cost rate for the timesheet’s employee is 100 usd / hour. Then the cost of that employee on that day is 8 x 100 = 800 USD.

o    There can be additional costs associated with a project. For example, to perform the 8 hours of work on that day, an employee might have used additional resources such as internet, telephone, electricity etc. These costs are called as indirect costs or burdened costs.