Unify financial systems with Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub

Embarking on a cloud transformation journey can be a daunting prospect, especially for organizations with a multitude of systems feeding their financials. Enter the Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub. This cloud application unifies data from different financial systems and consistently applies a centralized accounting policy. In so doing, the Accounting Hub makes financial reconciliations much more efficient and can dramatically reduce the number of manual journal entries.

Especially important for organizations just beginning their move to the cloud, Accounting Hub connects an organization’s general ledger to a variety of external systems, Oracle and non-Oracle alike. This feature makes it easier to move other back-office systems to the Oracle cloud in manageable, bite-size chunks without losing accounting data.

With this design, the Accounting Hub delivers five advantages:

More efficiency

Accounting done right the first time means finance organizations no longer have to continually scrub their data entries during the monthly and annual closing processes.

When accounting data is standardized and centralized—with a singular set of accounting rules that mirrors your accounting policies—manual entries and reclassifications are typically reduced by 80 to 90 percent.

But this efficiency means more than gaining accounting accuracy. By including additional data elements, Accounting Hub provides insight into the accounting entries and also establishes the foundation for improving and streamlining reconciliation processes.

More agility

Accounting Hub improves the agility of finance organizations with a simple process for integrating source systems into one enterprisewide accounting platform.

The highly configurable rules engine transforms transaction information from external systems to create accurate, detailed accounting entries that meet any accounting convention, including statutory accounting but also supporting corporate, regulatory, and management reporting needs.

A centrally managed set of accounting rules helps organizations adapt quickly to new and evolving accounting standards. In addition, complete and accurate journal entries can be created by simplifying and automating lengthy manual reconciliation.

More insights and visibility

Accounting Hub improves insight with a central, globally accessible source of detailed business information. Management accountants and business analysts can build robust, data-driven reports not bound by the dimensions of the chart of accounts and enriched with other data elements that provide broader insight into the business. For example, balances based on geography, channel, investment type, or product category can be maintained without including these key business dimensions in the chart of accounts.

In turn, this rich supporting information can provide deeper insight by feeding into intelligent machine learning platforms for front-office decision making. Predicting revenue and recommending discount or promotion options can be based on a continuous accounting view driven by business cycles and not limited by traditional financial reporting processes.

Accounting process reports provide visibility into the journal entries resulting from the accounting process and any exceptions that require action.

More control

A central set of accounting rules helps ensure that accounting policies are consistently applied with touchless processing. Centralization also helps avoid errors caused by manual models and disparate accounting systems.

Security rules control the setup, accounting, and posting of journal entries. Since all accounting rules can be centralized and standardized, Accounting Hub provides increased control with options that automatically transform, account for, and post transactions to the general ledger.

More auditable

Accounting Hub’s centralized architecture enforces compliance and auditability. Flexible configurations and a single source of accounting truth for all external systems enable finance teams to comply with GAAP and industry accounting requirements.

Audit tracking capabilities allow an organization to understand when an accounting rule was changed and by whom and also to document what was changed.

Accelerating your digital journey

As an award-winning Oracle partner for over 30 years, KPMG has delivered several of Oracle’s largest and most complex Accounting Hub implementations. In addition to implementing Accounting Hub across a wide range of industry sectors since the cloud solution was introduced in 2018, we have worked in challenging organizational environments in terms of accounting complexity as well as data and volume requirements.

As a result of this diversity, we have developed a full spectrum of tools, technologies, and techniques for Accounting Hub engagements. One innovation is the KPMG Integrated Data Analytic Layer (IDAL), our streamlined approach to integrating client systems with Oracle Accounting Hub. IDAL handles any required pre-processing and data transformation from Day One.

Thanks to our extensive experience, we have developed three principal scenarios and a variety of use cases within each scenario to better align your needs and show how the Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub can be leveraged for your organization.

• Strategic – The strategic scenario applies to organizations that require a roadmap for migrating to the cloud. It includes a risk mitigation strategy for starting small and growing cloud capabilities over time. This is especially useful for organizations with many different business units and systems, where cloud transformation would be a major initiative.
• Consolidation – The consolidation scenario applies to organizations comprised of multiple lines of business or business units operating their own ERP systems and needing to consolidate data into a single corporate view. The Accounting Hub standardizes accounting and maps data from across the enterprise while providing greater insights, reconciliation, and agility.
• Compliance – The compliance scenario applies to organizations with disparate accounting systems or manual, spreadsheet-based models. The challenge is to determine which entries must be made within the general ledger. The Accounting Hub helps organizations centralize and standardize accounting rules, moving the accounting function into one centrally controlled, auditable, and reconcilable rules repository.

We have conversations every day with businesses like yours that want to gain control over their financials by unifying data from multiple accounting systems and simplifying processes. Connect with one of our team to learn more.