Oracle is padding its E-Business Suite 11i.9 financial software with enhancements to the OracleO
Treasury, including real-time cash flow forecasting and more control
over Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance measures.
The software advances, which officials said would come out in the first
part of 2004, comes from suggestions made by its customer advisory
group. The company said its customers wanted more control and
visibility of the financial operations within the corporation.
“The security and control aspect has always been critical, but with the
recent emphasis on corporate governance, the (corporate) treasury
department is really playing an important role in compliance with the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act,” said Sally Screven, Oracle’s senior director of
application development.
The treasury department within a corporation looks at more than just the
debits and credits coming in from its various departments, whether that
department is on another floor or another continent. And when those
other departments are getting into derivatives and money market
transactions using the euro, yen or dinar, it’s a good idea to have an
application that can collect and correctly interpret that information
for U.S. uses.
To accomplish that, OracleO Treasury developers added increased support
for FAS 133 and IAS 39, the accounting standard for reporting
derivatives as an asset or liability on the balance sheet. The software
now provides reports of where the derivatives are being used, as well as
tracks the progress of hedge accounts through its lifecycle.
As a time-saving measure, OracleO Treasury now includes real-time cash
flow information inside the corporation, rather than putting together
batch reports on a daily basis. It also comes with forecasting function to help users make investment or borrowing decisions.
OracleO Treasury also beefed up its automation process, which processes
anything from passing journal entries to the general ledger, to
reporting transactions using CDs to issue or purchase debt.
“Our 65 subsidiaries were spending anywhere between 10 to 30 percent of
their time on it, we brought all those responsibilities back to the
headquarters level with no additional staff,” said Geri Westphal, Oracle
vice president of finance. “That’s what everybody is talking about, the
enhanced automation and increased productivity, so that we can move on
to the value-added work instead of chasing a foreign exchange contract
or an investment view.”