This blog is intended to be consumed along with the adjoining video as a part of a broader blog/video series in which we are looking to explore some of the out-of-box functionality that comes with Oracle Planning Cloud’s financials pre-built module.
Exploring the out-of-box dashboarding, driver and trend-based functionality
As a quick reminder, the enablement features that are selected during the application creation will be reflected with their own icons underneath the broader “Financials” icon on the Planning Cloud home page (i.e. in this application we have both revenue and expense planning enabled).
Upon clicking the Revenue icon, we are directed to the broader revenue planning window, which is broken into three major sections defined on the left side of the page.
1. Revenue Overview Tab
This interactive dashboard page comes out-of-the-box with numerous graphical representations of key metrics that are defined by pre-built forms. Any or all of the graphs can be individually adjusted as necessary by opening the corresponding form and making layout adjustments to appropriate dimension members. Not only can the content of what’s being displayed be altered, how the data is displayed is configurable too by selecting the settings button on the desired graph and updating chart type, among other configurable options.
2. Driver and Trend-Based Tab
There are multiple pages listed horizontally across the driver and trend-based tab, the first of which is “Driver Based Revenue Planning”. As is evident above, a table of all revenue and cost of sales drivers is displayed with which we can apply driver-specific trend assumptions, percentage increases/decreases and also manual adjustments. Oracle provides the following out-of-box trends that can be utilized with these drivers.
Each of these drivers interact with one another via the use of pre-defined member formulas to populate both the revenue and cost of sales account members. The formulas, along with defined trend assumptions, percentage changes and any manual adjustments are run and then pushed to the accounts when “Save” is selected on the “Driver Based Revenue Planning” page. We can see the resulting members update when moving to the “Driver Based Revenue” tab, which displays the revenue account members.
We can look at how these revenue and cost of sales accounts are derived via member formula by navigating to the financials configure screen and clicking on revenue accounts, followed by the member formula button to bring up the pre-defined member formula used to populate the selected account member (See below).
The ‘Revenue Trends’ tab compiles driver actuals figures over time in conjunction with projected driver numbers for the forecasted future. This allows for both a table-based and graphical driver trend analysis.
The remaining tabs allow for multiple scenario comparisons and analysis for either historical actuals, future projections, or both. These tables are completely configurable to display data in a way that is useful and can be best consumed for the end user.
3. Direct Entry Tab
The final tab within the broader Revenue Planning page is the direct entry tab. This tab opens a table that allows the end-user to input data in largely the same way that an ad-hoc analysis would allow within Excel’s SmartView. Again, this table is configurable and can be modified to remove/include members as appropriate.
In the next blog and video, we will look to create some custom drivers and related accounts, and look to expand upon what has been covered thus far.
