Oracle Financials Cloud Blog Series: Reporting in Fusion Financials Cloud – Part 1

By Adil Khan

Hyperion Smart View

There are many new features and offerings were announced by Oracle as part of Oracle Fusion Cloud but the most important feature, which blew me up, is the reporting capabilities in Oracle Fusion Financials. There are many reporting tools presented considering the business user necessity on day-to-day basis & critical business reporting requirements. This is the outcome of Oracle’s huge experience/survey/requests from the wide ranges of customers throughout the globe & across the industries.

1. Smart View
2. Account Monitor
3. Account Inspector
4. Financial Reporting Studio (FRS)
5. OTBI (Oracle Transactional Business Intelligent)
6. Excel Exports
7. Drill Down to Detailed Balances

In this blog, I am covering the Hyperion Smart View. Kindly refer “Reporting in Financial Cloud – Part 2” for other reporting tools.

Introduction of Smart View –

This is an Excel add-in, which helps to do various multi-dimensional analysis. This reporting tool is designed specifically for Oracle Hyperion EPM (Enterprise Performance Management), Oracle Business Intelligent and Oracle General Ledger. This is compatible with MS Word, MS Excel & MS Power point. The Excel based tool, which enables the Business users to fetch the real-time data from the GL Balance tables. This is the very powerful tool which allows users create their own financial analysis (Trial Balance, Income Statement by multiple views etc.) quickly as per the business requirement.A user can design, view, manipulate, distribute, and share data from these data sources in MS Excel. Smart View provides the ability to create and refresh spreadsheets to access real time account balances.A user can save this analysis and just need to refresh from the Smart View Tab to get the latest activity/balances. The only criteria to have the Fusion application username and Password.

Key Features –

1. Oracle Hyperion Smart View, Fusion Edition gives simple drag and drop dimensions to row & column.

2. Perform ad hoc multidimensional pivot analysis with full spreadsheet functionality.

3. Ability to Drill down from any level to detail balances, journal lines, and sub ledger transactions.

4. Create multiple analysis in one workbook. Users are having the option to refresh all worksheets to get the real-time account balances or latest activities.

5. Business Users can share the analysis offline with other authorized users.

There are two steps required to work with Smart View –

Step 1: Installation of Smart View from EPM Workspace:

a) (Navigation – Homepage – Financial Reporting Centre – Task Link “Select Open Workspace for Financial Reports” – Launch of EPM Page – Select the Smart View from Tool Menu)

In EPM Workspace, select Tools, then Install, and then Smart View This link would direct to the Oracle site for the latest version. Refer the below link:

(requires Oracle Login Credentials http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/epm/downloads/smart-view-1112x-2412371.html).

Download the file and Run as Administrator. Close all the Microsoft applications before you run the smart view. The Smart View Ribbon displayed when you open MS Office next time (as shown below Excel Add-In) *Sometimes you need to do Excel settings to enable Smart View.

Step 2: Connection & Working with data source/Instance:

After successful installation, now you can connect to the Smart View to build/create analysis as below –

a) Open the MS-Excel and look for Smart View at the ribbon. Select the Options

b) We can connect to the Data Source and access Smart View using the Panel. Below are key components of Smart view –

Options – Provide the URL (from EPM link) of Test/Production environment as highlighted below.

Panel – Used to manage the data connection (right side, the shared connection under Essbase) and task list. It would ask you to login before you select the connection/create ad-hoc reports

Essbase – One you successfully connect to the instance; you may see the Essbasesection where you can select the POV (Point of View) for any reports/analysis. For each report, there has to be Row dimension and Column dimension. The key components of Essbase are –

a) POV (Point of View) – Used to select the business data

b) Member Selection – Used to select the report members like a chart of account segment, Period, balance type, Ledger etc.

c) Zoom in / Zoom out – Used for drill down at the next level of the values/data per report design.

d) Drill Down– We drill down to the application (Oracle GL) and the source (Sub ledger – AP, AR etc.) data from the report.

Step 3: Disconnecting from Data Sources

We can disconnect from the connections as follows.

b) Disconnect from the current connection:

i. From the Smart View Panel, select the connection that is currently open in the tree list.

ii. Right-click and select Disconnect. As shown below

c) Disconnect from all connected Shared Connections:

i. From the Smart View Panel, click.

ii. Select Disconnect All.

About the Author

Adil Khan is the Oracle Financials Cloud Certified Consultant with an experience of 9+ years including both EBS and Financial Cloud. He was involved in many full life-cycle implementations, project management, pre-sales and support roles to stabilize the application. He is qualified MBA Finance and Pursuing Certified Management Accountant (CMA) from IMA, USA.

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