Oracle Corp. has unveiled a new version of its Financials package designed to boost data visibility so companies can monitor financial risk in real time.
The latest version of Oracle Financials offers role-based financial intelligence while integrating budgeting and planning information with actual results. Other new features in Version 11.5.8 include a profit and loss portal and an expense management portal, both designed to allow managers to drill down from financial balances to supporting detailed transactions, according to company officials.
Current economic conditions and new corporate accountability legislation have increased the demands on corporate finance departments to provide real-time disclosure of financial information and actively manage finance risk, said Steven Miranda, vice president of financial applications development at Oracle, in Redwood Shores, Calif.
“Alongside these new legislated requirements is cost cutting in a number of areas,” Miranda said. “This is a new version of ‘do more with less.'”
The new portals allow executives to monitor the state of the business in real time to quickly find the root cause of deviations from targets and take immediate action to correct problems. They are built on a single data model to avoid the time lapse and cost of passing information back and forth between disparate systems, he added.
“The portal is not based on some type of extraction from your transactional system,” Miranda said. “It is built directly on top of your transaction system. The passing of data back and forth gives you challenges in timeliness. … It also is a cost issue. It gives you an integration issue once you move the data. … If you want to drill into any details not in that source you somehow need to map your way back to that system.”
Oracle’s new Risk Management solution provides a set of pricing and analysis tools designed to enable a company to manage risk. The applications help with tasks such as calculating prices and analyzing a portfolio of treasury deals for potential market risks.
“It gives you a global view of your cash flow,” Miranda said. “It allows you to understand and better comply with your treasury policy. You can develop what-if scenarios to see how your investment portfolio … withstands interest rate or currency rate changes.”
The new version of Financials is now available.