Oracle Projects Integration with Other Applications

Currently it is marketed as Oracle Projects suite, which includes following products:

• Project Costing
• Project Billing
• Project Resource Management
• Project Management
• Project Contracts

Having listed all of them, I still believe that the original application name Project Accounting best describes what Projects is all about - it collects or calculates your project costs and revenues, translates them to your chart of accounts, and automatically posts journal entries to your General Ledger. Project Costing and Project Billing make up a true core of the suite.

Project Resource Management, Project Management, and Project Contracts are not as much applications (even though they are being sold under separate licenses), as they are “layers” of additional functions you can turn on and off. These three products cannot be installed or used as stand alone applications without Project Costing and/or Project Billing implemented first. There are also several auxiliary applications including Time and Labor, Project Collaboration, Daily Business Intelligence for Projects, and Project Portfolio Analysis, which make up the whole suite.

Oracle Projects gained several major enhancements in release 11i, including better costing, burdening, cost allocations, billing, as well as usability improvements.

Oracle General Ledger Integration

Oracle Projects fully integrates with Oracle General Ledger so you can update your GL balances with Oracle Projects activity. When you transfer cost and revenue information to Oracle General Ledger, you use Oracle Projects to collect all project cost and revenue detail transactions, summarize them, and transfer them to Oracle General Ledger.

Oracle Human Resources Integration

Oracle Projects shares organization, job, and employee information with Oracle Human Resources. If your business does not use Oracle Human Resources, you can easily enter this data in Oracle Projects. Oracle Human Resources integration includes:

• Business Group definition
• Organizations and Organization Hierarchies definitions
• Job Title definitions
• Entry of Employees and Employee Assignments, including date-effective assignments over time and specification of supervisors and billing titles

Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Payables Integration

Oracle Projects fully integrates with Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Payables, and allows you to enter project-related requisitions, purchase orders, and supplier invoices using those applications. When you enter project-related information in Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Payables, the system carries the project information from the requisition to the purchase order in Oracle Purchasing, to the supplier invoice in Oracle Payables, and to the project expenditure in Oracle Projects. You can report committed costs of requisitions and purchase orders that are outstanding against your projects in Oracle Projects.

Oracle Internet Expenses Integration

Oracle Projects fully integrates with Oracle Internet Expenses and Oracle Payables so that you can easily create project expense reports in iExpenses, and pay them in Oracle Payables. You can also enter expense reports in Oracle Projects and use Oracle Payables to create invoices from the expense reports, maintain and track payments of them, and transfer the accounting transactions to Oracle General Ledger.

Oracle Receivables Integration

Oracle Projects fully integrates with Oracle Receivables to process your invoices and track customer payments. Oracle Projects generates draft invoices and uses Oracle Receivables to collect payments for the project invoices and transfer the accounting transactions to Oracle General Ledger. When you transfer invoices to Oracle Receivables, Oracle Projects also maintains project balances of unbilled receivables and unearned revenue and creates accounting transactions for these amounts.

Oracle Assets Integration

Oracle Projects allows you to manage capital projects. In a capital project, you collect construction-in-process (CIP) and expensed costs for each asset you are building. You use Oracle Projects to collect all asset cost detail transactions, summarize them, and transfer them to Oracle Assets to become depreciable fixed assets. Oracle Assets will create and transfer journal entries to Oracle General Ledger to relieve the CIP account and record the asset cost.

External Systems Integration

You can upload transactions from external cost collection systems into Oracle Projects using the Transaction Import interface and Oracle WebADI upload tool. You can load quantities or quantities and raw costs for the transactions. Oracle Projects calculates burdened cost, revenue, and invoice amounts, and performs all accounting functions for these imported transactions.