Do you need a robust reporting solution with easy ad hoc build abilities but with formal distribution and outputs? Have you tried using Financial Reports but prefer the flexibility of Excel? Oracle continues to innovate with a new solution meeting the ever-changing reporting demands from organizations. The new solution, now called just Reports, gives you the formality of reporting tool and the ease of administration you have become accustomed to with Smart View. Reports brings simplicity and robustness of Management reporting and Narrative reporting into one place.
If you’ve already built Financial Reports, Oracle has added a “Migrate” button to convert your Financial Report over to the new Report solution. Reports supports Planning, Financial Consolidation and Close, Tax Reporting, and Free Form Planning and is available today.
What are Reports
Reports is an EPM cloud-based reporting solution for creating financial and management reports. It is the next generation of Financial Reports and eventually replaces Financial Reports completely. Enhanced features in Reports compared to Financial Reports. Reports deliver enhanced and robust custom reports with emphasis on user-friendly interface. Below are some of the notable features:
- User-friendly, robust report development with more of an ad-hoc build ability all in one screen
- Enhanced charting including stacked and combination charts, polar, radar and scatter charts
- Ad-hoc zooming into any parent when previewing report
- Snapshot and PDF generation for books or distributions
- Selectable alias tables
- HTML report scrolling
- Simplified Report bursting
- Improved design paradigms
Management Reporting vs. Reports
In addition to Reports, Oracle offers a Management Reports solution for more collaborative reporting. The Management Reports is a centralized and multi-source reporting solution while Reports is a single instance reporting solution like Financial Reports.
Management Reports is integrated with Narrative Reporting and it can be integrated with reporting packages and its variables as embedded content with server-side refresh. It also comes with Narrative Reports functionality called Notes for POV-based commentary text. The Reports is not integrated with Narrative Reporting and therefore cannot use report packages or Notes.
Migrating Financial Reports to Reports
Financial Reports migration can be performed through in-place (migration tool) or by importing FR report objects (ZIP files). With in-place solution, migration is directly executed from FR repository whereas importing FR objects is accomplished by filesystem-based import.
When you migrate a Financial Report to Reports, the system will remediate as many objects as possible. However, there might still be some items that do not exist in Reports and you will have to resolve them for the report to display properly. To perform in-place migration from Financial Reporting:
- Step 1 – From an Oracle EPM Cloud service, select the Report card In Planning, from the left pane select the Financial Reports icon.
- Step 2 – To migrate individual reports, from the repository, select the report that you want to migrate and then click on Migrate Financial Report icon. From the Migrate dialog, optionally enter a file name, and then select the destination folder to migrate the report.
If you’ve tested individual reports and they appear to migrate fine there’s another option to migrate all reports, in the top right of the panel. With this one button all of your reports can be migrated with a simple click. You will need to place the reports in appropriate folders so you may need to move reports into new folders when you migrate. This is also a good time to clean up any folders or reports no longer used.
Resolving Errors with data sources in Reporting
The most common validation error in Reporting is when the data source name in Reports is different from the data source name in Financial Reporting.
If you do not have a data source in Reports with the same name as the one in Financial Reporting, you must create a connection to the data source in Reports, and then edit the report to use that data source. You can change the data source for multiple reports at the same time in the Library.
To change the data source for reports:
- From the Library, select the reports that you want to change the data source for.
- Right-click and select Change Data Source.
- Select the data source and click OK.
The new Reports tool offers so many more options for users and developers alike that every Oracle Cloud EPM user should consider using and testing this solution. For more information on Reports be visit the new admin documentation at Reports.
Contact [email protected] to discover how Oracle Reports can enhance your organization’s financial and management reporting. Learn more about Oracle Reports and Cloud EPM Reporting by subscribing to Elire’s Monthly Cloud Newsletter. Even better, follow Elire on LinkedIn and Twitter to receive industry updates directly to your phone.