In the world today there seems to be a software or app for everything. Whether that is to find the best-rated restaurant in your city or to automatically scan an invoice to submit for payment, the diverse array of technology available is endless. Companies are leveraging new software to streamline business processes and to maintain a competitive edge that they must find a solution to ensure interoperability. This is where the APIs can be leveraged.
What are APIs?
APIs, or application programming interfaces, are essential instruments in bringing technologies together. APIs act as the transmission intermediary to define interactions through a series of calls and requests between two software applications for the exchange of data.
The use of APIs multiplies each day by the growing population of mobile devices and computing platforms on the Internet of Things (web, tablets, apps, smartphones, etc.) An effective API reduces the burden of change and creates new opportunities to extend the functionality of an application to make the data more accessible to the end-users.
Why do APIs matter?
The value of a company’s business can be drastically changed through the implementation of APIs. The data infrastructure of their organization can be unified for the free-flowing of information between the various systems and produce real-time data sharing. Routine business processes can avoid unnecessary risks and delays through leveraging APIs vs older methods of data integration like SFTP or manual transmission. APIs allow for the software to work for us and a company’s resources to work smarter, not harder.
How does Oracle Cloud Cash Management (CM) Use APIs?
Oracle maintains a catalog of diverse REST APIs that includes the various endpoints where third-party data can be integrated into the database. Through the development of their Open API framework, businesses can integrate key transactional data from other applications – Oracle or Non-Oracle — to Oracle Cloud for processing. Oracle Cash Management is one of the many modules that can leverage APIs to capture data from an external source to create and update records. Such uses include:
- Banking, Bank Branches, and Bank Accounts: Treasury teams can maintain their banking structure through a series of REST API requests. These can be developed to create, view, or update specific banking-related information at the bank, branch, or account level.
- Notional Cash Pools: Cash Managers can use REST APIs to facilitate the creation, update, viewing, or deletion of notional and physical cash pool structures with two or more bank accounts. Sweep settlements for cash pool structures can be initiated via APIs.
- External Cash Transactions: The bank reconciliation can benefit from REST APIs by creating and maintaining external cash transactions. A disconnect many organizations run into is they have a subset of transactions that live outside of the ERP but must be included for reconciliation purposes. APIs can be developed to pass that data from the third-party system into the Oracle reconciliation tables to reduce the need for manual creation.
- Flexfield (free form text fields): REST APIs can be developed to create or update an Oracle Flexfield as it would relate to Cash Management. This could be used to capture a list of signors on a bank accounts or pass reference information on a transaction.
The opportunities that can be harnessed through the use of application programming interfaces are endless. For more information on how your organization can achieve real-time data sharing and more streamlined data communication between Oracle Cloud and your various systems, attend our upcoming webinar on Oracle Cloud Cash Management, or connect with the Elire team at [email protected].
