Enhanced Formatting, AI-Powered Reporting & New ESG Solutions

At a Glance:
  • Enhanced Formatting for Forms: Forms now support Excel-like formatting, including borders, colours, fonts, and numeric formats. Designers can also apply formatting to headers and metadata.
  • Generative AI in Reports: AI-generated narrative summaries now describe exceptions, causality, and comparisons in financial reports, improving analysis.
  • New ESG Reporting Solution: Oracle EPM for Sustainability provides a pre-built, configurable ESG reporting framework, including KPIs, carbon calculators, and compliance with major standards.
  • Cash Forecasting Application: A predictive solution for cash flow forecasting that supports daily, weekly, and monthly projections to optimise liquidity
More formatting for Forms
With design-time format rules, forms will now:
  • Support most of the formatting capabilities that we do today in Excel such as borders, colours, font sizes, fonts, numeric formats, and so on
  • Allow rules to be created for pure formatting purposes in addition to today’s data validation rules
  • Allow format rules to be applied to header and metadata cells in addition to data cells
 
Oracle’s Business Benefit: Defining format rules at design time enables every user to see the formatting you create rules for, and it improves adoption among users who are used to spreadsheet formatting.
GK’s View: Options for formatting Oracle web forms is long overdue. This is a great change allowing the form designer to apply custom formatting, for example change font (10 available), or font formats. We assume the most valuable new formatting option will be the simple bolding of totals which was not previously available on the web.

Generative AI for Management Reporting Narratives

Reports provide the ability to utilize Generative AI (GenAI) for generating narrative summaries in a text box. It is used for the following three use cases:

  • Describing exceptions:  For example, a grid cell that satisfies the variance threshold defined by the report designer as a condition.
  • Describing the causality for exceptions: Examine one of the relevant cell dimensions where the condition was satisfied and describe the top 3 contributors to it.
  • Performing a comparative analysis: If the grid has prior time periods in the columns, describe the cell value in comparison to the prior period.

 

Oracle’s Business Benefit: GenAI can bring more intelligence to reporting and analysis to aide decision-making in finance.

GK’s View: Interesting use case for generative AI, that can automatically add variance analysis text to a report grid.

Updated Solution for ESG

EPM for Sustainability delivers a future-proofed and foundational ESG Reporting and Planning solution that allows you to rapidly deploy a single source of truth relating to your ESG requirements:

  • Let’s you view a single source of truth for ESG reporting, now and in the future
  • Includes pre-built KPIs, metrics, carbon calculators, input, and reports
  • Displays emissions by Scope 1, 2, and 3
  • Includes social, governance, and all other required disclosure metrics
  • Mapped to common Green House Gas (GHG) protocol outputs
  • Supports ESG Reporting frameworks (CSRD, TCFD, ESRS, IFRS, GRI)
  • Supports legal entity, organization, business unit, and line of business reporting.

 

Oracle’s Business Benefit: The Oracle EPM for Sustainability solution is built on best practices and is highly configurable to meet your unique business requirements.

GK’s View: We recommend this template as a configurable solution to capture ESG reporting now and to plan an organisation’s ESG journey for future periods. Available for free for Oracle EPM Enterprise customers.

New Cash Forecasting Application

Predictive Cash Forecasting is designed to help treasurers and cash managers perform short-term tactical or mid-term operational cash forecasting. It allows for daily, weekly, or monthly rolling forecasts that can be generated for operational, financial, and investing cash flow line items.

  • Built using a direct cash flow method and enables decision-making and actions for cash optimization across multiple legal entities within the business.
  • Provides an overview of the organization’s overall cash position at each level of the legal hierarchy.

 

Oracle’s Business Benefit: Predictive Cash Forecasting enables companies to make better use of their cash with data-driven continuous cash forecasting.

GK’s View: We recommend this template as a configurable solution to provide daily or weekly cash forecasting. Available for free for Oracle EPM Enterprise customers.

Summary

The January 2025 Oracle EPM update introduces significant enhancements across multiple areas. Web forms now support advanced formatting similar to Excel, allowing for greater customisation and improved user experience. Generative AI is now integrated into reports, providing automated narrative insights for exceptions, causality, and comparisons. A new ESG reporting solution offers a comprehensive framework for sustainability planning and compliance with global standards. Additionally, the introduction of predictive cash forecasting enables businesses to optimise liquidity management with real-time insights. These updates collectively enhance usability, financial analysis, and strategic planning within Oracle EPM.

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2024 It’s a wrap

Check out GK’ highlights in 2024. It’s been a busy and successful year.