Reports Rolls Forward
I attended an excellent Oracle Customer Connect seminar recently: “Reports Common Tricks, Tips and Best Practices”, hosted by Dave Roberts. Dave has been an acquaintance of mine since the Hyperion days, and he is still one of the best presenters I know. The session was full of new or newer features, some upcoming updates to the product, and some technical tidbits, as well as highlighting questions that are commonly encountered by both customers and partners.
Here I will summarize some of these, pointing out some of my favorites.
Reports vs. Narrative Reporting
Reports is the successor to Financial Reporting (FR) and will supplant it sometime in mid-2025 – this date has been pushed back a bit from what has been reported before based on customer feedback. Note that this is “Reports in Cloud EPM” – on-prem Planning will keep FR for the duration of its existence. The Reports product is embedded in the various EPM Cloud modules and business processes and is not integrated with Narrative Reporting’s reporting packages or its Notes feature. Its infrastructure and artifacts are managed within the EPM platform. Note that new features in Narrative Reporting may have a lag before appearing in reports.
Reports in Narrative Reporting are centralized and support both cross-cloud and multi-source reporting. Reports here are tightly integrated with Narrative Reporting. Its infrastructure and artifacts are embedded in the Narrative Reporting platform itself, and it can integrate reports through Navigation Flows, Integrated Business Planning (IBP), and Financial Reporting Compliance (FRC) in Oracle Cloud ERP.
Both products support report migration from FR.
Why Use Reports over FR?
The simplest answer to this question is that FR has reached the end of its development lifecycle. But from a functional standpoint, the reasons are plenty: a long list of enhanced FR features including better POV control and grouping, better charting with more chart types, an overall better design, new Report Designer features like grid titles and row banding, and a new and enhanced process for books and bursting.
Financial Reporting Statement of Direction
Subject, as always, to Oracle’s safe harbor provisions, FR is now scheduled to reach end-of-life in June 2025, though this date isn’t final and is subject to change. Once the date is final, at least six months’ notice will be given, with announcements through a variety of customer-facing channels. When FR is retired, all reports need to have been migrated and all non-FR documents in FR’s Explore repository will need to be moved to Cloud EPM Documents or the Narrative Reporting Library. All FR-related interfaces (FR Web Studio, Explore, and the FR tab in the Reports card) will be removed and no longer be available. It is recommended that you begin planning the transition well in advance of this.
Upcoming Enhancements to Reports
Several enhancements are coming this year to Reports:
- The ability to burst multiple output files into a single email for a recipient, including as a ZIP file, eliminating your users having to be sent multiple emails.
- A native scheduler that will execute Narrative Reporting bursting definitions, adding to the current method, which involves EPM Automate and a third-party scheduling utility. For Reports you can currently use the Job Scheduler, though this currently requires the Service Administrator role.
- For Books, end-user support for “respond to prompts”, including those that aggregate across multiple reports in the book. Currently the prompts must be answered at design time.
Summary
This seminar was fast-paced, informative, and full of useful information. We highly recommend that anyone who designs Financial Reporting content spend an hour to view it. You can find it at the following URL:
PARC Consulting – EPM Solutions by EPM Experts
