Oracle Projects Fundamentals(Costing and Billing)

Oracle Projects consists of the following products:

          • Oracle Project Costing

          • Oracle Project Billing

          • Oracle Project Resource Management

          • Oracle Project Management

          • Oracle Project Collaboration

          • Oracle Daily Business Intelligence for Projects

          • Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis

The following sections provide detail information on each of these products.

Oracle Project Costing:         

          Oracle Project Costing provides an integrated cost management solution for all projects and activities within an enterprise. With Project Costing you can manage costs across currency and organizational boundaries. Project Costing also acts as a central repository of project plans and transactions, processes project costs, and creates corresponding accounting entries to satisfy corporate finance requirements. 

          Project Costing gives operations managers and finance managers complete and timely access to project performance information and the resulting accounting impacts thereof. It also empowers line managers with timely, detailed cost information to monitor project performance in a productivity-enhancing format, and enables financial managers to track the total cost of running the business.

The key features of Oracle Project Costing are:

          • Versatile template-driven project definition

          • Multiple currency financial plan and budget creation

          • Diverse accrual and expenditure capture

          • Robust expenditure control, and collection functionality                                                                      

          • Powerful burdening functionality

          • Rule-based general ledger account functionality

          • Comprehensive reporting functionality with drill down capability

          • Capable asset creation and CIP cost collection

         

          Oracle Project Costing can be extended with Oracle Project Billing (see below) and is part of the Oracle Enterprise Project Management Suite, an integrated suite of internet applications designed to transform businesses to e-businesses.

For more information about Oracle Project Costing, see the Oracle Project Costing User Guide.

Oracle Project Billing:

         

          Oracle Project Billing enables enterprises to simplify customer invoicing, streamline corporate cash flow, and measure the profitability of contract projects. Using configurable accounting rules, Oracle Project Billing extends Oracle Project Costing functionality by processing actual costs, creating corresponding accounting entries for revenue accrual to satisfy corporate finance requirements, and creating customer invoices for project work. With Project Billing, project managers can review project invoices online and analyze project profitability, and accounting managers can see the corporate impact of project work.

         

The key features of Oracle Project Billing are:

          •  Flexible agreements in multiple currencies with either hard or soft limits

          •  Budgeting for revenue in multiple currencies, separately from cost

          •  Organization-level and project-specific billing rate schedules and overrides

          •  Versatile billing retention and tax functionality

          •  Flexible revenue accrual calculation

          • Reports for unbilled receivables and unearned revenue

          • Integration between Oracle Project Billing and other Oracle applications

For more information about Oracle Project Billing, see the Oracle Project Billing User Guide.

Overview of Oracle Projects

This post provides a brief overview of the Oracle Projects group of applications, including

          Oracle Project Costing,

          Oracle Project Billing,

          Oracle Project Resource Management,

          Oracle Project Management,

          Oracle Project Collaboration,

          Oracle Daily Business Intelligence for Projects, and

          Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis.

Overview of Oracle Projects

          The applications that make up the Oracle Projects suite work together to provide a complete enterprise project management solution. They give you a flexible approach to defining and managing your projects and the people, schedules, deliverables, and finances associated with them.

          At the aggregate level, enterprise project management involves the collection and coordination of corporate resources (such as people, money, and hard assets) to accomplish a predefined scope of work in a scheduled time frame and budget. Some

enterprises only have projects that are internal in nature, such as projects that track time and costs related to marketing campaigns or infrastructure build-out programs for capital development. Alternatively, many enterprises are entirely project oriented: they derive their entire income stream from projects that provide client services. Oracle Projects includes billing functionality that enables these enterprises to generate project invoices of varying complexity for their clients.

         

          The Oracle Projects application suite includes a variety of features central to the requirements of competent and efficient enterprise project management. It enables project managers to effectively oversee their projects, assess progress against predetermined milestones and budgets, staff their projects with appropriate talent, and quickly generate a wide variety of reports. It also helps virtual and globally distributed project teams to efficiently communicate, collaborate, and complete tasks.

          Oracle Projects also gives corporate executives the ability to quickly see how projects are performing across the enterprise. It enables them to drill down to areas of geographical interest or product specialization to review projects that are potential problems or are in immediate need of additional attention.

          Oracle Projects applications are designed to integrate with many other Oracle application suites (including Oracle HRMS, Oracle Financials, and Oracle Supply Chain applications) to provide an efficient information flow, facilitate a global sharing of resources, and provide robust intercompany accounting.