Thinking Outside the Box With Summary Level Drill-Back

Financial consolidation and close processes, in particular, are both time-consuming and difficult. Two-thirds of organizations feel that they’re under pressure to speed up their financial close.

In accounting and finance, it’s crucial to know the source of the figures that you’re working with. Unfortunately, far too many companies fail at this critical task. Just 28 percent of organizations claim that they trust the numbers in their financial close reports. Ironically, one-third of organizations also ranked this ability as their foremost priority for their financial close processes.

While consolidation and close can be painful at the best of times, especially when manually reconciling data in Excel spreadsheets, businesses now have access to excellent software solutions such as Oracle Financial Consolidation and Close Cloud Service (FCCS).

Oracle FCCS is a mature, feature-rich application with advanced capabilities such as summary level drill-back. By making full use of these features, you can see dramatic improvements in the efficiency and accuracy of your consolidation and close processes.

What is Summary Level Drill-Back?

“Drilling down,” “drilling through,” and “drilling back” are key concepts in data management that refer to navigating data hierarchies and connections. Drill-back refers to the ability to return to the source of a given data point. For example, if one record is the result of a calculation that depends on other records, drill-back allows you to easily view these original records with just a few clicks.

One of the most useful features of Oracle FCCS is the ability to perform summary level drill-back. This means that users don’t need to be at a specific, zero-level data intersection in order to drill back to the source of the data. Instead, they can perform drill-backs at a summary level.

How Can You Use Summary Level Drill-Back in Oracle FCCS?

So how does summary level drill-back help with the accounting woes of a company that’s growing and engaging in acquisitions? For one, it can drastically reduce the tedious manual activities that your financial analysts need to perform. The more time that your analysts spend on manual Excel-based calculations, the more time you waste and the more potential for inaccuracies you introduce into the equation.

With a single click of the mouse, summary level drill-back in Oracle FCCS removes the need for many of your manual processes. For example, your analysts can skip the process of unifying your chart of accounts within your source systems, or performing a complex mapping of source accounts to financial statement captions using Excel.

Instead, you can start with the pre-built financial statement captions within FCCS, and supplement them with captions that are specific to your company or industry. Use the Data Management data loading tool in FCCS to map the various charts of accounts from various source systems to one unified set of accounts.

When you need more detail about a particular balance, you can drill back to the underlying source data. Here, you can find references to source information, i.e. the native account information that was put into data management before it was mapped. Not only is this a big win for corporate accounting, it keeps auditors happy and reduces the need for testing.

Have questions about summary level drill-back? Contact our knowledgeable EPM team. With decades of client-side experience, we can help you manage Hyperion and EPM Cloud, execute migrations, upgrades, and more.