Internal Controls Manager and Financial Consolidation Hub

home

Articles

Blog

Books

Tools

Links

FAQ Page

Internal Controls Manager and Financial Consolidation Hub

Oracle's new versions of Internal Control Manager and Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub promise greater benefits from Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. But what do they offer?

Currenttly the financial reporting and SOX compliance activities are separate. The new integration between the Internal Controls Manager and the Hub will have dashboards highlighting both the current status of both financial reporting and the internal controls certification.

Each entity in the consolidation hierarchy is actively monitored with the ability to drill down from financial statements to live transactional details in Oracle General Ledger and sub-ledgers, and with the ability to drill across to Oracle Internal Controls Manager for live certification results. Finance teams can use the dashboard to quickly spot potential risks for misstatement and avoid delays in the discovery of key failed controls -- improving both the production and the assurance of accurate financial statements.

Oracle claims that the new automation and integration will reduce the cost of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley. This is likely to be a major selling point given the level of costs associated with section 404. Cost savings are supposed to come from leveraging existing technology in the Oracle E-Business suite for auditor reporting and attestation.

The Financial Consolidation Hub has a spreadsheet interface over the top of the data mining and OLAP capabilities of Enterprise Editions of 9i and 10g.

Using the spreadsheet, users can drill down to operational transactionss in the E-Business suite modules such as general ledger, accounts payable, fixed assets and inventory purchasing.

"With over 250 customers on Oracle Internal Controls Manager, we've drawn upon our users' collective experiences to bridge the divide between the preparation and the control evaluation of financial results, said Oracle Vice President, Applications Strategy, Chris Leone. "We're helping customers advance to the next phase of sustainable compliance by delivering assurance analytics that anticipate year two reporting requests from auditors and business process owners."

Internal Controls Manager is due to ship in 2006. Oracle Financial Consolidation Hub is available now.