Unleashing the Power of R12: The Mechanics of Ledger Sets and Secondary Ledgers

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Unleashing the Power of R12:
The Mechanics of Ledger Sets
and Secondary Ledgers
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Unleashing the Power of R12: The Mechanics of Ledger Sets and Secondary Ledgers
Copyright © 2014 eprentise, LLC. All rights reserved. www.eprentise.com | Page 2
© 2014 eprentise, LLC. All rights reserved.
eprentise® is a registered trademark of eprentise, LLC.
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Author: Brian Lewis
Published: August 16, 2011
www.eprentise.com

Of the new features in Oracle® E-Business Suite R12, the most powerful are ledger sets and secondary
ledgers. Taken together, these features have the capability of eliminating thousands of spreadsheets and
wasted staff hours. This article explores briefly the functionality of ledger sets and secondary ledgers.
Ledger Sets
Citing directly from the Oracle Financial Implementation Guide:
“Ledgers sets allow you to group multiple ledgers together to achieve processing efficiencies. For
example, you can open or close periods for multiple ledgers simultaneously, translate balances for all
ledgers in a ledger set, run recurring journals that update balances for multiple ledgers, or run
consolidated financial reports that summarize balances across multiple ledgers in a ledger set”
According to Oracle, “All ledgers in a ledger set must have the same chart of accounts and accounting
calendar/period type combination.” That means that every ledger that is operating with a different chart
of accounts or calendar cannot be included in a ledger set. Further, ledger sets will not work across
multiple instances.
The Implementation Guide goes on to says that some of the General Ledger features now possible
through the use of ledger sets are as follows:
 Translation and Revaluation: Translate balances and run revaluation across multiple ledgers in a
ledger set.
 Open and Close Periods: Open and close periods for multiple ledgers within a ledger set from a
single operation.
 Reporting: Submit standard reports and Financial Statement Generator (FSG) reports across multiple
ledgers in a ledger set. The added benefit of using ledger sets in FSG reports is to aggregate data
and create summarized balances across multiple ledgers in a ledger set.
My favorite, as a CPA having worked in financial reporting and external auditing, is ledger set reporting. It
is absolutely transforming to be able to run a single report across multiple ledgers and still maintain full
drill-down to the underlying detail.
Secondary Ledgers
Simply put, as stated in the Oracle
Financials Implementation Guide,
“[s]econdary ledgers represent the
primary ledger’s accounting data in
another accounting representation.”
Specifically, these representations
can differ from the primary ledger is
the following ways: i) chart of
accounts, ii) accounting calendar/period type combination, iii) currency, iv) subledger accounting method,
and v) ledger processing options.

What does that mean in daily practice?
That depends on what your business needs are. Secondary ledgers can be maintained at one of four
different levels of detail:
 Balance level secondary ledgers maintain the primary ledger account balances only in another
accounting representation. This is useful when there is a need to present financial position in another
basis, but the need for drill-down transparency to the underlying transactions is not a need.
Populating this secondary ledger requires the use of Oracle General Ledger Consolidation to transfer
primary ledger balances to this secondary ledger. Because of this, a balance level secondary ledger is
a financial reporting tool that would only be useful at period ends.
 Journal level secondary ledgers maintain journal entries and balances in an additional accounting
representation. This is affected through the use of the General Ledger Posting program which will,
each time you post to the primary ledger, duplicate the posting in the secondary ledger but in a
different accounting representation. This is useful when there is a real time need to monitor financial
position and key financial performance indicators in another accounting representation. Secondary
ledgers maintained at this level have some transparency, allowing drill down to journal level entries
but not to subledger detail. Because of this, a journal level secondary ledger is useful for more real
time financial monitoring.
 Subledger level secondary ledgers maintain balance level, journal entry level, and subledger level
detail allowing almost-transparency through drill-down functionality. The subledger level is affected
through both the Subledger Accounting and the General Ledger Posting programs to
contemporaneously duplicate both subledger and general ledger posting in the secondary ledger.
This level of secondary ledger allows a fully populated transaction schema for review and
management monitoring.
 Adjustments only secondary ledgers do not maintain a complete accounting picture but instead
only reflect adjustments. This is a very useful type of secondary ledger because it allows entries to be
made discretely and to be provided to management and/or auditors as a separate ledger. This allows
for a very high level of transparency of adjustments made. It can act, in essence, as a new control
level by which entries can be made by staff level accountants, approved by line level accounting
supervisors, but then accumulated in the adjustments only secondary ledger for final high level
management approval in aggregate. Then to obtain a full secondary accounting representation, use
ledger sets to combine the adjustments only ledger with the primary ledger for report generation.
Prior to R12, there were limited options for companies requiring different currencies or a statutory chart
of accounts. You could have created a GL Consolidation that allowed you to map to a different chart of
accounts or currency, but the GL financial consolidation would not have included the transaction detail of
the subledgers, so reconciliation was a time-consuming process. (This is very similar to a Balance Level
Secondary Ledger.) Multiple Reporting Currencies (MRC) allowed you to transact in one currency and then
automatically translate to another currency for your corporate reporting, but there were no standard
reports to reconcile from the primary set of books to the reporting set of books. R12 now connects
subledger detail with a mapping into a secondary ledger so that there is both full drill down into the
subledgers (from a defined secondary ledger) and enforced consistency from a primary ledger into the
secondary ledger (through create accounting rules). This is known as a Subledger Level Secondary Ledger.

Solution Beacon, LLC. Release 12 Financials Best Practices. Subledger Accounting and the General Ledger.
Johnson, Alyssa. 2009.
This is how it works:
1. Define your primary ledger and its related secondary ledgers. The secondary ledger may have a
different currency, chart of accounts, calendar, or accounting method.
1. Specify the ledger attributes for the primary ledger.
2. Assign one or more secondary ledgers to each primary ledger for an accounting setup.
3. Specify the ledger attributes for one or more secondary ledgers (optional).
4. Assign one or more reporting currencies (optional).
2. Define Create Accounting Rules to map the transactions that post to your primary ledger to
transactions in your secondary ledgers.
1. The secondary ledgers assigned can only perform the accounting for the legal entities within
the same accounting setup.
2. Note: If an additional ledger is needed to perform accounting across legal entities or ledgers in
different accounting setups, use a ledger in an accounting setup with no legal entity assigned.
This can be used for multiple purposes, such as performing management reporting or
consolidation across multiple legal entities.

3. When accounting is created, the journal entries are automatically generated for all of the associated
secondary ledgers based on the defined mapping rules from the primary ledger to the secondary
ledgers.
From an internal control and financial reporting standpoint, one of the most welcome secondary ledger
types is the adjustments only level. It has long been an internal control concern that manual journal
entries that have been made directly to the general ledger are commingled with the automated, routine
journal entries flowing from subledgers or other automated sources. This causes problems such as poor
transparency, reconciliation difficulties, and difficulty monitoring critical Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Section 404
controls.
As an example, a global company routinely generated their reporting set of books in a different currency
(using MRC functionality) and then each month would make manual adjusting journal entries to this same

reporting set of books. It was very difficult to trace the original source of the transaction, to locate the rate
used for the currency conversion, and to determine which transactions were manual and which came from
the subledgers. An extensive and time-consuming analysis was required to reconcile the history.
In general, most companies have good controls established around the routine data processing of
transactions that flow up from the subledgers, such as accounts payable and accounts receivable
transactions, but the same controls do not necessarily exist for manual journal entries. Instead, review and
approval of journal entries is the most common control. But for any control to be effective, it is essential
that the efficacy of that control be easily monitorable. When manual journal entries blend in with
automated entries, such monitoring is impaired. Having a discrete, adjustments-only secondary ledger
provides the ability to have only the routine, automated entries in the primary ledger with no manual
journal entries allowed or needed. Then, any manual entries are booked to the adjustments only
secondary ledger where they are easily monitored and have complete transparency.
Take, for example, the case of deferred revenue. A company books its sales as invoiced in the Accounts
Receivable subledger. However, under GAAP rules, if the company had a service commitment for a period
extending beyond the close of the reporting period, then an entry would have been made to defer part of
the revenue or to reverse previously deferred revenue as income. This is a critical revenue recognition
matter, and based on my experience as an external auditor, one that your auditors will examine closely
while testing revenue deferrals and also prior to making conclusions on the controls around revenue
recognition. Prior to the adjustments only secondary ledger feature, analysis of the general ledger
transactions had to be carried out to bifurcate the deferral entries from the automated subledger entries
— a time-consuming process.
With the adjustments only secondary ledger, instead of booking the adjustments directly to the primary
ledger, the adjustments are booked to the secondary ledger. For example, let’s say our fictitious company
determined that $120,000 in revenue needed to be deferred (revenue recognition deferral) because
installation had not been completed (an open service ticket). With the adjustments only secondary ledger,
if this was the only adjustment, the ledger would look like this:

JE#1
Adjustments-Only
Secondary Ledger
Sales 120,000
Deferred
Revenue 120,000
Deferred
Revenue
120,000
Retained
Earnings
120,000
Sales
(120,000)
Now to report financial results, the adjustments only secondary ledger is associated with the primary
ledger as a ledger set, and then a combined report is generated. The result is as follows:

Account Primary
Ledger
Secondary
Ledger Combined
Cash
200,000 200,000
Accounts Receivable
400,000 400,000
Accounts Payable
300,000 300,000
Deferred Revenue
120,000 120,000
Retained Earnings
150,000 (120,000) 30,000
Stock and Other
equity 150,000 150,000
Sales
350,000 (120,000) 230,000
Expenses
200,000 200,000
The end result is that the non-automated journal entries are segregated into a separate adjustments-only
secondary ledger, ideally with the accountants’ (who do manual type entries) user permissions prevented
from making entries into the primary ledger. This way, monitoring of these critical entries is simple, and
the SOX 404 controls around the automated entries can be more easily tested and concluded upon.
Crucial to the effective use of ledger sets and secondary ledgers is having a well-designed and
rationalized common chart of accounts in your primary ledgers. Simply put, if your current chart of
accounts does not suit your current business, or if it is inconsistent between primary ledgers, then the
functionality of secondary ledgers will be limited and the use of ledger sets to streamline financial
reporting workflows will be impaired.
Secondary ledgers allow a company to meet varied reporting needs. If there is a single global chart of
accounts and a single global calendar and a single E-Business Suite instance, companies can leverage a
single source of truth that includes transparency into all transactions from the primary ledger to the
secondary ledgers as well as full drill-down capability to the subledgers. That means that there is
consistency of reported information across business units and reduced effort for management reporting,
maintenance, and reconciliation.

The eprentise Solution
eprentise FlexField software can easily transform
your multiple charts of accounts into a common
chart of accounts, unlocking the full
functionality of Release 12’s new efficiency-
enhancing features like ledger sets. eprentise
Reorganization software allows you to easily
change calendar period dates, period names,
and calendar names. In this way, it is possible to
create the single standardized calendar that
ledger sets require. Finally, eprentise
Consolidation software enables companies to
merge two or more instances of Oracle E-
Business Suite (EBS) into a single, consolidated
database enabling the use of ledger sets across
all portions of the company.
Going to a single chart of accounts, common calendar, or single global instance can be effectively
accomplished with eprentise software and can allow you to maximize the benefits of standard business
processes and common definitions across the enterprise. If regulatory, reporting, or management
requirements dictate the need for a different accounting representation (chart of accounts) or a different
calendar, the secondary ledger functionality of R12 allows you to transparently present financial reporting
and management information in different bases.
Curious?
For more information, please call eprentise at 1.888.943.5363 or visit www.eprentise.com.
About eprentise
eprentise provides transformation software products that allow growing companies to make their Oracle® E-Business
Suite (EBS) systems agile enough to support changing business requirements, avoid a reimplementation and lower the
total cost of ownership of enterprise resource planning (ERP). While enabling real-time access to complete, consistent
and correct data across the enterprise, eprentise software is able to consolidate multiple production instances, change
existing configurations such as charts of accounts and calendars, and merge, split or move sets of books, operating
units, legal entities, business groups and inventory organizations.

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