Are You Using Oracle PBCS or EPBCS for your financial planning?

When it comes to financial planning and analysis, spreadsheets are less trusted in today’s fast-changing world.

This results in increased stress on the finance department.

Financial professionals benefit from tools like Planning & Budgeting since they can remain adaptable and foresee changes.   

Oracle Planning Budgeting Cloud Services (PBCS) was recently discussed in a webcast on agile financial planning.

PBCS comes preconfigured with a number of features that enhance the flexibility and efficiency with which financial planning tasks can be completed easily.

EPBCS, the Enterprise edition, is a planning tool that has a lot more built-in capabilities if you need it.

It is possible to implement this solution in a short period of time due to its pre-integrated modules and additional capabilities.   

Here, we’ll take a closer look at Oracle’s Cloud planning solutions and see how they stack up against each other. 

Both PBCS and EPBCS are affected 

The overall benefits of an Oracle Cloud platform are the same whether you pick PBCS or EPBCS: no upfront expenditures for hardware or software, reduced participation of your IT staff, and no yearly maintenance fees.  

PBCS is an on-premise system based on Hyperion Planning.

Its qualities have previously been demonstrated in practice and developed from there.  

Both programs include the following features: 

• 3 BSO cubes for planning  
• 3 cubes for ASO reporting  
• 1 cube for consolidated reporting 

For ad-hoc reporting, both programs employ the SmartView Excel Add-In, Financial Reports for structured reports, and Data Management (FDMEE) for data uploading.  

In addition, both apps have a minimum of 10 users and two environments: development and production. 

The distinctions between PBCS and EPBCS  

Oracle PBCS provides the ability to modify the computations and templates that underpin these calculations.

PBCS and EPBCS vary in this regard.

EPBCS includes ready-made modules that allow for more small, customized changes. 

EPBCS is divided into five sections: Finance, Human Resources, Projects, Capital, and Strategic Modeling. 

There are financials tools that may be utilized to swiftly establish plans and prognosis as well as generate financial basis overviews such as balance sheets and cash flow overviews for internal study.

Step-by-step components of financials include: turnover/gross margin, costs, balance sheets, cash flow, income statements, and analysis.

Financials includes these components.

Workforce, Projects, and Capital may all be connected with Financials, thus allowing planners to develop extremely comprehensive plans, forecasts, and financial reports using a variety of data in addition.

People and money are key organizational assets that may be aligned with a firm’s competitive advantages through workforce planning.

With the help of Workforce, departments may collaborate to plan staffing and related expenditures such as salary and health insurance.

Expense and trend charts are available for planners to review.

Planners can control and monitor staff spending in the following ways, depending on the features activated: 

• assessing, calculating and reporting regarding staffing, wages, bonuses, taxes and healthcare expenditures;  
• planning for recruiting, transfers, promotions, terminations, etc.  
• calculating the country’s taxes and benefits.

A separate business process, or one that can be integrated with Financials and Projects, can be used by Workforce.  

It is designed for companies with a lot of internal projects, such as those in the fields of IT and marketing as well as research and development.

In addition to short- and long-term initiatives, this module offers the option of driver-based planning.

While tracking asset-related costs and project income, individual employees can use this module to manage their project planning. Out-of-the-box assessments of project outcomes, revenues, costs, and cash flows are also provided. 

Asset expenditures are managed, prioritized, and planned using capital.

In the request, justification, evaluation, and approval process, capital aids decision-makers and first-line supervisors. If you’re going to do anything like:  

calculating the impact of changes on earnings, cash flow, and funding using driver-based methods;  

Making and approving plans for the use of company assets;  

To understand the impact on financial reports, one must consider the transfers, the unusual depreciation schedules, as well as the retirement plans and substitutes.  

Step-by-step asset planning may be achieved with the help of these components provided by Capital:

investments; current assets; intangible assets and analysis. 

You may use the Strategic Modeling module to improve your financial modeling. In many cases, financial modeling is still relied on manual procedures that are less than trustworthy (mainly spreadsheets).

Long-term planning, what-if modeling, company or group finance, and treasury efforts can all benefit from the usage of this module.

This module offers a built-in hierarchical list of accounts that not only enables quick-start consolidations but also facilitates forecast modeling and target positions.

Various financial models can be subjected to stress tests and simulations based on different situations. 

Conclusion  

Interested in learning what a successful adoption of a financial planning solution may imply for your company? Perhaps you’re still undecided about which product to buy.

Then we can look at it jointly, based on your own planning and application needs. We’d love to hear from you!