Impact23

During the 6/12 Financial Reporting & Boundary System office hours, the ITS Looker Finance developers proposed several data changes to increase clarity, reduce Incidents, and provide a uniform experience across all data sets:

1. Removal of the Ledger Effective Date:
   • Reason: This field was unclear and misleading to users, causing confusion about its purpose and impact on reports.
   • Impact: Simplifies the interface and reduces potential misinterpretations of the data​​.
   • Feedback: The team plans to address user feedback on the removal of the Ledger Effective Date by potentially adding a different date field. They acknowledged the need to replace the Ledger Effective Date with a more useful date field and committed to working on this issue before the proposed changes are deployed.
      
2. Addition of Account Sequence Number:
   • Location: This new field would be added in the Ledger Details section.
   • Purpose: It matches the field from the UCR Financial Detail Report and aims to enhance data validation processes.
      
3. Conversion of Dimensions to Measures:
   • Change: Seven ledger dimensions are being converted into measures.
   • Reason: Measures can be aggregated, providing accurate totals and reducing confusion. Currently, most dollar amounts are coded as dimensions, which do not aggregate automatically. Changing them to measures ensures that amounts are correctly summed and reported.
   • Impact: This conversion will ensure that reports provide consistent and accurate totals, addressing discrepancies between Looker and other Oracle Financials reports such as the UCR Financial Detail Report​​.
      

Watch a demo of the proposed changes to Looker Finance from the 6/12 Financial Reporting & Boundary System office hours.

Please note: The deployment date will be revisited in August. Users preferred postponing the changes in Looker until then to avoid having to recreate their reports for the current fiscal year.