By Neeraj Garg

This is the third of three articles discussing new enhancements in Oracle E-Business Suite Projects Applications Release 12.2. In this article, we address the third of three key enhancements: Costing Using Payroll Actuals

Costing Using Payroll Actuals

This enhancement enables companies to use actual payroll costs from Oracle Payroll or a third-party payroll system to cost project labor transactions. These actual costs are distributed to the labor transactions on projects using new mapping rules that specify the expenditure type, cost type, and distribution rules to be used for this purpose. Figure 1 shows an example of this mapping.

Figure 1

Drawing on this mapping and the amounts retrieved from the payroll system, the costing process will distribute payroll costs to various labor transactions, as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2

The resulting distributed costs are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Users can also accrue standard labor costs before a payroll run to report project costs and support billing. When payroll costs are distributed, the accrued expenses are automatically reversed. In addition, a new process has been introduced to help payroll roll-backs needed for error correction. This process will change an existing labor distribution to projects, making all the transactions re-eligible for costing. Then, when the new payroll run is completed, these transactions can be costed with the corrected payroll numbers. This process may also be used to correct errors in the setup of labor costing in Oracle Projects. For example, it can reverse out a standard costing run and replace it with an actual costing run.

As with the Costing Using HR rates method described above, companies implementing this feature need to consider the need for labor-cost information security because actual labor costs may be exposed.

Conclusion

With this current set of enhancements, Oracle E-Business Suite Projects has evolved into a complete solution that can be used to address nearly any costing requirements that companies may have. Oracle users can more easily take advantage of various approaches to labor costing, using payroll data, HR rates, and total time. These enhancements allow companies to manage and perform costing in ways that fit their specific needs, which in turn helps create a better understanding of project costs and, ultimately, profitability.

If you have questions about the new costing enhancements, the use of costing extensions, or any other issues about using Oracle Applications in a project-intensive environment, contact us! We are always delighted to help end-users make the best use of the applications we originally invented at Project Partners.