Points be to Noted while doing AR Conversion

Conversion (Data Migration) of Invoices in Receivables

Whenever we are going in for implementation of Receivables module, we have to consider the necessity of bringing in customer open balances from the old system to Oracle Receivables.

Some of the key questions that needs to be addressed before we take up a conversion activity. This is just a sample list and not an exhaustive one:

1. What are the different types of invoices in existing system Provide invoice samples? (invoices, credit/ debit memos, commitments, chargebacks)
2. Do we need to migrate only open invoices?
3. Do we migrate closed invoices also, if yes, then for what time period?
4. Please explain the invoice numbering mechanism? Is it automatic?
5. What are the interfaces from/to your existing receivables system?
6. Will the old system still be in place for querying and reporting purpose?

One can adopt one of the following three strategies for conversion:

1. Consolidate all the open balances customer-wise and create a single open invoice for each customer in the new Oracle system. The advantage of this system is that it is quite easy and not data intensive and makes good business sense in case of small businesses with very few customers. The major demerit of this approach is that later on one cannot track the individual invoices which the customer had sent and can become an audit issue also. In case of dispute over payment, this invoice will remain open till the dispute is resolved. Also, aging of invoices and dunning history will be lost.

2. Bring in all the open and partially paid invoices, credit/debit memos into the new system. Migrate all the unapplied and partially applied receipts to the new system. The advantage of this process of conversion is that you can track all open invoices individually and apply the correct receipt to correct invoice. Also, the conversion effort will be moderately low compared to case if you migrate all open and closed invoices. The disadvantage of this approach is that you cannot have a track of closed invoices in the new system. Also, it would be tough to handle scenarios where there is a dispute regarding incorrect receipt application, etc. This is the most common approach taken for receivables invoice, credit/debit memo and receipt migration.

3. Migrate all open and closed invoices to the new system. Reapply the migrated receipts to invoices in the new system. This approach makes sense if your receivables data is quite small else the effort involved in migrating all closed invoices and credit memos to the new system does not make much business sense.

The next question that arises is how we should migrate the invoices, credit/debit memos and receipts to the new system. Oracle provides standard interfaces to load the same. We can also use tools like Dataloader or manually key in the data into Oracle.

In this article i will talk of invoice, credit/debit memo conversion only. Prior to invoice migration, customer migration should be over apart from other pre-requisites. Following is the list of pre-requisites that should be completed prior to invoice, credit/debit memo conversion:

•Set-up of Customer Payment Terms should be complete
•Set-up of Currencies should be complete (this is necessary in case you have foreign currency invoices also)
•Set-up of Transaction Types should be complete
•Set-up of Accounting Rules should be complete
•Set-up of Tax rates and Tax codes should be complete
•Set up for sales representative should be complete
•Set up for debtor area should be complete
•Set up for income category should be complete
•Automatic customer invoice numbering should be set to 'No'
•Customer and Customer address should be migrated in the system
•Disable the Invoice interface purge program so that the data successfully imported should not get purged in the interface table.
•Set up for invoice batch source name should be complete

In the next step extract Invoice data from the legacy files and using SQL loader populate the interface tables RA_INTERFACE_LINES_ALL and RA_INTERFACE_DISTRIBUTIONS_ALL. Submit the Auto Invoice open interface program. Data from the two interface tables will be uploaded to the following base tables using the Invoice open interface program:

•RA_CUSTOMER_TRX_ALL
•RA_CUSTOMER_TRX_LINES_ALL
•RA_CUST_TRX_LINE_GL_DIST_ALL
•RA_BATCHES_ALL
•RA_CUST_TRX_LINE_SALESREPS_ALL
•AR_RECEIVABLE_APPLICATIONS_ALL
•AR_PAYMENT_SCHEDULES_ALL
•RA_INTERFACE_ERRORS_ALL

Ensure that the Purge Interface check box is not checked when you submit the Autoinvoice program. In the Autoinvoice errors form you can see the error corresponding to failed records. Correct the errors in the interface table and rerun the Autoinvoice program. Submit the Autoinvoice Purge Program separately. Only records that have been successfully processed by Autoinvoice are purged.

Using autoinvoice you can migrate invoices, credit/debit memos and on-account credits into Oracle. However, you have to set grouping rules (Navigation > Setup > Transactions > Autoinvoice > Grouping Rule) to group lines to create one transaction and ordering rules (Navigation > Setup > Transactions > Autoinvoice > Line Ordering Rules) to determine the order of the transaction lines on a particular invoice.