Skip to main content

Overview of Encumbrance Accounting


With General Ledger you can record pre-expenditures commonly known as encumbrances. The primary purpose of tracking encumbrances is to avoid overspending a budget. Encumbrances can also be used to predict cash outflow and as a general planning tool.
To use the full capabilities of encumbrance accounting, you must enable the budgetary control flag for a set of books. When you enable the budgetary control flag, the system automatically creates encumbrances from requisitions, purchase orders and other transactions originating in feeder systems such as Purchasing and Payables.
When you do not enable the budgetary control flag, you can still enter manual encumbrances via journal entry, but you cannot generate encumbrances from requisitions and purchase orders.
You have two options for using encumbrance data to monitor over-expenditure of a budget: After actuals and encumbrances have been posted, you can generate reports to show over-expenditures. You can also can use funds checking to prevent over-expenditures before they occur.
To use General Ledger encumbrance accounting:
1. Define Reserve for Encumbrance account for each set of books.
2. Enable Budgetary Control for your set of books to automatically create encumbrance entries from Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Payables.
However, you need not define budgetary control options for your detail or summary accounts nor must you define budgetary control groups.
3. Open encumbrance years to enter and post encumbrance entries to future periods. Your initial encumbrance year is opened automatically when you open your first period for your set of books.
General Ledger uses the last period of your latest open encumbrance year to determine how far to calculate your project-to-date encumbrance balances.
4. Define encumbrance types.
5. Define financial encumbrance options in Purchasing and Payables in the Financials Options window.
6. Enter encumbrances manually.
7. Import encumbrances using Journal Import.
8. Enter encumbrances via Purchasing and Payables.
Purchasing automatically creates unposted encumbrance entries for General Ledger when you approve a requisition or purchase order.
Payables automatically creates unposted encumbrance entries for General Ledger to encumber funds for purchase order variances and unmatched invoices.
General Ledger immediately updates your funds available when you reserve funds for your transactions in Purchasing and Payables. However, you must post your encumbrance entries to review funds available in Financial Statement Generator reports.
9. Reserve funds for encumbrance entries to allow posting of encumbrances. To do so, do one of the following:
Reserve funds online in the Enter Encumbrances window. See: Entering Encumbrances.
Reserve funds in batch by running the Mass Funds Check/Reservation program. See: Running the Mass Funds Check/Reservation Program.
Have the Posting program automatically reserve funds when you post your encumbrance batch. See: Posting Journals.
Suggestion: We recommend that you let the Posting program automatically reserve funds. Since reserving funds for encumbrance entries independent of budgetary control is always successful, this method requires no user intervention.
10. Review unposted encumbrance journal entries online. See: Reviewing Encumbrances.
11. Post encumbrances.
12. Relieve encumbrances.
13. Review funds available.
14. Define and submit encumbrance reports using the Financial Statement Generator. For example, you might define a Funds Available report to measure budgets against expenditures and encumbrances. See: Overview of Financial Statement Generator.
You can also use standard reports to review your encumbrance balances and activity. Standard reports include the following:
Encumbrance Trial Balance Report.
General Ledger Report.
Account Analysis Report.
15. Perform Year-End Encumbrance Processing.
16. Carry Forward Year-End Encumbrances.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Applying Prepayments to Invoices

You can apply the available amount of Item type distributions from a Temporary type prepayment to one or more invoices to offset the amount you pay on the invoice(s). If you entered the prepayment as a Permanent type and want to apply it, you can query the prepayment in the Invoices window and change the Prepayment Type to Temporary. If you use Automatic Offsets then your setting for the Prevent Prepayment Application Across Balancing Segments Payables option controls whether you can apply a prepayment to an invoice or expense report with a different balancing segment. Prerequisites The invoice type is Standard, Mixed, or Expense Report. Today's date is on or after the Settlement Date of the prepayment. The invoice date is on or after the date of the prepayment. The prepayment is type Temporary, fully paid, validated, not cancelled, has no active holds, and has not already been fully applied. The prepayment has the same supplier, invoice currency and payment currenc...

Application Utilities Lookups and Application Object Library Lookups

Maintain existing and define additional Lookups for your shared Lookup types. You can define up to 250 Lookups for each Lookup type. Each Lookup has a code and a meaning. For example, Lookup type YES_NO has a code Y with meaning Yes, and a code N with a meaning No. Note: In Releases 11.0 and earlier, there were two Lookup features, Special Lookups and Common Lookups. These two features have been merged into one. The new consolidated Lookups feature has Lookups maintained in this form. If you make changes to a Lookup, users must log out then log back on before your changes take effect. Lookups Block Type Query the type of your Lookup. You can define a maximum of 250 Lookups for a single type. User Name The user name is used by loader programs. Application Query the application associated with your Lookup type. Description If you use windows specialized for a particular Lookup type, the window uses this description in the window title. Access Level The access level restricts changes that...

About Bank Reconciliation

The diagram in this section provides an overview of the Cash Management process, from entering bank statements to posting accounting entries to your general ledger. There are two major process steps you need to follow when reconciling bank statements: 1. Load Bank Statements: You need to enter the detailed information from each bank statement, including bank account information, deposits received by the bank, and payments cleared. You can enter bank statements manually or load electronic statements that you receive directly from your bank. (See: Entering Bank Statements Manually and Loading Bank Statement Open Interface ) 2. Reconcile Bank Statements: Once you have entered detailed bank statement information into Cash Management, you must reconcile that information with your system transactions. Cash Management provides two methods of reconciliation: Automatic--Bank statement details are automatically matched and reconciled with system transactions. This method is ideally suited for b...