Oracle EBS Secondary Ledgers and Reporting Currencies

The intent of this document is provide the reader with a fundamental understanding of Oracles Secondary
Ledgers, enriched with lessons learned from actual implementations. Matt Makowsky is an Oracle Financial
Applications Consultant with 17 years experience and a Senior Solutions Architect with Perficient. Feel free to ask
him any questions in the comments section below the blog.
Oracle EBS offers two ledger types in addition to the traditional Primary Ledger: Secondary Ledgers and Reporting
Currency Ledgers.
To determine which to use, consider these basic business objectives:
1 Accounting Presentation does your business (for a given country), require a chart of accounts which is different
than your functional ledgers chart of accounts?
2 Calendar does your business (for a given country), require a reporting calendar which is distinct from that of
your primary ledger?
If the answer to either of these two questions is yes, then you will find you need a full Secondary Ledger, which has
all of the functionality of a primary ledger.
In a secondary ledger, you may have a different chart of accounts, a different calendar, and a different currency. In
addition, you may also define a reporting currency ledger that is directly connected to your secondary ledger. You
may also use special subledger accounting rules to create journals with different rules than your primary ledger.
In a reporting currency ledger, the ledgers accounting flexfield and calendar must be the same as the primary ledger,
and you cannot hook another reporting ledger to a reporting ledger. The reporting currency, must however, be
different from that of the primary ledger, whereas a secondary ledger can have the same currency as the primary
ledger.
If youre in any doubt, a full secondary ledger will be the preferred method, as you may decide shortly down the road
that you will require some of its advanced features. There is only a little more configuration involved, and it may pay
off down the road. You cannot however change the chart, currency, or calendar. If any of those requirements
change, you will need to build a new secondary ledger.
However if you decide to use a simpler reporting ledger instead, you can always manually migrate to a full secondary
ledger at a later date, by downloading data from either your primary or reporting ledger and re-uploading via ADI.
Both types of ledgers will transfer data from the subledgers and post at the same time as the primary ledger.
Reporting Ledgers will never have mapping issues, however currencies with exchange rates must always be in place
to avoid errors in processing.

With the use of either ledger type, subledger data may be converted to display and report in the currency and
accounting presentation of the secondary ledger or reporting ledger. The program may only be run once, so it should
be tested first in a test environment and evaluated to see if it meets your business needs.
Best Practices:
1 Use a secondary ledger if your local requirements also require that the statutory ledger is stated in another
currency.
2 Use a secondary ledger if your chart of accounts or calendar must be different than your primary ledger.
3 Choose Subledger Level postings in your configuration to obtain the most information out of your secondary or
reporting ledger, especially if another currency is required for reporting at detail level.
4 If at all possible, keep the calendar and flexfield the same so the ledgers may be joined in a ledger set. This will
enable responsibilities to link to both primary and secondary ledgers at the same time, as well as enable reporting
across ledgers.
5 If balances is all that is needed for a reporting currency, consider simply using translation. Translation is only run
at month end, and typically uses different rates between balance sheet and P&L accounts. Cumulative differences
are plugged into a cumulative translation adjustment account. Consider your business needs prior to activating a
reporting ledger rather than using translation. Both will give you different results on foreign exchange, as reporting
currency ledgers will pull the rate from the transaction in real time, and month end translation is working off of period
end and average rates against balances.
6 Name responsibilities that closely correspond to the names of your ledgers, so users know what they are
accessing when the choose a specific responsibility.
7 Use the profile GL: Data Access Sets rather than GL Set of Books Name to determine the access of the
responsibility. This will allow you to assign multiple ledgers to one responsibility (if they share the same chart and
currency).