FSAH/FAH - Financial Accounting Hub

FSAH known as Financial Services Accounting Hub was changed to FAH(Financial Accounting Hub) recently as the former title was misleading. This hub has nothing specific to Financial Services, rather can be used anywhere to address the universal challenges of compliance, single source, drill down to subledger, consolidation and duplication of accounting engine.
Major industries having versatile business tend to build lots of high complexity application to cater to multiple business needs. Businesses can vary from loan to core banking to retail banking to investment banking and so on. The applications meant to do business are either developed in house or procured from market or can have mix of both. This may look good having individual systems to cater to individual operations. However it throws up lots of challenges from maintenance and accounting perspective. Primary challenges are:-
1. Accounting transactions stored in different places. No single source of truth.
2. Excessive effort in building and maintaining accounting treatments at multiple system level
3. Difficulty in enforcing corporate wide standards
4. Ineffective reporting from compliance perspective (GAAP, IFRS etc)

Everyone desires to have a single source of truth where it can look in for any transaction information that has already happened. This apart, re-usability is something everyone wants to have to ease out maintenance and cut cost.
The above challenges led to the evolution of concept called “Accounting Hub”.
Oracles Financial Services Accounting Hub (FSAH/FAH) solves these problems with a centralized accounting rules engine and repository. Accounting journals are created with a transparent rules transformation engine, validated, and stored in an auditable format in a single location. Your organization can enhance its reporting, efficiently account for products and services, simultaneously meet diverse and mutually exclusive accounting requirements, and increase internal controls.
Why FAH
· Implements centralized Business Rules, Accounting Services for different products and Accounting Systems and acts as a Financial Data Store with different representations for different reporting purposes.
· Allows user to maintain coherent accounting policies with tight internal controls. This rules repository contains the instructions for completing accounting transformations.
· Provides a common accounting engine that transforms data from source systems into journals and stores them in the accounting repository.
· Is tightly integrated with Oracle Applications like Oracle Receivables, Payables, Fixed Assets Oracle General Ledger etc. The OGL set-ups provide FSAH with the chart of accounts to be used for accounting generation. FSAH generates accounting for OGL
· Provide visibility, efficient and control in the streamlined accounting process.

Flow
· Identify Data
· Load data in staging area
· Create Events in FAH
· Create Accounting in FAH
· Transfer Journal to GL
· Post Journal in GL
Complexity Factors
Following Factors bring in more challenges in a FAH implementation. They should be given diligent consideration before stepping and committing to FAH projects.
• Number of Feeder Systems
• Input Data formats
• Multi Currency
• Business Rules
• Accounting Rules
• General Ledger Mapping
• Drilldown to Feeder systems
• Reporting Needs