Plus and Minus of Oracle Financials
March 02, 2018
Plus and Minus of Oracle Financials
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Asset Lifecycle Management
- Financial Control & Reporting
- Lease and Finance Management
- Procure-To-Pay
- Travel and Expense Management
- Grants
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Financials
I use Oracle Financials for all financial management from requisitions, to vouchering and interface to assets. General Ledger income and expense, budgeting, tracking of all monies. Grants are very important to the organization and we track NIH and many types of grants and research, that is half of our main effort. We are expanding to mobile inventory, travel, and expenses. Its been a long road to get everyone using this new product, its been installed here almost 5 years. We added to the product connections, through interfaces to other applications such as fundraising, patient payments, annuitant payments, vendor invoices, and recently laboratory interface. We utilize the workflow approval process and have expanded to a successive chain of approvals, based on accounting. Being a healthcare organization, security is very important and don't expect to go to the cloud anytime soon, there are too many unknowns and HIPPA is very important to us.
Pros
- Requisitions to PO's to voucher and assets. This works with all the tools available. Like the option to customize the PO and check print formats.
- General Ledger to reporting and yearend is very smooth and works well. Have had some issues with reversing journals.
- Grants like all the features and have been able to configure as needed to manage projects and activities.
- Inventory and tracking work well when integrated into our ordering for customers and stocking the inventory.
Cons
- Payment Requests are new and need to be improved for paying invoices, without receiving the product. This is almost half of our payments made on a regular basis. This happens for licenses, subscriptions, and software. We have customized the workflow and still hit issues, users need to be able to modify the request and approval chain before submitting. In the past, we had customized requisitions to accomplish something similar but would prefer to use delivered features.
- Struggling with the licensing of applications. We decided not to use Hyperion due to the large space/storage requirement and our limited space. So we wanted to trade out this product for the budgeting detail product. But working with Oracle on modifying the licensing of products is like pulling teeth. Once you subscribe to a set of products, they do not allow or facilitate changes without lots more money. As a non-profit, the funds are not available. We have been trying for over 2 years and they want more money even though we are giving up Hyperion(expensive) for the Budget module (much cheaper). I consider this a huge disadvantage in dealing with Oracle and their regimented way of dealing with customers and no options to make changes. Huge negative.
- when working with Oracle support, many times you are getting someone in a foreign country and their understanding of the English language and the products are very limited. So when describing an issue, many times it is not understood. Also, the response should be within days, and when it extends to weeks, for just an update it is getting ridiculous. So my only option is to call and get things escalated.
- as a non-profit this is not something we look at.
Oracle has a strong Grants module and that is why the selection.
Comments
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