Oracle Support for Time Period Spreading and Grid Spreading in Flex Forms

 New Oracle Support for Time Period Spreading and Grid Spreading in Flex Forms

Oracle Smart View for Office (Mac and Browser) now supports the spreading of data for periods and grid spreading in flex forms. This ability was earlier restricted to regular forms only.

This applies to: Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management, Financial Consolidation, and Close, FreeForm, Planning, Tax Reporting

To perform period spreading, select the Spreading Enabled check box in the Data tab in Smart View Options and then enter the new value you need to spread across time periods as per the defined spreading rules.

To perform grid spreading, you can enter a value or percentage to increase or decrease an existing value or enter a new spread value. 

The value is spread to the related cells as per the selected spread pattern.

Business Benefit: Users now have the same capability of spreading data in flex forms, just the way they use spreading in regular forms.

Tips And Considerations

Spreading is supported only in cases where the Period dimension is not a flex-enabled. 

If the Period dimension is in a column, then flex should not be enabled on columns. Similarly, if the Period dimension is in a row, then flex should not be enabled on rows.

Spreading Data for Time Periods

In a form, the spreading rules for time periods are set in the web application as part of the dimension property settings.

When you work with a form in Smart View, and depending on how the form was set up by the administrator, data values can be spread, or distributed, in several ways:

• Spread the value of a summary time period to its base time periods or to the first parent or first child of the parent time period
• Spread values among children and parents proportionally, based on existing distribution
• Spread values based on the weekly distribution of a quarter, which could be 4-4-5, 5-4-4, 4-5-4, or None (as set up by the budget administrator)
• Temporarily lock the values of certain cells while spreading data over time periods (see Spreading Data with Cell Locking)
• Spread values for different time periods using a different spreading rule for each separate time period on the same row or column dimension. For example, FY2018 can have formula fill, and FY2019 can have flow.