Using FDMEE to load balances into ARM

Hi all,
in the last months I noticed that there were lot of people who have no clue about Account Reconciliation Manager aka ARM. In this post series I will try to give you a brief introduction to the product... but always from FDMEE side :-)

We will try to answer questions like:
- What is ARM? What is it used for?
- Which is the role of FDMEE when loading balances into ARM?
- ...

Financial Monthly Cycle
To understand what ARM is I should start with talking about Financial Monthly Cycle. I'm pretty sure the concept slightly varies from one company to other but the essence should be the same.
So how can we see the financial monthly cycle of my company AKAFDMEE?

1. Our daily business activity transactions are grouped by activity/time (GL Debit/Credit). At the end of the day, we have huge volume of transactional data. Where is this data stored? my company is too big so we have many financial systems to facilitate management of all transactional data. All my transaction systems feed into common General Ledger Systems... you may know some of them: JD Edwards, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, SAP, etc.
2. We need to consolidate our business activity with other business activity and business units. For that, we have a tool called Hyperion Financial Management (HFM)
3. Mmm... all my data is now consolidated and we have to deliver all results, dashboards, financial statements, etc. to all stakeholders. Lucky we got Hyperion Financial Reporting (FR)
4. And now what? we would need to reconcile all reports, the data, balances from different GL systems... manual process required :-(

Going back to Hyperion, there was no reconciling tool until 11.1.2.2 where the new Account Reconciliation Manager was released as part of the Hyperion Financial Close Management Suite (FCM)

Account Reconciliation Manager - ARM

• Part of Hyperion FCM Suite
• Reconciles the final data, with the source data, down to the transactional level
• Facilitates the use of multiple currencies
• Facilitates the management of balances in larger account

ARM follows a reconciliation workflow that can be depicted as follows:

The objective of ARM is to reconcile balances from a Source System by comparing it with balances from Sub-System(s)

To summarize, we want to verify that specific balance is correct by reconciling accounts back to their respective source systems. It sounds easy, doesn't it?

ARM - System and Sub-System

The following 2 examples shows how ARM can be used in the business.
Example 1: reconcile EBS GL Balances with EBS Account Receivables Balances

   - What do we want to verify? EBS GL Balances

   - Source System = EBS GL

   - Sub- System = EBS AR

Example 2: reconcile HFM consolidated data with EBS GL Balances

   - What do we want to verify? HFM Data

   - Source System = Consolidated data extracted from HFM (EAL?, EA?...)

   - Sub- System = EBS GL Balances

FDMEE-ARM Integration

Why we need FDMEE? easy one... FDMEE will be used to load balances from Source System and Sub-System(s) into ARM so they can be reconciled.

Then, let's start seeing this as an integration:

- Target Application: ARM

- Source System: Balances from System and Sub-Systems

- Mappings: map source data into ARM "Dimensions"

- Data Load Rules: extract data from Source Systems and load it into Target Application

Now the key point is to understand what and where is done, it means, put all together.

Take care!