Get ready for forecasting in 2025 with Oracle Cloud EPM Financials

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Written By David Pabst

By David Pabst, Solution Architect and Oracle Ace Pro â™ 

Did you know that Oracle has several prebuilt, wizard-based planning accelerators included as part of your Oracle Cloud EPM Planning subscription?

These prebuilt modules are designed to streamline planning, budgeting, and forecasting for various aspects like Sales, Cost, Opex-Non Labor, Labor, Capital, and Project spending, among other functional areas like Key Sales Planning, Long-Term HR Planning and Daily Cash Forecasting. Oracle Cloud EPM Planning provides a suite of modules, each tailored to address specific financial and operational needs, helping organizations move beyond manual, spreadsheet-based planning to a more structured, automated approach.

The real value is getting up and running quickly with a planning process that you can evolve and grow into.  This can be especially helpful if you are coming from spreadsheets or a competing financial planning software application and need to get running fast (e.g., days or weeks).

TL;DR these prebuilt modules are pretty good, maybe not perfect, get you a significant amount  of prescriptive budgeting and forecasting content … FAST. Once you are up and running, you can improve, do something different, etc.   One benefit, if you are new to the platform, these accelerators get you using the tool and let you feel out what you like and what you might want to change.

Prebuilt Modules in Oracle Cloud EPM Planning

Oracle Cloud EPM Planning offers a variety of prebuilt, configurable modules to cover different business domains. These include:

  • Financials: Provides a full set of financial statement plans, integrating the P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow. This module supports budgeting and rolling forecasting, offering flexibility to manage different financial reporting scenarios.

  • Workforce: Allows organizations to plan by employee, job code, or both, using driver-based models to handle compensation-related expenses. This module simplifies labor cost forecasting by providing visibility into headcount and compensation planning.

  • Capital: Enables organizations to control capital expenditures (CapEx) by providing a clear view of planned capital needs. The module helps manage the lifecycle of capital investments and provides insights into the impact of CapEx on financial performance.

  • Projects: Supports cost management across different types of projects. Whether for IT initiatives, marketing campaigns, or capital projects, this module ensures organizations can track and forecast project-related expenses.

  • Strategic Modeling: Allows businesses to engage in long-range financial modeling, offering the ability to simulate financial outcomes and stress-test different business scenarios. This module is ideal for businesses seeking to understand the long-term impacts of strategic decision like M&A, adjusting Financing, issuing stock, paying a dividend, and so on.

In addition to these prebuilt modules, Oracle Cloud EPM Planning offers full-built, tailored applications for:

  • Strategic Workforce Planning: For the CHRO, designed for long-term workforce planning, this application allows organizations to model future workforce needs based on strategic goals, ensuring alignment with overall business objectives.

  • Sales Planning: Meant for the CRO, supports revenue planning by providing tools to forecast sales targets, quotas, and key-customer planning. This application integrates with financial models to ensure that sales forecasts align with overall business goals.

  • Predictive Cash Flow Modeling: Meant for the Treasurer, helps organizations predict future cash inflows and outflows based on historical data and trends, offering better visibility into liquidity and financial stability. This module ensures that businesses can anticipate cash shortages or surpluses and adjust strategies accordingly.

By offering these prebuilt modules and tailored applications, Oracle Cloud EPM Planning helps businesses activate complex planning and forecasting processes for different parts of the organization fast.    These are all included as part of your subscription, you just need to “turn them on.”

All four modules are easily navigable for Finance and business-users alike with big, easy to understand icons.

The “Financials” Module, Accelerator, Wizard!

Oracle Cloud EPM Planning Financials supports budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting across an integrated set of financial statements including P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow. It provides a foundation for both rolling and zero-based planning methods. You can configure your own dimensions and turn-on various planning methods like trends, drivers, and direct inputs.

Key features of the Financials module include:

  • Integrated Financial Statements: Integrated P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow statements.

  • Built-in Planning Chart-of-Accounts: Simplifies the process of loading natural accounts into pre-established financial statements, accelerating the turn-on process.

  • Data Integration: If you are using Fusion GL, there are prebuilt integration to you’re your GL actuals.  Or, you can upload GL balances using spreadsheets.

  • Support for Multi-Year Planning: Organizations can plan up to 4 years ahead, tailoring forecast frequencies (weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually) to their needs.  In addition, the modules support a 13-month year if you are in Retail.

  • Currency Translation: Built-in translation that allows you to separate input currencies from reporting currencies.

  • Prebuilt Dashboards, Reports and Input Forms: So you can get using the application fast and deploy input templates to different people in your organization.

The Financials module includes pre-built input forms, calculations, drivers, reports, and dashboards across the P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement.

Who Should use this wizard?

This module is a good fit for organizations that have a “typical” for-profit style P&L with Sales, Cost, SG&A, Operating Income and Below-the-Line items.  If you have an oddly structured P&L like in some financial services, not-for-profit, or government it may be a tough fit. I equate using one of these modules like if someone handed you a prebuilt spreadsheet that could do planning for your organization.   There is a ton of value if you are looking for a quick start for an FP&A style reporting and budgeting and forecasting solution.   If you want to create your own business process from the ground-up, then you should do that!

OK – I like it but want to change it!

That’s the great part of Oracle Cloud EPM Planning, it’s flexible and you can tailor it to your organization’s needs.   The prebuilt modules, like Financials, gives you a good head start with quality financial content and then you can extend from there.    I find many clients will activate the accelerator, leverage its bones, and then extend with their own calculations, reports, dashboards, and so on.

Conclusion

Oracle Cloud EPM Financials module is a great quick start to provide integrated P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow planning/forecasting in a few days/weeks.  Once you get using it you can extend it, modify it, improve it, and change it to meet your needs!

Here are some additional resources you might want to look at here:

Good luck Planning in 2025 for 2025!

David Pabst
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Connected Planning: Value Beyond Finance