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Timing of Data on OBI Reports

As a general rule Oracle data in Oracle Business Intelligence (OBI) is refreshed nightly starting at midnight and available by 6:00 a.m. PST. However, there are special cases like during the month-end-close process and the Graduate Financial Services (GFS) push for each payroll period, which vary from the general rule.

During the first 6 business days of each new month, also called a General Ledger (GL) Period, Stanford closes its books for the prior month. Even though a new calendar month has started, the prior GL Period is still open. While it remains open, the next GL Period cannot receive transactions because only one GL period can be open at a time. Refer to Month-End Close for more details and calendars.

During the 6-day close, different Oracle modules stop receiving entries for the open GL Period and start accumulating transactions which will post to the next GL Period once the close process completes. This creates a timing issue for the reports which run on GL Periods:  Consolidated Expenditure Reporting (CER) and Revenue and Fund Management (RFM). The other systems (e.g. Expense Request and iProcurement) will continue to post transactions which become visible in their reporting but not in CER and RFM reports.  

An example would be an expense request transaction that is paid on the second day of the calendar month. It will appear in Expense Requests Reporting (ERR) but not in CER. Once the expense request module has closed, instead of posting to the earlier GL Period it will start accumulating transactions for the next GL Period. Once the period closes, Systems and Reporting Operations starts the processing of the accumulated transactions for the new GL Period which will appear in the CER and RFM reports in 1 to 2 days. Once a period is closed all of the related transactions appear in all OBI reports. The timing issue relates to comparing reports from CER or RFM with reports in other subject areas or real-time Oracle reports during the days of the month end close process when CER and RFM are not receiving data for the next GL Period.

Refer to Topic Overview: Commitment Management for details but only the last closed and current open GL Periods show any commitments. Most student commitments are updated at the end of the month except for assistantship salaries, which is updated at the end of each pay period.

The total of future salary commitments are posted to the current GL Period in OBI CER but the expenditure item date of the transactions reflects the true pay period of the commitments so it is possible to export CER salary commitment data to Excel and pivot by expenditure item date, grouped by month and year, to show the months of the commitments.

Last Updated: Mar 11, 2022

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