For a small percentage of our customers and only after the above steps have still not had the desired effect, the creation of summary accounts may provide the desired performance gains.

The Oracle General Ledger provides the ability to create summary accounts which are special accounts that hold a balance at a summary level. GL Wand can use these summary accounts to facilitate faster reporting. Typically, summary accounts will help with reporting performance where the reports run at higher levels in the reporting hierarchy take very long to complete. For example, if you have a cost centre hierarchy with many levels and running a GL Wand report at the top level cost centre takes very long, you could create summary accounts at this top level cost centre and this could dramatically improve reporting time. The process is as follows:

       Decide at what level in the hierarchy the GL Wand reports will be executed.

       Follow the instructions in the Oracle General Ledger user guide to create summary accounts at this level.

Performance gains can be quite substantial but it will depend on your specific configuration and reporting requirements. Below is a case study of the performance gains that have been achieved:

Customer A had the following

       15 million GL Balance records

       8 segments in the accounting flexfield

       Complex cost centre hierarchy with many levels

       GL Wand report only reported on values in the first 3 segments

       GL Wand report had 1900 Get Balance calculations

       Report was running for more than 20 minutes

After creating summary accounts the report running at the top level cost centre ran in 55 seconds.

To configure GL Wand to use summary accounts go to the GL Wand options form and uncheck the “Disable Summary Account Checking” option, which is set by default.