Oracle Project accounting interview questions:

Many of you have asked me about the questions that are asked for an oracle project accounting position.

Here am putting together some of the common questions that i used to ask the candidates in an interview.

Explain in few words about Project Costing

Project Costing module helps in calculating the cost and accounting of a project. It also interacts with other modules such as Payables, Purchasing to interface costs related to a project.

Explain in few words about Project Billing

Project Billing module helps in calculating the revenue and billing of a project. It helps in generating invoice for a customer project based on the customer agreement on that project, typically based on agreed upon bill rates, payment terms etc. Invoice is generated to the customer based on the number of hours worked on the project. Project Billing also helps to perform milestone billing based on the percent of work done. Revenue and Invoice accounting also done using project billing.

Explain in few words about Project Management

Project Management module helps project managers to manage the project effectively by providing them the visibility of a project ( how the project performs, what is the status of the project, any issues in the project etc).

Financial Plans help project managers to effectively plan the budget of a project. Using Change management the financial plans can be managed effectively. Status Reporting feature helps to communicate the project status to  the stake holders of the project.

Explain in few words about Project Resource Management

Project Resource Management module helps project managers to effectively manage the schedule of the project using the available resources. It helps in scheduling of the resources across various tasks of the project based on the resource availability. It also provides capabilities to staff various resources in an organization to a project by raising resource requirements. Project managers also can raise resource requirements for a particular open position in a project and can also mention the resource competencies required for that position.

How Project accounting interacts with Accounts Payables module?

Project related Supplier invoices are created in Accounts Payables module. This is a cost against the project and hence has to be transferred from payables to oracle projects. To interface the supplier costs, PRC: Interface Supplier Costs process can be run. This process fetches all the approved and yet to be interfaced invoices to the projects module.

These invoices are transferred to Projects module as expenditure items. Each eligible invoice distribution in an invoice is transferred as an expenditure item to projects module. The cost of the item is same as the invoice distribution amount.

How Project accounting interacts with Purchasing module?

Project related Purchase Orders are created in Oracle Purchasing module. This is a cost against the project and hence has to be transferred to oracle projects.

 There are 2 ways to do this.

1) Create a Supplier invoice against the PO. Then interface the supplier invoice to projects module.

2) Incase when we cannot wait for an invoice to be create, we will have to transfer the PO cost directly to projects. This can be done by creating a Purchase receipt against that PO. Then interface the receipts directly to projects module.

To interface the Purchase Receipts, PRC: Interface Supplier Costs process can be run. This process fetches all the receipts matched against  the project related PO.

Receipt distributions are interfaced to projects module as expenditure items.

Explain about the cost distribution process in project costing

Project costing module calculates costs for expenditure items which are not yet costed. For example the timesheets transferred from OTL module are interfaced as uncosted expenditure items. The cost for those timesheets are yet to be calculated.

Cost can be derived by the use of cost rates setup against the project. Cost rates can be setup against a specific organization, Job or an employee. For example if 8 hours is worked on a project in a day and the cost rate for the timesheet’s employee is 100 usd / hour. Then the cost of that employee on that day is 8 x 100 = 800 USD.

There can be additional costs associated with a project. For example, to perform the 8 hours of work on that day, an employee might have used additional resources such as internet, telephone, electricity etc. These costs are called as indirect costs or burdened costs.