Multiple Reporting Currencies

Overview: The Multiple Reporting Currencies (MRC) feature allows you to report and maintain accounting records at the transaction level, in more than one functional currency. You do this by defining one or more reporting sets of books, in addition to your primary set of books. In your reporting sets of books, you maintain records in a functional currency other than your primary functional currency. You can set up multiple reporting sets of books and associate them with a primary set of books.
Your primary functional currency is the currency you use to record transactions and maintain your accounting data within Oracle Applications. The functional currency is generally the currency in which you transact most of your business and the one you use for legal reporting.
A reporting functional currency is a currency other than your primary functional currency for which you need to report accounting data. You must define a set of books for each of your reporting functional currencies.
When you enter transactions in Oracle Applications, they are converted, as needed, into your primary functional currency and each of your reporting functional currencies. You log into a reporting responsibility to inquire and report on transactions and account balances in your reporting functional currencies.

Oracle Applications Support for MRCThe following Oracle Applications support Multiple Reporting Currencies:
· General Ledger
· Payables
· Purchasing
· Receivables
· Cash Management
· Projects
· Assets
· Cost Management

[Cost Management amounts are converted to a specified reporting currency when you request a report. The converted amounts, however, are not stored in the Cost Management subledger. ]


When to Use MRC: MRC is specifically intended for use by organizations that must regularly and routinely report their transactions and financial results in multiple currencies, other than their primary functional currency. If you only need to report balances in a currency other than your primary functional currency, the General Ledger Translation feature is probably sufficient.
* MRC is not intended as a replacement for General Ledger's translation feature.

Typically, you should consider using MRC when:

1) You operate in a country whose unstable currency makes it unsuitable for managing your business. As a result, you need to manage your business in a more stable currency and still be able to report your transactions and account balances in the unstable local currency.

2) Your company is multinational, and you need to report financial information in a common functional currency other than that of the transaction or your primary functional currency.

3) You operate in a country that is part of the European Monetary Union (EMU), and you want to concurrently report in Euro in preparation for the pan-European currency.


MRC Features

1- Reporting Sets of Books: In Oracle Applications you record day-to-day business transactions in your organization's primary set of books or post transactions to the primary set of books from your subledgers. From the primary set of books, you can report your account balances in your primary functional currency.
To use MRC, you must define additional sets of books, called reporting sets of books, and associate them with a primary set of books. When defining a reporting set of books, you specify your reporting functional currency as the set of book's functional currency. This is the currency in which you want to inquire and report your transactions and account balances.
For example, assume your business is located in Canada. You use a primary set of books whose functional currency is Canadian Dollars (CAD), but you also need to inquire and report on your transactions and balances in U.S. Dollars (USD), since this is the functional currency of your parent organization. You define a reporting set of books with a functional currency of USD, then you associate this reporting set of books with your primary set of books.

Multi Org set up

Setup Steps [21]

1. Develop the Organization Structure
2. Define Set of Books
3.1 Define Locations for the Legal Entity, Operating Unit and Inventory Organization
3.2 Define Locations for Bill-To Sites
4. Define Business Groups
5. Assign Responsibilities with Business Groups
6. Define Legal Entities
7. Define Operating Units
8. Define Inventory Organization
9. Define Auditable Units
10. Set MO: Operating Unit & GL Set of Books Name Profile Option
11. Conversion to Multi-Org
12. Define Responsibilities
13.1 Set Profile Options for Operating Unit
13.2 Set Profile Options for Operating Unit Responsibilities
14. Define Inventory Organization Security
15. Implement the Applications Products
16. Assign Key Flexfield Security Rule and Assign Security Rule
17. Run the Operating Unit
18. Implement Document Sequencing
19. Define Intercompany Relations
20. Set Top Reporting Level Profile Options
21. Set Up Conflicts Domains




Step 1 [Oracle Required/ ERP Required]

Develop the Organization Structure
Level: Enterprise
Navigator: None
Purpose: A successful implementation of Multiple Organization support in Oracle Applications depends primarily on defining your organizational structure in the multi-level hierarchy used by Oracle Applications.


Step 2 [Oracle Required/ ERP Required]

Define Set of Books

Level: Enterprise
Navigator: Setup > Financial> Books> Define
Purpose: Use the Define Set of Books window to enter your sets of books


Step 3.1 [Oracle Required/ ERP Required]

Define Locations for the Legal Entity, Operating Unit and Inventory Organization
Change Responsibility to Inventory

Level: Enterprise (For each new Operating Unit, this will need to be completed) (including Manufacturing)
Navigator: Setup > Organizations > Locations

Pay Per Click (PPC)

Pay-per-click advertising is one of the most cost-effective methods of getting leads known to Internet business owners. It gives you instant traffic, and allows you to test your business model in real time.
At the same time, pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) is not as simple to use as the PPC companies will have you believe. If you jump into the system without preparing for 'tracking' your results, doing deep keyword research, establishing your ROI and most importantly, testing your ads, you'll lose a lot of money really fast.

The PPC Model

In the PPC advertising model, you have three core elements - keywords , ads , and bids . These three elements are combined with ' placement ' to create an advertising model that displays 'relevant' ads on search engines (in response to keyword searches), portals and websites that opt to display such ads on their pages (the ads to be shown are determined by a keyword analysis of the page).
For a PPC campaign, you need to know the keywords that you are targeting. For example, for a niche site that promotes a time management product, I would create a list of keywords that included keyword groups containing terms related to time management, productivity, saving time, self improvement and maybe even business soft skills. As I've told you before about keyword research, you should have a big list so that you capture most, if not all, of your target traffic.
The next step is to write the ad copy for the ads that will be displayed for your searches. The ad copy is extremely important because along with your bid amount, this will determine the 'conversion rate' (explained below) of your ads. Write concise, compelling ad copy that highlights the benefits of your website / product, and avoid fluff.
Once you've written your ads, it's time to bid . The bidding mechanism differs from PPC engine to engine, but the idea is the same - your bid amount is the maximum cost (usually calculated in U.S. dollars) that you are willing to pay for each keyword. It's important to know how much you can afford in terms of bidding costs so that you avoid going into bidding wars with your competitors, and also so that you don't spend more than you make through this campaign.

Cost-Per-Click

Cost-Per-Click ( CPC ) is the amount you pay each time a potential customer 'clicks' on one of your ads that they see on their search engine results or on websites. This is often less than the maximum bid amount you set for each keyword.

Conversion Rate

Conversion Rate is the ratio of clicks over impressions (the number of times your ad is displayed on searches or page loads on websites). A typical conversion rate is between 2 to 3 percent - that is, for every 100 impressions, you get 2-3 clicks on your ads.

Placement

If there is more than one person bidding for a keyword (as is almost always the case), the placement of the ads (which ad comes in on the first slot, which comes in on the second, etc.) is determined by bid amounts of each competitor. The higher your bid, the better your placement (Google adds the conversion rate into their placement calculations, and I'll tell you how later). Your conversion rate to a certain extent depends on how high your ad is placed on the 'rankings' and this leads advertisers to place high bids just to rank at the top. The trouble with this approach is that you might enter into a bidding war with your competitors and lose a lot of money.

Tracking

Tracking refers to measuring which keywords are bringing you the best leads or sales, and which keywords are bringing you 'window shoppers' - people who are 'compulsive clickers' and don't buy or sign up. Tracking your ad campaign will help you further fine-tune your ads and improve your ROI.

ROI

Your Return-on-Investment (ROI) is determined by how much you are spending over how much you are earning in net profits from your ad campaign. It's important to establish a base ROI before your start your ad campaign - assume a conversion rate of 1 percent - so that you don't over-spend and are able to run this campaign within your budget.

The Pay Per Click World

Currently, there are two major PPC engines, Google AdWords and Overture (now known as Yahoo! Search Marketing ). While there are many alternatives such as Espotting (now Miva), MetricsDirect and Kanoodle, the top two PPC engines are a class apart when it comes to delivering results.
However, one of the first pieces of advice you'll hear from most people is that bigger PPC engines such as AdWords and Overture are too 'expensive' to break into (with CPC for top positions easily passing $3-$4 for many keywords, and reaching $10 for really competitive keywords).
In reality, if you are just starting out, it's critical that you pick one of the top two PPC engines. Why?
Traditionally marketers judge PPC engines on the following criteria:

• Reach - How large your potential target market is.
• Cost-per-click
• Quality of traffic - Do the leads fit your customer profile? Are the willing to spend on your products?
• Quality of service - The tools and help offered by the PPC engines.

Overture and AdWords beat their competition on all of these metrics except CPC. However, the benefits of 'cheaper' clicks are more than compensated for by the ease of use of the big two, and more importantly, as any PPC expert will tell you, the quality of traffic from Overture and AdWords is far better than from other PPC engines.

Overture

Overture was purchased by Yahoo!, and recently renamed to Yahoo! Search Marketing. The name's not catchy, but with Yahoo! Behind the 'second-largest' PPC engine on the Internet, you can expect that the quality of traffic and services will improve over the next year. Yahoo's acquisition of Overture is the single biggest reason advertisers have started paying attention to Overture again, although Google AdWords still commands leading respect.
Overture is a manually edited PPC engine. When you write ads for your website, these ads (and the keywords you specify) have to be approved by human editors before they can appear in search results on Overture partner websites. While this ensures that the quality of ads remains above a certain level, this is also a hassle, as new ad campaigns can take several days to be approved, and there is a distinct lag between the time you plan to improve a section of your campaign (for testing) and the time those changes actually go live.
Overture keyword bids are totally transparent, meaning that any advertiser can see at any time what other advertisers are paying for that particular keyword. This is both useful and harmful - advertisers can accurately target their 'ad placement' positions, but knowledge of the top 2 or top 3 bid amounts can easily lead into a bidding war, and competitors undercutting your ads by posting a bid that is $0.01 higher than yours.

Google Adwords

Google AdWords is the leading PPC engine on the Internet, although it's closely followed by Overture. Combined, the two PPC networks are distributed on nearly every search engine or portal.
Google is totally automated - your ads go live within minutes of being written. This is one of the two significant advantages AdWords has over its competition - no need to wait for 'approval' of your keywords and ads, which can take a few days on other PPC engines.
Google AdWords, like Overture, does not charge you your maximum bid amount, but just one cent more than the bid lower than yours. On the other hand, AdWords bids are not transparent like Overture - bidders have no idea what their competition is bidding. This reduces the threat of bidding wars.
The second advantage of AdWords is that it includes conversion rate calculations in its ad-ranking algorithm. Simply put, your ad may rank higher than your competitors' even if you are bidding lower, just because you have a higher conversion rate. AdWords rewards ads that are better written, and thus provides a subtle barrier against ad spam.
PPC advertising has become the ultimate marketing tool for testing new ad campaigns, business models and landing pages without spending too much money. Where else can you test a sales page by sending it 100 leads for $5?
If you are looking to promote your website / product effectively but cannot wait for your search engine rankings to show on Google or Yahoo, you should seriously consider PPC advertising as an advertising tool that not only brings in instant traffic (and sales), but is a hedge against ranking fluctuations by ensuring that you stay on the top page for your target keywords.
This is just a general overview of Pay Per Click and marketing/strategies. Stay tuned for Part 2 coming soon, where I'll go into some much more advanced techniques to really ramp up your traffic, all the while spending less money!

Email Marketing for SEO

This being my 500th post, it feels like a bit of a milestone, and I thought I'd write about something that is seldom discussed: SEO and email marketing, or, more specifically, how email marketing can be helpful to your SEO efforts. Ideally, your efforts to promote your website should not be limited to SEO alone. Digital marketing is a complex affair, and its various aspects can work effectively together to bring targeted traffic and conversions. Email marketing is a big subject, but I will only talk here about how email marketing can assist your SEO efforts.

As you know, the two pillars of successful SEO are killer content and quality backlinks. The ultimate point of SEO is goal conversion. How can email marketing help?

Content. Creating content is hard work. As it is created, we want to get the most mileage out of it. Newbies at web marketing often make the mistake of reusing the same content on the Web, for example, by putting the very same article on their primary website and then also on blogs and in article directories, for the benefit of backlinks. But in the eyes of search engines such “reprints” merely create duplicate content, and this tends to hurt your site’s SEO and also reduces the value of those backlinks. However, although this may change in the future, at present search engines don’t read or index email messages. If you have a mailing list, you can create a newsletter and circulate it to your subscribers by email and also publish it on your site without any worries about content duplication. That’s double mileage out of the same content.

Backlinks. These are the backbone of SEO. One of the challenges in link building is getting potential readers to know that you have got fresh fantastic content up there. Marketers are increasingly aware that social network promotion can be helpful in this department, but they sometimes forget that good old email works just as well! Use your email newsletter to let your subscribers know you have updated your site; include links to the new pages with brief descriptions. This will drive interested traffic to those pages, hopefully winning you backlinks if people see value in your content. Linking miracles can happen if your email newsletter goes viral via forwarding.

Goal conversion. Especially if your product or service has a long, complex sales cycle, you should not rely on SEO alone to retain your prospects. Sometimes potential customers spend whole months doing due diligence before they commit to buying this or that solution. They often start with informational, not commerce-oriented search queries. People may first find your site through such a query, but then they may easily forget the query they used and the fact that they bookmarked your URL. However, if you get them to subscribe to your newsletter, you can keep building trust and branding through the entire length of the sales cycle. In this scenario email marketing does not necessarily improve your SEO as such, but it helps it achieve its goal.

So here are some tips that will help you develop email marketing intelligently in conjunction with your SEO:

• Use a legitimate mailing list. Absolutely do not send spam. Spam is illegal in some parts of the world. In the US it is illegal under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. Never buy or rent mailing lists even if they are touted as "opt-in." A purchased email list is never opt-in; it is always a spam list. If you send spam, you will be reported, blocked by ISPs, harassed by SpamCop, blacklisted. Not only your email address but your whole domain may find itself on blacklists and blocklists, which can' be good for your SEO either. If you are on a shared IP address, other users will suffer too. So how do you build a genuine list?
• Create a signup center on your site, visible from all pages. You can also use other techniques to get people to sign up. For example, take them to the signup page when they click on "Lean more" information links. Or create pop-ups inviting them to sign-up once they have posted a blog comment. Always let them know that you won't share their information (and be true to your promise).
• The most reliable form of email subscription is "verified opt-in" or "double opt-in." People opt-in by signing up and are then invited to validate their subscription by following a link in the confirmation email sent to them. This has been show to significantly reduce the number of spam complaints. (Yes, people can report your messages as spam even if they have properly subscribed!)
• Provide a lot of terrific content on your site before expecting visitors to sign up. Use nice charts and graphs a lot in your information: many readers perceive them as signs of expertise.
• Always include your company’s physical address in each email message. (This is required by the CAN-SPAM Act.)

On-Page Optimisation -- An Introductory Guide

It's an often asked question on the forums: what is on-page optimisation -- so here's a quick guide to what does and doesn't work. The intention is to dispel some common myths and to focus on those things that can provide a tangible improvement to your search result positions. It's not intended to be a one-stop shop for on-page SEO knowledge -- that would be beyond the scope of a single post.

So what is on-page (or on-site) optimisation. This basically encompasses all those factors and elements on the page itself that can help you rank better. This are things that you have direct control over, unlike off-page (or off-site) optimisation where, although you can influence them, you're not in direct control as you're dependent on another site/webmaster.

Head Elements

Title Element

This is perhaps the singularly most important element on the page for determining your position in the SERPs. Google, Yahoo! and MSN place a great deal of weight on any terms that appear within the title, so it's worth spending some time thinking about it.

1) Keep it concise. The more terms you have in the title, then theoretically the less weight gets passed to each. Too short and you could miss out on some additional terms, too long and you start to lose the value. Quite often you'll see sites that try to include all their targeted keywords in the homepage title -- don't do it. Instead, have a dedicated page for each term where you can focus the title and page contents on just that term. Most sites will have more traffic landing on inner pages than the homepage, so there's just no need to try and get all your keywords on the one page.

2) Don't repeat keywords unnecessarily. You get no additional benefit from repeating keywords and if done excessively it can end up looking ridiculous to potential visitors (see point 3 below). Take for example a title such as "Widgets - Red Widgets, Blue Widgets, White Widgets | Widget Store". This could easily be rewritten as "Red, White and Blue Widgets from the Widget Store", as well as several other possible variations.

3) Let it read well. The title of your site in the search results will almost always be taken from the content of the title element on the page. It's important therefore that it reads well for any potential visitors. There's no point ranking #1 if you're going to lose visitors because your title puts them off. Such problems could be caused by excessive repetition (making it look spammy) for example.