What might be the purpose of this column in eTRM (Oracle eBusiness suite)

Question

I realize this is quite specialized question(about Oracle's eTRM + eBusiness suite ) I'm trying to figure out the meaning of this

REMIT_TO_ADDRESS_ID NUMBER  (15)

which comes from the AR.RA_CUSTOMER_TRX_ALL table . The reason is that in a query I have, there's a bug like this where we say:

LEFT OUTER JOIN ra_customer_trx_all 
  ON  rct.REMIT_TO_ADDRESS_ID = acct.REMIT_TO_ADDRESS_ID    \

(acct is from the table hz_cust_acct_sites_all , by the way)

My guess is that REMIT_TO_ADDRESS_ID is some kind of meta-data?

I really appreciate any pointers/tips. Thanks.

Answer 1

Little bit rusty, but did Oracle Apps for 10 years. From your question I understand that you are new to Oracle Apps technology. ra_customer_trx_all stands for:

• "RA" => "Accounts Receivables" also known as "AR" (something you sell and want money for),
• "customer" says it,
• "trx" => "transactions",
• "_all" => all records across all organisations (multi-org).

It is a nice table with lots of features :-)

When in Oracle Apps a column is listed with name ending in '_id' and data type of number(15, 0), it is generally a reference to a row in another table. Depending on the Oracle Apps module, you will sometimes find also a foreign key constraint. But generally most Oracle Apps modules rely on the frontend to enforce referential integrity.

So remit_to_address_id refers to another table. In this case address information. Also, the naming of the column tells us that the referred row is used in a special way (role) namely as "remit to".

You might want to join it to the address table of Apps. When you do so, please check the columns listed in the indexes. The multi-org field org_id may be listed first (probably not in AR). If you forget them, you will still have good results since the ID-s are unique across the system, but the index might not be used.

For end user queries, I generally recommend to use the multi-orged view instead of the _all table. This ensures that users only see their current organisation. Remember that you need to set up the client_identifier session variable (if I recall correctly) to store the current organisation ID in.

I hope this helps you.

Answer 2

I have no knowledge of eTRM, or any other Oracle business application.

That said, as a complete wild guess, I would say that the REMIT_TO_ADDRESS_ID is the ID of an address that a payment of some kind is sent to, and that the address is optional (thus the outer join). So, in an Accounts Payable system, you may have a vendor, who has a normal business address. But when you send actual monies, they have an optional Remit To Address, and the payment is sent there instead of the normal business address.