Workbook for a period helps your finance organization manage its tasks within Finance Close Automation (FCA) and enables you to easily view progress against your plan. A workbook organizes functions and close tasks for a function into a single context.

Because finance closing is a repetitive process, you typically create a workbook and define task dependencies only once, for the first period when configuring the FCA. From the next period onwards, you create the workbooks and tasks by duplicating the workbook from the prior period. The duplicate function copies over the entire workbook along with tasks including task dependencies.

Setting up a workbook for a given period involves the following tasks:

1. Create a Close workbook.

Close workbooks are the highest level of organization to track the overall progress of accounting and operational timelines. You create a close workbook for the period at the finance organization level. The close workbook contains workbooks for various functions such as Payroll, Revenue, and Tax.

2. Create functional workbooks.

Functional workbooks group related close tasks together. The functional workbooks are created at the department level such as Payroll, Revenue, Tax, and External Audit. In functional workbooks, you create close tasks for the accountants.

3. Create close tasks.

Close tasks are discrete pieces of work assigned to accountants at either period end. There must be one Final task in each functional workbook.

4. Define task dependencies.

Dependencies between the tasks help you to determine the order in which tasks are performed. It is easiest to build task dependencies while creating sets of tasks. FCA enables you to set finish-to-start dependency between tasks that indicates that a task must not be started until its predecessor finishes.