How to obtain a balance per period based on a criteria different from the Accounting Flexfield Structure or a static data from a transaction?
With the Supporting References you will be able to define an analytical criteria based on any sources (Oracle Payables, Oracle Fixed Assets, Oracle Purschasing, etc…) and any data type (Transaction date, description, segment of a DFF, etc…). This analytical criteria will be linked to a type of account (Expense, Revenue, Liability, etc…).
In other words, the Supporting References allow you to have a new analytical criteria to:
• Provide a reporting balance based on a specific value or a combination of them for an account type
• Allow you to perform a reconciliation based on a free criteria
Let me give you a short example:
A company enter many invoices for a period, some of them are related to a project (in this example the project is the installation of a CRM software).
Each invoice will be translated to a journal entry with one or more expense lines.
The Accounting Flexfield Structure (Chart of Accounts) do not include a Cost Center to follow such type of project. Then this company do not use Oracle Project Accounting…
So, how to be able to point and check the expenses related to the CRM Project ?
The only information provided by Payables to SLA is the word CRM somewhere in the header of each invoice…

THE solution: the Supporting References of SLA!
With this feature you just need to define an analytical criteria based on the invoice header entered in Payables. So, by using the words of the SLA setup and configuration process we can say that the Supporting References are based on a Source and an Application.
To perform such configuration there is in the standard menu of SLA an OA-FRAMEWORK page built to make the related setup.

Nevertheless, such Supporting Reference will be available to be used only after it will be assigned to the expected account type because the goal of the Supporting Reference in our example is to be able to follow the expenses for one or more invoices, not the liability or the tax amount…
So, the next step is to assign the Supporting Reference to the expected journal line type inside a journal line definition. Note that to be able to perform such setup we need to have a customizable Application Accounting Definition… Such AAD can be created by a copy from the standard AAD for Payables.

After this new AAD have been validated then associated to the ledger, each invoice finally accounted will give you the opportunity to perform a search based on the word CRM. Which will be used as value in the Supporting Reference to make a query of each invoice header. So, in the Supporting Reference Balance page we have only the relevant invoices like expected.

We can see there is a hypertext link on the line amount, which will allows us to perform a drilldown on all details.