Set up and maintain the Master Reference Geography Hierarchy, which can:

• Be used across the Oracle E-Business Suite for various purposes and tasks related to locations, for example address validation.

• Provide the underlying structure from which administrators create tax zones for user-defined geography hierarchies.

  Note: You perform setup tasks for user-defined geography hierarchies outside of Geography Hierarchy administration. To create and update tax zones and zone types, you use Oracle E-Business Tax.

See: Geography Hierarchy Overview.

From the Geography Hierarchy: Countries page, you can access the various features for administering each country in the Master Reference Geography Hierarchy. The original list of available countries comes from the FND_TERRITORIES table. After you initially define the hierarchy for a country, you can continue to maintain it using the same administration functionality.

Prerequisites

Optionally use Receivables lookups to add and manage the code types and data providers available for defining geographies. This table shows the lookup types.

See: Defining Receivables Lookups, Oracle Receivables Implementation Guide.

Administration Process

1. Structure:

   • Define country structures of geography types to establish how geographies within the country are hierarchically related.

   • Create geography types as needed.

   See: Defining Country Structures.

   Attention: You must define the country structure before you can define specific geographies for a geography type within that structure. You should define a complete and accurate country structure the first time around, because you cannot insert new levels between existing levels after geographies are defined. You can add new levels below the lowest level in a structure.

   For example, you want to use Geography Hierarchy for United States address validation. For the US country structure, you define the geography type Country as the parent of State, State as parent of County, County as parent of City, and City as parent of Postal Code.

2. View Details:

   • View and define the list of geographies for a specific geography type in the country structure. See: Viewing and Defining Geographies.

     For example, for the United States, you first define all the states for the State geography type, then the counties in each state, the cities in each county, and the postal codes in each city.

   • For each geography in the list, you can also click Update to enter additional details.

   Suggestion: Access to View Details (for the list of geographies) and the corresponding Update (for information specific to a geography) is available in a hierarchical manner, based on your country structure. On each View Details page, you can access the list of geographies for the geography type one level down.

   For example, when you click View Details for United States in the Geography Hierarchy: Countries page, you get a list of states within the US. For each state, you can click View Details to get the list of counties within that state, or click Update for that state. So, if you want to update information for Redwood City, the navigation path is: View Details for United States > View Details for California > View Details for San Mateo > Update for Redwood City.

3. Update: Maintain information specific to a geography. See: Updating Geographies.

   For example, while you define a specific state in the US, you can enter alternative names or codes for that state.

4. Manage Validations: Specify geography validation level and address styles at the country level, and map geography types in country structures to location table attributes for address or tax validation purposes. See: Managing Validations.

5. Run the Geography Name Referencing process to map addresses in location tables to master reference geographies. This mapping is used for tax calculation. See: Geography Name Referencing Process.

   Suggestion: Set these related profile options:

   • HZ: Batch Size for committing records in Geography Name Referencing process

   • HZ: Number of workers for a given Geography Name Referencing request

   See: Profile Options and Profile Option Categories.