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Oracle EPM September 2026 Updates (26.09)

By Lead Innovative Technologies|7 min read|Oracle EPM

Oracle's September 2026 Cloud EPM update (version 26.09) rolled out to test environments on September 4 and to production on September 18. It is a wide release: 50 features across the platform, most of them small, low-risk changes that ship enabled by default. The headline theme is Financial Consolidation and Close getting its own set of AI assistants, alongside continued Dashboard 2.0 migration, a genuinely useful Data Integration enhancement, and a batch of Enterprise Data Management refinements that matter more than their size suggests.

This summary is based on Oracle's official 26.09 EPM Cloud Readiness documentation. If your team is on monthly cloud updates, most of this lands automatically, but four features need setup before anyone can use them, and that is worth planning for before the update reaches Production.

Financial Consolidation and Close Gets Three New AI Assistants

This is the biggest functional change in the release. Three Generative AI features arrive for FCCS at once, and all three require Generative AI to be enabled first (Home → Application → Settings → Enable AI → Generative AI):

  • Consolidation Assistant. A chat-based, AI-powered tool for Service Administrators that detects system and consolidation performance issues, analyzes metric anomalies, and recommends fixes, combining insights that previously lived across several separate diagnostic screens into one guided conversation.
  • EPM Assistants: Consolidation Approvals Assistant. Brings the EPM Assistants framework, already available in other business processes, into FCCS approvals.
  • Generative AI in Data Discovery. Extends GenAI-assisted analysis into FCCS Data Discovery.

A fourth close-specific change, Consolidation Settings for Concurrent Consolidations and Translations and Queued Jobs, also ships as setup-required and targets close performance directly, letting administrators control how many consolidation and translation jobs run concurrently versus queue.

Why it matters:These are the only four “Setup Required” features in the entire 26.09 release, and three of the four are FCCS AI assistants. If your close team has been waiting to pilot Generative AI in Cloud EPM, this update is the natural place to start, since Oracle has now extended the same assistant pattern used in Planning and Account Reconciliation into consolidation.

Dashboard 2.0 Keeps Absorbing Dashboard 1.0

Oracle continues retiring the original dashboard framework module by module. In 26.09, dashboards are automatically upgraded to Dashboard 2.0, with UI cleanup and access to the latest chart types, across:

  • Planning modules: Capital, Financials, Workforce, and Projects
  • Sales Planning
  • Strategic Workforce Planning
  • Tax Reporting

The upgrade happens automatically during application enablement, no action needed. Separately, users can now designate a Dashboard 2.0 page as their default landing page after login instead of navigating to it every session.

Why it matters: As with the Redwood UI rollout in earlier releases, each of these automatic conversions shrinks the Dashboard 1.0 footprint a little further. Training material, screenshots, and any custom navigation guides for the affected modules are worth a quick review after this update lands in Production.

A Real Fix for Data Integration Quick Mode

Data Integration's Quick Mode now supports SQL for complex target mappings, using#SQL mappings and SQL target expressions, CASE logic, SQL character functions, and conditions based on multiple source columns, with source dimensions referenced using dollar-sign syntax such as $ACCOUNT$ or $ENTITY$. It applies across Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management, Financial Consolidation and Close, FreeForm, Planning, and Tax Reporting.

Why it matters: Complex SQL transformation logic used to be the main reason teams stayed on Standard Mode instead of migrating to Quick Mode. This removes that barrier, which means existing Standard Mode integrations with SQL-based mappings can move to Quick Mode without a redesign or custom preprocessing step.

Enterprise Data Management: A Long List of Small, Useful Changes

EDMCS gets more individual line items than any other product this cycle, thirteen in total, and while each one is labeled small-scale, several change day-to-day governance work meaningfully:

  • Change Management Assistant enhancements.The GenAI-powered assistant adds a welcome message with example prompts, the ability to model nodes after related viewpoints (not just the current one), conversational node renaming, smarter search fallback (an empty “Equals” search now falls back to “Contains”), and request-item context inside comments for multi-item requests.
  • Contextual properties for nodes in viewpoints and default property groups for viewpoints, reducing repetitive manual property configuration.
  • Disable Workflow at Application Level system setting, a governance control for turning off workflow at the application level.
  • Execute and monitor Oracle Integration Cloud processes directly, plus extended visibility to previous import, export, load, and extract jobs.
  • Include management hierarchy for ownership approval policies, tightening approval routing.
  • New artifact types for granular template export, navigation links for node data type properties, and node count dashboard improvements.
  • Relaxed permission check during resubmit of an enriched request, reducing avoidable resubmission friction.
  • REST API for system events audit and submitted date and by column in request activity, both aimed at audit and compliance reporting.
  • Access Token URI for OAuth 2.0 Cloud EPM connections, and additional Pillar Two tax allocation properties for Tax Reporting applications.

Why it matters: None of these are announcement-worthy on their own, but together they are exactly the kind of governance and audit tightening that shows up on an EDMCS health review. Metadata teams running frequent change requests should read through the Change Management Assistant changes in particular, since the modeling and search improvements affect a workflow used every day.

Account Reconciliation: Multi-File Attachments

Reconciliation Compliance now supports attaching multiple files in a single step, by browsing or drag-and-drop, across reconciliations (attachments, comments, multi-line attributes, manually added transactions) and Alert instructions.

Why it matters: A small usability fix that removes a repetitive one-file-at-a-time step from close-period reconciliation work, particularly useful for reconciliations that carry several pieces of supporting evidence.

Advanced Predictions: Fitted Values for Dynamic Calc Members

The Model Estimates (fitted value) line in the Advanced Predictions Explainability chart, for Planning and FreeForm, now works for dynamic calc members, which it did not before. Model estimates can only be viewed in the Explainability chart itself, not in an ad hoc grid, since the values are calculated dynamically.

Why it matters: Anyone piloting Advanced Predictions on a model that leans on dynamic calc members previously had a gap in explainability for exactly those members. This closes it, making it easier to validate a forecast model before trusting it in a live planning cycle.

EPM Automate, REST APIs, and Platform Administration

A cluster of admin- and automation-facing changes rounds out the release:

  • New runApplicationDiagnostics EPM Automate command.Triggers the Execute Application Diagnostic job, which validates an application's metadata, forms, rules, and other components against best practices and produces a downloadable diagnostics report, no setup required.
  • New functional grouping of REST APIs, now mapped directly to business processes for easier discovery.
  • Output and error file support in the SimulateConcurrentUsage command and REST API, and updates to the Get Insights and Get Insight Summary REST APIs.
  • Audit data availability through EPM Automate and REST APIs, extending audit trail access beyond the UI.
  • First Name is now optional for EPM users, and environments can remain on a one-off patch or manual skip update for a maximum of six months before Oracle requires them to catch up.
  • New Calculation Manager filter by Rule or Template type, and the ability to attach multiple files simultaneously in Task Manager, Supplemental Data Manager, and Enterprise Journals.
  • Simplified FreeForm application creation, and new guidelines for avoiding block contention in business rules, added directly to the Operations Guide.

Why it matters:This is the release's quiet, practical layer. The diagnostics command and the block-contention guidance both feed directly into the kind of proactive health checks and quarterly patch testing that a well-run Oracle EPM AMS practice relies on.

Profitability, Tax Reporting, and Narrative Reporting

Enterprise Profitability and Cost Management gets a performance enhancement for some allocation rule types, consolidates multi-period requests to clear POVs and calculated data into the batch job, and adds trace support to the Enhanced PCM Agent. Tax Reporting adds additional Pillar Two tax allocation properties and its own EPM Assistants Tax Journal Assistant for users, plus the same Dashboard 2.0 upgrade described above. Narrative Reporting's single change this cycle is small but useful for governance: audit logs now include books.

What This Means for EPM Teams

Taken together, 26.09 confirms two things Oracle has been signaling all year: Generative AI assistants are expanding business process by business process, and this month it is FCCS's turn, and platform-wide cleanup, from Dashboard 2.0 to EDMCS governance to REST API organization, keeps happening in the background whether or not anyone opts in. Almost all of it ships safely on its own. The four Setup Required items in FCCS are the exception, and they are worth scoping before this update reaches your Production environment on September 18.

If your team does not have a documented process for reviewing readiness notes like this one every month, that is exactly the kind of AMS habit worth building early. If you are newly joined or just starting out in an EPM support role, our Oracle EPM AMS Practitioner Workshop covers how a real AMS team reads updates like this one and turns them into a repeatable process instead of a last-minute scramble.

Want help scoping the FCCS AI assistants, reviewing what this update changes for your environment, or building a repeatable process for monthly Oracle EPM updates? Lead Innovative Technologies can walk your team through it.