According to the Oracle documentation3, "Oracle Essbase is embedded within Oracle General Ledger and provides multidimensional balances cubes. Every time a transaction or journal is posted in General Ledger, the balances cubes are updated at the same time." Essbase balances cubes are used for interactive reporting and analysis, but also for performing allocations using calculation manager. Calculation manager enables you to create allocation rules that use balances and budgets from Essbase as sources and targets. The other options are not features that leverage Essbase cubes.