The first year as a standalone event, FinancialForce Community Live spanned two awesome days, filled with networking, learning, fun, sun and the general good times that you’ve come to expect from the FinancialForce Community.
Oh, and did we mention that it was held in VEGAS?!
With some big announcements expected to be made at #FFcomm16, we had to get in on the action, and we were once again proud to call ourselves a sponsor of the event. So, what were five awesome things we took away from FinancialForce Community Live 2016?
ACTION VIEWS
Probably our favorite announcement of the event, this summer Action Views are going to be removed from the FFA license to be included in the ERP license, meaning that as soon as you install one of FinancialForce packages, you will get access to Action Views.
So, anyone out there using SCM, PSA and/or HCM without FFA will have access to this very nice reporting tool which, among other things, allows you to go beyond the Salesforce limitation of 3 levels of relationships between the objects you report on. FinancialForce will also add ‘Related Content Panels’ to the Action Views to get access to more data from each row of an Action View, and you also get access to Chatter from Action Views. Pretty cool!
TRAINING AND DOCUMENTATION
FinancialForce is developing instructor-led training. This fall withing the FinancialForce Community we should get access to the “FinancialForce Knowledge” being used by FinancialForce’s support representative to solve cases. There’s likely to be more announcements to come this fall about FinancialForce Community, stay tuned!
UNIFIED BILLING
FinancialForce has expanded through acquisitions, and currently there are 3 billing engines: project billing in PSA, sales order invoicing in SCM, and the new subscription billing module that is being released this summer. For 2017, this should all be unified and payment process streamlined.
ENHANCED INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Enhancements to inventory management relating to customer returns and vendor returns are also scheduled for 2017, which are sure to help with virtual kits’ returns and quicken a complete sales order being returned instead of processing per line item.
LIGHTNING COMPATIBILITY
Currently, dashboards are displaying nicely with SalesForce Lightning, but to use the rest of the features provided by various Salesforce custom applications, including FinancialForce modules, you are likely to have to revert to the classic UI. We have heard whispers that we may hear some interesting announcements from FinancialForce regarding its usage on Lightning for 2017. WATCH THIS SPACE!