The Force.com platform’s software updates throughout the year. The summer marks the second, of three, Salesforce and FinancialForce releases, each year. Click here for the Salesforce Summer Release Top Picks by the Big Bang team.
It’s the same story, in a new chapter for the Summer 2021 FinancialForce Release. This release brings us new tools and options to best leverage this leading Salesforce-native ERP solution. With some exciting new features and some quality of life improvements, this release will solidify FinancialForce’s place as the premier PSA and ERP solution. We will go over what the experts at Big Bang think are the most relevant features for this quarter’s update.
Building on an already impressive analytics and accounting tools, FinancialForce will upgrade their engine for the release of Summer 2021 with four different notable features:
- Analytics and Reporting in FinancialForce
- Customer Engagement in FinancialForce
- PSA and Revenue Recognition in FinancialForce
- Historic FX rates in FinancialForce
1 – FinancialForce Analytics and Reporting are Streamlined
If we take a look first at the improvement coming our way for the reporting side, FinancialForce will now overhaul its current Financial statement setup with a new financial report builder that will allow more flexibility with the creation of financial reports. Like advertised, the New Financial Report Builder will now allow you to create new reports from built-in financial reports templates (Trial Balance, Income Statement, Balance Sheet). These templates will be selected from the Report Creation window. Not only will this standardize your financial reports but also let you create business ready statements in mere seconds.
To allow for better detailed analysis of the financial reports, FinancialForce will now include a drill down functionality, letting users look at detail level data from the summary report. If you select a sum amount field on an accounting report, you will now be able to see the individual transactions behind the calculation. This new feature will allow you to source the transaction level information that impacts your financial reporting.
2 – Customer Engagement Advancements in FinancialForce
Starting from the last release (Spring 2021), FinancialForce now contains the Customer Engagement object. The engagement record helps to visually represent a customer lifecycle over multiple revenue streams and help your business better understand which activities generate the most value for your customers. The engagement object will provide in a fixed time frame the related products of a customer such as: items, PSA services and subscriptions. This tool provides an all-in-one view of all your customers’ engagement points with your firm. It will monitor your customers’ interactions with your firm and report on it for better and more efficient decision making.
The Summer 2021 Release will include new functionalities for the Engagement Objects. Sales orders will now be included in the Engagement Analytics. If you use the Supply Change Management (SPC) with the engagement functionality and your Financial Analytics app contains the SPC core dataset, your Engagement Analytics app can include sales order data.
3 – PSA and Revenue Recognition
If you use both Revenue Management and Salesforce Revenue cloud app, you can now integrate them using the Revenue Cloud connector feature. By enabling it, your orders are configured with a standard integration that lets you use revenue management to recognize revenue and amortize cost against Salesforce orders. Settings and templates are created that allow you to run revenue recognition directly against your source objects (to comply with ASC 605) or using revenue contracts (to comply with ASC 606 and IFRS 15).
4 – Historic Foreign Exchange (FX) Rates Setup in FinancialForce
Last but not least, FinancialForce now enables the storage of currency exchange rate (FX) at the time of creation of a transaction. This new feature will allow to calculate with precision the currency gain/loss throughout the source record lifetime
These exchange rates will also be used for the revenue management tools to calculate amounts to revenue or amortize costs. To finish, a new interface will be set up for displaying the historic FX rates. You will also be able to select which source objects can use FX rates for calculation.
FinancialForce Summer ‘21 Release Next Steps
When will these features take effect? Some features in the Summer ’21 release apply to all users and immediately took effect when the release went live. Other features require direct action by an administrator before users can benefit from the new functionality. Talk to your administrator – and we’ll help you out.
For the detailed release notes: FinancialForce Summer ’21 Release Notes.
