FinancialForce, the leading Salesforce-native PSA and ERP solution, now aligns its releases with the platform. If you want to read our Salesforce Spring ‘23 Release Top Picks, click here.
With the new features and enhancements included in the FinancialForce Winter ‘23 release, customers will find it easier to conduct their operations digitally and achieve genuine customer-centricity. We will go over what our Big Bang experts think are the most relevant features for this major update.
Click here to jump to the PSA improvements.
FinancialForce ERP improvements
1. Multi-Revenue Billing
Manage Subscription Contracts and Billing
Users will now have an easier time maintaining and editing active contracts by applying inflationary increases or decreases to ongoing contracts outside a renewal process.
2. Revenue Management
Automation
To keep track of anticipated revenues and streamline the monthly revenue recognition process, companies are now able to automate the entire revenue recognition process from beginning to end.
Users are able to simplify the revenue management process by using the RevenueScheduleAutomationService global API to generate revenue schedules and create accounting journals automatically.
3. Planning and Analysis
Financial Report Builder Formatting, Sharing, and Embedding
Financial data can be organized by report designers into polished, easily understandable reports that display current business performance. By producing shareable, accurate, and expert financial reports, financial teams may assist their stakeholders in learning about current business performance. The subtotal and measure calculations, column formatting, and increased sharing of report designs with CSV exports and imports are all advantages for report designers in this release.
Finally, users can use the Analytics Embedded Dashboard Component in Lightning to embed Analytics dashboards with Financial Report Builder filters.
4. Procurement
Purchase Contract Renewals
Using the renewal process feature, procurement managers may quickly produce a draft renewal contract from a current one. This eliminates the requirement for human data entry by transferring existing contract header and line information and updating the contract start and end dates. The contract can then be modified by users before being submitted for approval.
5. Global Business Management
Supporting Multi Tax Statuses for the Same Account (Vendor)
The new release supports multiple tax statuses on a Vendor account to provide payable documents, ensuring compliance for businesses trading with various nations.
6. Cash and Bank Management
End-to-End Bank Reconciliation
The bank reconciliation process has been upgraded to automatically create journals based on data that has been stored and to offer auto cash matching when producing a cash entry.
7. General Ledger
Efficiently Manage Period-End Close with Templates for Hard and Soft-Close Options
Accountants can streamline the process and close more quickly and effectively when managing year-end activities for a single company or several businesses. Soft and hard close choices for all companies or a particular group of companies can be chosen with templated close options.
FinancialForce PSA improvements
1. Services CPQ
Estimate Products
It is typical to develop numerous projects when estimates include multiple service offerings, such as implementation services and managed services.
In this context, FinancialForce launched estimate products in the Winter ’23 release that let users create more intricate estimates connected to numerous opportunity items when, in the past, an estimate could only be linked to a single opportunity. The Manage Products action helps add and remove estimate products from the estimate builder and the Send to Opportunity action pushes relevant data, such as role requests, to opportunity products.
Estimate Builder Enhancements
During the estimate stage, it is critical to collect the appropriate data with the relevant level of detail. The Estimate Builder component update improves user experience and adds more column options.
- Take immediate action through the new Estimate Builder’s new action column.
- Alter the columns to show margin percentages by rows and observe how applying discounts or altering rates will affect the margin.
- Include any extra custom columns that your company needs.
- Estimate products are now shown at the hierarchy’s top level.
Create Projects from Estimate
To ensure that none of the crucial information obtained throughout the sales cycle is wasted, creating projects from estimates is a crucial component of the handoff from sales to services. To ensure depth in functionality, Financial Force further developed the Create Projects from Estimate capability in the Winter ’23 release.
When generating a project from an estimate, users can now choose to display optional extra information by providing the API name of a field set into the Area Set.
When a project is formed from an estimate, administrators can map fields on the estimate to fields on the project using the Estimate to Project Mappings page.
Salesforce CPQ Integration
To enable a simpler approach for the usage of services estimates in Salesforce CPQ, the Services to Salesforce CPQ interface has been improved. A Create Estimate button has been added to the quote line editor in Salesforce CPQ for users to choose a quotation to be associated with an estimate at the time of creation.
This update provides Salesforce CPQ users with a more streamlined experience when using Services CPQ for estimating service items and adding them to the total quote, thanks to the direct connectivity between estimates and quotes.
2. Resource Management
Resource Optimizer
Based on programmable match options, the Resource Optimizer offers automated resource matching to multiple resource requests.
The Winter ’23 release includes extra configuration choices in the Weightings section on the filter panel to change the importance of the utilized fields, skills, and availability, as well as the ability to filter the resource requests to be matched based on the start date.
When locating the best resources to fill vacancies across various requests, these improvements give resource managers more power and flexibility.
3. Services Forecasting
Previewing Services Revenue Forecast Data
Services Revenue Forecasting takes into account extensive data sets from projects, opportunities, and associated items that reflect real or anticipated revenue to provide forecast data, employing revenue recognition methods.
With the introduction of Revenue Prediction Preview in the Winter ’23 version, users are now able to see what would be in a revenue forecast for the chosen project if it were to be run immediately. The PSA Administration page has access to it.
The preview not only reveals whether the integration between PSA and Revenue Management is enabled but also aids in tracing the origins of numbers in a revenue prediction.
Services Revenue Forecasting Calculation Enhancements
To make sure that calculations accurately reflect the many use cases encountered by users and to offer accurate Revenue Forecast statistics, FinancialForce has brought two improvements to the Services Revenue Forecasting calculation.
- When utilizing the Deliverable method, users can modify the active revenue forecast setup record to have a custom date field that decides the month in which income is put for costs and other changes.
- Revenue projection records for the relevant monthly time period now include information on actual, scheduled, and unscheduled hours on milestones and projects when utilizing the % Complete technique, allowing users to track where the data came from.
FinancialForce Winter ’23 Release Next Steps
When will these features take effect? The FinancialForce Winter ’23 release is already available to customers and will roll up from January through April 2023. If you need help accessing some of these new functionalities, talk to your administrator – and we’ll help you out.
For the detailed release notes: New Features and Enhancements in Accounting Winter 2023
You can also visit the FinancialForce Community Portal under the Release Hub tab for a complete overview of the features, trailhead path and videos.
