Under the tag line of Business Unlimited, FinancialForce announced its Fall 2018 release of its solutions as Dreamforce 2018 kicks off. Each of its products is to receive functional improvements.
In addition, FinancialForce has now completed the work to make the product fully Lightning ready. This project, codenamed Adonis has seen FinancialForce transform its UX into what it believes is a beautiful ERP solution for an organisation leveraging the services economy. This allows customers to take advantage of the lightning features such as Utility Bare, Outlook/Gmail integration, Lightning actions as well as build Lightning communities.
FinancialForce detailed improvements to three products:
- FinancialForce PSA
- Subscription & Usage Billing
- Financial Management
In addition to this it will also demonstrate at Dreamforce the new FinancialForce Analytics solutions first announced at this year’s user conference. These are now available in general release.
Professional Service Automation – PSA
This is the year that PSA solutions, including FinancialForce, have focused updates on better resource planning. FinancialForce has taken this a step further. Not just improving the planning capabilities of its product, with increased flexibility, but also improving resource forecasting tools.
The forecasting elements are also improved through the general availability of PSA Analytics. Business leaders are now able to view graphical details and analysis against Billings, Backlog, Capacity and Utilisation all key metrics.
The improvements to resource management are underpinned by a more comprehensive skills database. This enables resource managers to better identify the ideal team member for projects. Ultimately, this means that resources are allocated better, leading to improved utilisation and profit.
In addition, PSA has also delivered improvements to project management. These include improvements to project base lining and versioning. There is also a revised Gannt chart redesign which includes support for WBS.
PSA analytics also enables business leaders to have a better view of their forecast, delivering better forecasting accuracy and insights. Drawing from data across CRM, PSA and Financial Management information, the forecasts are more accurate and are delivered in a better way, leveraging the new US that Lightning offers.
Subscription & Usage Billing
While FinancialForce has recently focused on the service economy it has recognised that product still exist. Companies have a growing number of revenue models that often straddle different business models. The new version supports Subscription services, consumption – and usage – based offerings, and billing for tangible goods. Recent improvements mean that companies are now able to deliver consolidated invoices. There are improvements to pricing and usage billing. In addition, it has improved the discounting options.
Financial Management
The Financial Management solution has now added new dashboards and improved reporting that is powered by Salesforce Einstein. This delivers the capability or reporting on millions of rows of data.
Other improvements include bank reconciliation and improvement to the collections functionality. Collection managers now have access to a new dashboard. This gives them a better view across customers enabling them to resolve issues before they become problems that put contracts at risk. In turn this can help turn contracts into renewals and improve collection of revenue.
What does this mean?
FinancialForce has been slowly changing over the last year as it evolves into a more mature organisation looking to land larger deals. That has been accompanied by a 38% year on year growth (Fiscal 2017 – 2018). This is an acceleration after a slow growth in the previous year after Tod Nielsen took over as CEO. That growth has led to more recognition. It reached the Forbes 2018 Cloud 100 list.
FinancialForce has been recognised recently by a number of industry organisations, including 64th on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. FinancialForce has a strong presence at Dreamforce again this year and will show in more detail some of these updates.
