Summer 21 FinancialForce Image by Bruno /Germany from PixabayFinancialForce used its virtual summit FFX to unveil the latest features of both its PSA and ERP solutions. The company also announced that it is launching FinancialForce Customer Success Operation Cloud (CSOps Cloud) as part of its fall release. CS Ops Cloud is an innovative application that ties together elements of Salesforce and the FinancialForce ERP. It is focused on organisations that offer subscription-based product and services. The intent is to improve customer relationships through tracking, managing and leveraging all customer touchpoints.

The Summer 21 release include services estimations, enhancements to the financial report builder, drop-ship analytics, and improvements to the UX. FinancialForce also revealed two new integrations, the first to Salesforce Revenue Cloud and the second through a new partnership with Storecove. Storecove will offer FinancialForce access to its Peppol network and the ability to support e-invoicing. This is critical to support its expansion into Europe. FinancialForce intends to include the Storecove integration as part of the Fall release.

Summer 21

Correction

This article previously stated that Services Estimation is part of the Summer 21 release, it isn’t. It is due out in the Fall release. The article has been updated.

FinancialForce continues to strengthen its products, building on the major release in Spring and adding more functionality in the Fall. For the Summer 21 release, has added strengthened functionality in several areas.

Integration with Salesforce Revenue Cloud was  strengthened with support for revenue recognition. The solution now supports ASC 606. Users can further analyse the data, including subscriptions, usage, tangible products, and services with Tableau CRM (formerly Einstein Analytics) dashboards.

FinancialForce has enhanced the Financial Report Builder (FRB). FRB enables users to create complex financial reports and maintain the ability to drill down into the source data. Other enhancements include drop ship analytics. Users can analyse drop-ship revenue and costs across multiple customer projects and accounts. Users can create consolidated invoices for customers. The analytics can provide a fuller and better picture of customer behaviour.

The development team also continues to enhance the user interface. It has introduced several Lightning features to the product to make it easier for customers to configure, navigate and search across their instance.

Fall 21

Dan Brown demonstrated several new features that FinancialForce aims to include in the Fall release. These include Services estimating and customer success operations cloud.

Services Estimating

This is a completely new feature. It brings project estimations closer to Salesforce opportunities, complementing CPQ and CRM engagements.  It enables sales execs to better manage opportunities by giving them access to project estimations within PSA. They are able to consider the availability of resources, the types of resources required, existing project templates and known risks. This information helps to build service estimations on the platform. For multi-element quotations, it is possible to attach the services estimation to the CPQ quotation. This combines Salesforce Revenue Cloud with FinancialForce PSA.

Dan Brown, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at FinancialForce
Dan Brown, Chief Product and Strategy Officer at FinancialForce

Enterprise Times asked Dan Brown how this would impact the Zimit relationship around its services CPQ solution. Dan Brown answered: “We have a good relationship with Zimit. This is going to change that relationship. We believe the right strategy here is an on-platform solution. Once you start putting something in the middle, it gets costly, and it can get inconsistent.

“Data duplication has caused many a problem in the enterprise. That was really our motivation. We’ll still defer to certain use cases. They have a good product, but we felt like this was strategically necessary and that the architecture needed to go a different way.”

Localisations

For some time, FinancialForce has delayed the rollout of its localisations. These were initially delayed due to Covid and more urgent customer requirements. However, Dan Brown revealed that Germany, Norway, Belgium and Sweden localisations will be available in Fall 21.

It will help the EMEA team meet local businesses’ needs and help attract local channel partners. Beyond this, Dan Brown indicated that FinancialForce aims to become pan-European but selective in Asia for future localisations. It will be interesting to see what localisations follow.

Customer Success Operations Cloud

Customer Success Operations Cloud delivers a single view of the customer across the whole engagement cycle. It enables stakeholders to view information from across sales, delivery and finance and responds to signals to maintain or improve customer satisfaction. As Dan Brown commented: “We believe that customer-centricity is really in the DNA of being a successful service economy company.”

Scott Brown, CEO at FinancialForce commented: “CS Ops Cloud underscores FinancialForce’s commitment to the concept of customer centricity and offers a critical new way for organisations to delight and retain their customers. With Sales, Services, and Support all on the Salesforce platform, Customer Success was the sole silo in the customer journey, until now.

“The solution gives customer success teams a new way to expand the view of their customers while allowing organisations to truly build their business around the customer through the combination of FinancialForce and Salesforce solutions.”

CS Ops Cloud will offer an innovative way for organisations to improve customer satisfaction scores and reduce churn. It will deliver a way that organisations can manage the entire customer lifecycle, measure it, highlight insights, and take actions to rectify issues or improve positive trends. The intent is to help organisations drive positive outcomes across satisfaction, retention, expansion and referrals.

e-invoices and PEPPOL

In the Fall release, FinancialForce also plans to unveil the ability to send and receive e-invoices through the PEPPOL network through its Storecove integration.

Enterprise: What does this mean

While Dan Brown signalled this is only a minor update, it is a testament to his team’s increasing productivity that FinancialForce has rolled out such significant improvements. Customers attending FFX will hear more about the latest updates and future product development that FinancialForce is undertaking.

Scott Brown will also give an update on the channel first strategy that he spoke about with Enterprise Times earlier this year. Most of the sessions at this year’s event will also hear customers talk about their experiences. They will explain how they have implemented and leveraged FinancialForce solutions for their benefit.

 

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here