Accounting Seed has unveiled its Summer 22 release. This is the first release under its new (and slightly more boring) naming convention. In future, Accounting Seed will name releases Winter, Spring and Summer to align with Salesforce releases.
The naming replaces the slightly more flamboyant flower names that Accounting Seed had previously used. The last release was Magnolia. The challenge with giving interesting names is that they rarely align with what is unveiled. One cannot help being a little saddened by the loss of the historic naming convention. After all, there are over 150 types of flowers and over 400,000 plant species worldwide.
This release focuses on enhancing automation and improving the consolidation features that were also a focus in the Magnolia release. There are also enhancements to the core finance features, including expenses, reporting and revenue, as one would expect from a leading accounting solution on the Salesforce platform.
Ryan Sieve, chief technology officer at Accounting Seed, commented: “With every product release, we are serving our customer base in a deeper, more impactful way. Every new feature or enhancement is deployed because our customers provide feedback and we listen.
“The Summer ’22 release reinforces our commitment to providing the most up-to-date technology and automation capabilities to our 50,000 users, and the entire Accounting Seed team is thrilled to bring it to market.”
A new pricing strategy
In addition to the release, Accounting Seed has also revealed a new pricing strategy with three tiers: Essential, Professional and Premier.
- Essential consists of the core package with standard support. No extensions are included. It supports up to 300 general ledger accounts, 400 account variables and 7,500 quarterly source documents
- Professional consists of the core package with business support. It includes two extensions and an additional ASU certification. It supports up to 600 general ledger accounts, 800 account variables and 15,000 quarterly source documents
- Premier consists of the core package with business support. Three extensions and an additional two ASU certifications. It supports up to unlimited general ledger accounts and account variables and 30,000 quarterly source documents
The extensions available include:
- Project Accounting/Expenses
- Inventory
- Multi-Currency
- Consolidations
- Purchase/Sales Orders
- Field Service Connector
- Non-Profit Connector
Sieve noted: “We support a broad variety of customers in diverse industries and countries. The new tiered product offerings enable us to work with our customer’s unique needs and better support their business processes and goals. As our customers grow, we have the ability to scale with them—that is the purpose these product packages serve.”
The actual cost of these new tiers is available on request.
Summer 22
New features
There is no major new module with this release. This does not mean there are no new features, however. There is a new foreign currency translation capability. This enables foreign currency translation to run as a background process during consolidation. Users can set up exchange rates with a start date (not time). These rates are used during consolidation and not for normal transactions between purchase/sales and GL.
Enterprise Times asked Accounting Seed if customers have to enter these exchange rates manually, as the release notes infer. The product team responded: “We plan to publish a recipe that will assist the Salesforce Administrators and Business Partners at each business to automate the download of exchange rates into the custom exchange rate table.”
With the current volatility in exchange rates, customers dealing with multiple subsidiaries supporting different currencies will welcome this update.
The second new feature automates creating a refund for an overpayment or duplicate payment from a cash receipt. This occurs more frequently than it should, and the automation reduces the manual work it generates. The process includes support for generating a check if required.
Enhancements
Enhancements include:
- There is a new way to amortize revenue. Accounting Seed already supports Straight Line – Full Month (Monthly Amortisation) and Straight Line – Daily Amortization (Daily Amortisation). The solution now supports Straight Line – Prorated Monthly
- Users can default the billing date from an opportunity to the current date or the close date on the opportunity
- It is possible to pay a billing in a future accounting period. Once paid, the applied date is set to the billing date, not the payment date
- Expenses also support the new amortisation method, Straight Line – Prorated Monthly
- Consolidations now support the ability for ledgers to be in a different currency to the parent ledger where the multi-currency extension is enabled. The new currency translation will run automatically where this is configured
- There are several updates to reporting with improvements to the standard reports, including the ability to consolidate results across GL accounting variables and suppress opening and closing balances in the trial balance report
- Administrators have two new permission to use: GL Accountant and GL Accountant ERP
- In addition, this release has numerous bug fixes that existing users should note
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
While this is not a major release, there are a lot of updates that fill some of the smaller gaps in the product. What is missing, perhaps, are localisation improvements for Europe, where Accounting Seed is looking to expand its footprint. Will these be forthcoming in the Winter 22 release?
Accounting Seed is building out the consolidation and multi-currency support that will enable it to expand in Europe, especially to support those companies with subsidiaries across the region. Winter 22 promises to be a larger release, but there is little indication of what it will contain.
