FinancialForce has announced the general availability of its Summer release for its ERP and Professional Service Cloud solutions. The company has evolved its messaging in recent months to Services-as-a-Business, providing software solutions to the ever-evolving challenges of services organisations today.
Its solutions now fall into three areas that dovetail neatly into the Salesforce CRM and other AppExchange specialist solutions, such as contract lifecycle management. Professional Services Cloud helps organisations with their new services estimation module before delivering professional services automation. Its ERP Cloud solution then continues the opportunity to cash lifecycle before completing the cycle with the newly launched customer success cloud application.
Underpinned by the Force.com platform, it provides a flexible, scalable solution with automation, building intelligence and innovation. That innovation is set to continue with investment in its R&D, seeing a 250% growth in that team over the last three years.
Scott Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer of FinancialForce, commented: “Organizations continue to be buffeted by market disruptions, from spiraling inflation, to new COVID variants, and unanticipated supply chain issues. Our new Services-as-a-Business approach delivers the automation, intelligence, and innovation that services organizations need to become more agile so they can expertly turn disruption into opportunity.”
In the analyst briefing, Dan Brown, CTO, FinancialForce, explained what the company aims to deliver to address the Services-as-a-Business approach. He commented: “If you’re going to run Services-as-a-business, you have to have a set of connected capabilities along the opportunity to renewal, end to end process. These things can be complex. They need to be interconnected. Most of the time, customers run multiple services concurrently, as multi revenue streams that lead to deliver a solution and value creation to their customers.”
Summer 22
The latest update, Summer 22, aims to continue the trajectory to address this challenge. Scott summarised it as: “It’s all about intelligent reconciliation, Report building on the ERP cloud side, as well as intelligent and smarter staffing and capabilities around service estimation that you see in PS cloud.”
In fairness, there is much more in this release than that, customers should review the release notes to see what they can take advantage of. The full release notes were unavailable to Enterprise Times as of writing this article.
ERP
There were several notable enhancements within the financial solution that FinancialForce offers.
It has added an automation rules engine for bank reconciliation. It enables organisations to close periods faster through a matching process than customers can predefine by exact matches, or for example, using a range of dates for the transaction. Enterprise Times asked Dan what percentage of reconciliation accuracy customers can expect.
Dan responded: “We have seen from customers that they desire more flexibility in the number of and which criteria are used for matching. We expect 100% matching if the transactions are present in the system. There could be cases where there is a transaction on the bank statement that is not in the system, and this is what we are working on next – dynamically creating cash receipts and matching for those exception cases.”
Within its new FP&A tool, there is now the ability to carry out headcount analysis from imported headcount data. FinancialForce has partnerships with ADP and XCD and integrates with others, but there is no sign that it has a single global partner.
Summer 22 continues to improve the UX, taking advantage of Salesforce Lex. There is a new user experience for Requisitions, Purchase Orders, Purchase Contracts and Journals. The Global Org Chart is also enhanced to enable multinational organisations to consolidate faster with a visual interface. It also highlights relationships between entities in the group organisation.
There are improvements to the opportunity to renewal process, including support for early termination of multi-year contracts. Heidi Minzner, Vice President, Product Management (ERP Cloud) at FinancialForce, explained another improvement: “You can look at this deferred revenue waterfall in whichever currency the user prefers, regardless of what currency is in use for billing and revenue recognition.”
There were also improvements to the Financial Report Builder, including new formatting capabilities to support statutory reports. The export to PDF and Excel now maintains the formatting as well.
Professional Service Cloud
FinancialForce continues to extend the capability of its resource management. This is a key theme for many PSA vendors. The Summer 22 release enables resource managers to differentiate between essential and desirable skills when searching for resources. The capability to automatically assign by an absolute match or a weighted preference will be welcomed for larger firms. One new feature of note also allows resource managers to compare the profit margins of their selections.
A new task timer enables consultants to track time on specific tasks. It will enable them to accurately record the time taken on a specific task avoiding the need for timesheet entry. It will be interesting to see how widely this is used.
There are improvements to the analytics capabilities with four new dashboards. These analytics are predefined but available out of the box using CRM analytics from Salesforce (Tableau) without requiring additional licenses. These dashboards can be drilled into but also offer insights for improvements. They include:
- Utilization: This includes a visualization of resource usage, with areas of improvement identified
- Revenue Forecast: Visualize activity and explore variances to baselines
- Burnup: View the use of quoted times and resource for the project
- Services CPQ: Track effectiveness & accuracy of estimates from quote through delivery
FinancialForce has also added improvements to Services CPQ with an updated interface to simplify the creation and amendment of estimates. There are new role configurability features—including role templates, role grouping, and skill requirements for services estimates.
Customer Success Cloud now and the future
The delivery of services is no longer a single engagement; companies need to understand how they can renew and continue engagements. To achieve this, FinancialForce launched its customer success cloud. This release sees improvements in task management and improvements to workspaces and the UX.
FinancialForce also uses its own solution to support its customer base. This is part of Accelerate its full customer lifecycle experience. Dan highlighted three new features. The first is a new checklist for new customers that identifies their Salesforce org security permissions, license requirements and configuration changes that may be required ahead of installation. The second is a dashboard that gives administrators better control over when updates are deployed to sandboxes or live and automatically generates a PDF report once the deployment is completed. The third is an update and refresh for its help, community and training portal with a new search feature.
Enterprise Times asked Dan whether some of these features would be rolled into the Customer Success Cloud. He replied: “We have had conversations with a couple of ISVs we have partnerships with. Nothing yet, but that connection certainly is one we’ve thought about as well.”
Enterprise Times What does this mean
This release has no major new functionality, but the iterative improvements are impressive. They address and improve the suite for nearly every stakeholder in the business, from the consultants on the ground with an easy-to-use task timer to the finance teams working on period closes.
The volume of changes is impressive, and with a new cadence of three updates a year, every update promises to be a major one. Previously, FinancialForce issued four updates, two major. What will be interesting is if it can develop the new Accelerate functionality into a repeatable solution for the customer success platform. Whilst this may only apply to Salesforce ecosystem ISVs, it could become a powerful tool and help corner the market.
