FinancialForce made its Spring release generally available this week. While there was no new product this time, the update provided a rich list of features that demonstrated the company’s investment in its R&D team over the last few years.
Scott Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer at FinancialForce, commented, “Our new Spring 2023 release is designed to give organizations the certainty they need in these very uncertain economic times. Given the pace at which market and business conditions change, services businesses need confidence in their ability to manage estimates, skills, and resources and solve complex problems. This new release gives organizations a complete, customer-centric view of their business so they can turn continuous disruption into a competitive edge.”
That investment, Scott shared in a press briefing, has meant the company now has around 500 employees within R&D from a total that is now over 1,000. With recently released products such as CPQ, Financial Planning and Customer Success, that product-led investment has seen revenue growth in double digits in its financial year ending January 2023. Scott did not share any revenue numbers nor how the new products were doing quantitatively. However, there is huge interest in the customer success solution and CPQ.
He was also proud of the NPS score from the FinancialForce enterprise customers, 70. Adding, “I’ve never seen a software company in the SaaS space with an enterprise NPS of seventy. The largest I’ve ever seen in my history was Snowflake when they IPO’d at a sixty.”
With solutions that now cover the entire opportunity to renewal cycle for services business, FinancialForce is well placed to take market share in the services economy. With the service economy representing 2/3 of the global GDP, it is a huge opportunity. On that, FinancialForce looks destined to capitalize on its “Services-as-a-Business” approach
What is in the Spring release
This release has a wealth of updates, and below is only a snapshot of some of the features.
PS Cloud
Headlining the updates for PS Cloud is a new Project Scheduling Risk Dashboard. This is the feature that most excites Scott. Why? He commented, ”I would love to have that ability to look ahead, see the risk, see what impacts are coming in the future and be able to have an early intervention to solve those problems.”
The dashboard looks at scheduling variance for the last 13 weeks and predicts 13 weeks ahead. It allows project or resource managers to identify risks and take early action to keep projects on track.
The dashboard is not the only enhancement to resource management. A new work planner developed in Lightning enables resource managers to view and edit all assignments and resource requests from within a single pane. The planner is designed to increase efficiency by reducing the number of mouse clicks resource managers use to staff a request.
The update leverages lightning components to enable users to sort and group for their preferred working method. This flexibility brings an increased level of efficiency across different use cases.
FinancialForce has also improved the integration to Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendars. Events created in PS Cloud are synced to the external calendar. Any changes to assignments within PS Cloud are automatically replicated as well.
Skills Management is also improved with a new visualisation of skills hierarchy. It lets users and managers quickly view skills and locate the best skill to apply against requirements. Users can quickly add skills, certifications and experience once projects are complete within a defined structure of skills.
Chloe Stevenson, Senior Product Strategy Manager at FinancialForce, explained why this is important for customers. “It’s really important for their resources to be able to add and manage their skills in a really simple way to make sure that when they’re staffing work, and they’re staffing the right people with the right skills on to their upcoming work.”
Service CPQ
It is now possible to include estimated products within estimate templates. Users creating estimates can thus quickly add details to Statements of Work or proposals. This is especially useful when groups of products and services are sold with each other. Users can also create multiple estimates for expenses to deliver additional granularity within SoWs.
Once an estimate is complete, a new, free feature called Output Builder can be used to generate a document. A new Output Builder email template allows the simple creation of an estimate than can be quickly emailed to customers, eliminating several manual steps. The output builder will combine FinancialForce and Salesforce CRM data with helping create the document.
ERP Cloud
The enhancements to the ERP cloud focus on productivity improvements such as flexibility, automation and user experience. Revenue recognition allows users to configure the recognition process by company, currency and revenue stream.
Period close, always the bane of finance teams, is made more efficient. There are templates that can store frequently used close options combinations to speed up the period close further.
Contract renewal now supports Salesforce flows during the renewal process. Users can still use manual inputs, but it means the renewal process for active contracts is further automated.
For accounts receivable teams, the collection management is automated. There is greater flexibility and automation across customer reminders and statements. It includes review and distribution processes, with a new interface that enables AR teams to set reminder and statement rules.
Accounts payable teams also benefit from a simplified user experience called Payments Plus, which enhances how users make electronic payments. A new summary of payments record pages and the ability to edit filters in the payment template make the process easier and give greater control over the payments process.
Financial Planning
Spring 23 continues to develop scenario planning tools across the platform. FP&A teams can take budget snapshots to simplify and improve version control in this release. Dan Brown commented, “We now support multiple versioning and scenario planning, which is a really critical thing in the longer term. The more you move out on your forecasts and your plans, the more you need to take into account various scenarios.”
Internationalisation
Historically FinancialForce has added localisation functionality. While this release had its share, no new countries were added. Within PS Cloud, to meet European compliance requirements, it is now possible to record time in days and hours, according to Dan Brown.
Heidi Minzner, Vice President, Product Management (ERP Cloud) at FinancialForce, added, “Some additional capability from a broader localization perspective was around local Chart of Accounts. We’ve made some significant enhancements in that area within the spring release. We have had support for that for some time, but we have been working with our new customers in different markets, specifically in France. We’ve worked alongside them to extend that and make it more robust for their requirements.”
What is next
Looking ahead to the Summer 23 and Winter 24 releases, Dan Brown promised: “A ton of innovation that is coming in our core offers that will complement much of what you’ve seen here and extend it. We have several new partnerships that we’re just about to sign, and we’ll be announcing the next month”. He also indicated that the Winter release would see more new offers, though he did not elaborate further.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
This is a comprehensive release with many small but significant updates that customers should be aware of. The full release notes run to 35 pages, with only a few screenshots but links to further information about each feature.
Underpinning this release is the Salesforce platform, with FinancialForce continuing to take advantage of Lightning, the Salesforce UX, bringing complexity simply and efficiently for users. It is also enhancing analytics with Tableau CRM and bringing more intelligence to its solutions. However, there is no mention of Einstein GPT launched at Salesforce DX last month.
