FinancialForce, the leading provider of customer-centric business applications across finance, services, and customer success teams, today announced general availability of its Winter 2023 Release. The new release further strengthens FinancialForce’s Services-as-a-Business (SaaB) approach, which brings together key capabilities for running any services business efficiently and effectively. These capabilities include automation, intelligence, and innovation, backed by profound domain expertise, best practices, and a proven record of success.

New features in the Winter 2023 release include Advanced Resource Management for the Professional Services Cloud that give resource managers more flexibility and control within the staffing process, as well as new ERP enhancements that intelligently automate manual tasks. With these new capabilities, services organisations can keep up with the speed of work and continue to add value to their businesses.

“Our new Winter 2023 release gives organisations the deeper intelligence and agility they need to run a connected services business,” said Scott Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer at FinancialForce. “In an economic environment rife with constant change, this new release is designed to give organisations the tools they need to unlock full business visibility and put their customers at the center of everything they do.”

A Better Professional Services Cloud

The Winter ’23 release represents a significant step forward for FinancialForce’s Services-as-a-Business capabilities. The SaaB platform provides a 360-degree view of every customer while powering all aspects of services operations —from sales, to delivery, to customer success management, to financial management and planning. To help organisations better achieve enterprise agility, the release features new enhancements to Advanced Resource Management, giving resource managers greater flexibility and control within the staffing process. For example, skills information is more accessible and accurate thanks to new tools that organisations can use to keep skills up to date, which helps to maximise resource utilisation. Resource managers can also better identify match criteria so they can optimise resource deployment and tailor it to the needs of the business. 

Additionally, the Winter ’23 release features critical enhancements to Services CPQ, a fully connected services estimating solution. Services teams can now identify specific rates, roles and skills so that they can deliver project work that results in more accurate estimates and higher win rates. Services CPQ also offers a stronger connection to Salesforce CPQ, with the combined solution now providing a complete and robust quoting engine for businesses.

To help services teams deliver with intelligence, the Winter ‘23 release includes significant enhancements to PS Cloud Analytics. Organisations that upgrade to the latest version of FinancialForce will have access to accurate and timely utilisation data that powers capacity planning decisions. Also included is the ability to measure utilisation capacity by hovering over a heat map, as well new forecasting capabilities for viewing all records. Together, these features allow for maximised resource utilisation and help provide an accurate picture of business health.

Other key PS Cloud features include:

• Work Planners:With this feature, line managers can see the scheduled work of everyone on their team. Work Planners are also editable so if an employee has a work conflict, ie. doctor’s appointment, schedules can be easily revised. 

• Intelligent Time Tracking:This feature provides a frictionless, real-time way to enter timecards to reduce end of the week administration. Users can also track time against assignments, tasks and projects with automatic timecard entry. Teams can now simply and quickly record the exact amount of time worked to reduce revenue leaked due to forgotten or inaccurate time entries. 

A Complete ERP Cloud

On the ERP Cloud front, the Winter ‘23 release strengthens FinancialForce’s Services-as-a-Business capabilities by making it even easier to run a connected business through the automation of manual tasks. Specifically, the updated Bank Reconciliation Automation feature can save organisations hours of work each month by eliminating the error-prone task of reconciling manually. The new feature provides an efficient end-to-end bank transaction reconciliation process with automated transaction creation capabilities and matching rules. Accounting teams now have the ability to auto-create journals based on stored information and provide auto cash matching when creating a cash entry.

To help businesses gain more agility and flexibility, the Winter ’23 release offers new Year-End Close Enhancements for Multi-X, which streamlines the close for multiple entities. With the new user interface and templated close options, finance teams can close the books faster and more efficiently. Improvements to Financial Report Builder, enables companies to organise data into professional reports that show current business performance. As a result, finance teams can share current business performance with their stakeholders via accurate, professional financial reports.

The new release also helps services businesses improve their planning and forecasting. Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) teams can now perform headcount planning by role which allows them to better understand how headcount decisions impact financial performance based on the most accurate data. There are also enhancements to the way benefits are calculated, with users now able to add salary increments when doing headcount planning. In addition, multi-currency support is now available which allows subsidiaries to create budgets in local currency and aggregate to a corporate budget using corporate currency. 

Other key ERP Cloud features include:

• Deferred Revenue Waterfall:This enhancement increases the scope of data input for the deferred revenue waterfall to include professional services data. Users can now see key revenue metrics for specific projects, such as what’s been billed, recognised, and deferred.

• Procurement Workspace Enhancements:Procurement Managers can now easily manage contract renewals and suppliers with new reports and alerts. These enhancements provide insights into spend by category and supplier. Users can also receive alerts notifying them of upcoming contract renewals. 

UX Improvements

This release continues FinancialForce’s commitment to the Salesforce Lightning Experience (LEX), providing a consistent, powerful, and modern user experience. For example, users can now easily create and manage line level data on purchase orders and requisitions in a single, intuitively-designed view. Additional improvements include a streamlined experience for creating journals and building customer quotes all powered by LEX.