FinancialForce Summer 2021 Release Review

Every year, Salesforce.com updates its software. Every year during the summer, Salesforce, and FinancialForce launch their second of three releases.

This FinancialForce Summer 2021 release brings us new tools and options to best leverage this leading Salesforce-native ERP solution. FinancialForce’s reputation as the premier PSA and ERP solution will be strengthened further with some exciting new features and quality of life improvements incorporated in this release.

We will go over the key features for this quarter’s update based on what our experts at AblyPro think are most relevant.

To enhance their already impressive analytics and accounting tools, FinancialForce will release four new features for Summer 2021:

• Analytics and Reporting in FinancialForce
• Customer Engagement in FinancialForce
• PSA and Revenue Recognition in FinancialForce
• Historic FX rates in FinancialForce

1. Analytics and Reporting are Streamlined in FinancialForce

In the new release, FinancialForce will now overhaul its current financial statement set up with a new financial report builder that will allow the creation of a more flexible financial report or statement. New Financial Report Builder allows you to create new financial reports from built-in templates (Trial Balance, Income Statement, Balance Sheet). From the Create Report window, you can select the templates you want. This dynamic update will not just standardize your financial reports but will also allow you to produce business-ready statements in real-time.

FinancialForce has also introduced drill-down functionality that will allow users to see detail-level data straight from the summary report, allowing a more detailed analysis of the financial data. On an accounting report, you can now view the individual transactions behind a sum amount field. Through this new feature, you will be able to source transaction-level information that impacts your financial reporting.

2 — Customer Engagement Advancements in FinancialForce

The FinancialForce object now contains the Customer Engagement object. The customer engagement record helps your business visualize the customer lifecycle across multiple revenue streams and helps understand which activities generate the most value for your customers. Within a fixed timeframe, the engagement object provides a customer with related products, such as items, PSA services, and subscriptions. You can view all your customers’ engagement points within your business with this tool. It will track how your customers interact with your firm and provide reports so that you can make better and more efficient data-driven business decisions.

The Summer 2021 Release will include new features for Engagement Objects. Engagement Analytics will now include sales orders. Your Engagement Analytics app can include sales order information if you’re using Supply Change Management (SPC) with your Engagement functionality, and your Financial Analytics app contains the SPC core dataset.

The new Customer Engagement Lightning app allows you to easily access the Engagements tab.

3 — PSA and Revenue Recognition

Now that the Salesforce Revenue Cloud app and Revenue Management can be integrated, you can use the Revenue Cloud connector to do that. When this integration is enabled, Salesforce orders are configured with a revenue management integration. This lets you recognize revenue and amortize cost against Salesforce orders.

Setups and templates are created that allow you to recognize revenue directly against your source objects (according to ASC 605) or by using revenue contracts (according to ASC 606 and IFRS 15).

4 — Historic Foreign Exchange (FX) Rates Setup in FinancialForce

Additionally, FinancialForce now allows the storage of currency exchange rates (FX) when creating a transaction. The new feature allows the currency gain/loss to be calculated with greater precision throughout the lifetime of the source record.

Exchange rates will also be used by revenue management tools to calculate revenue or amortize costs. A new interface will be created to display the historic FX rates. Furthermore, you will be able to select which source objects can use FX rates for calculation.

Next Steps for FinancialForce Summer ’21

What is the expected timeline for these features? There are some features in Spring ’21 that apply to all users and took effect immediately upon launch. Other features must be activated by an administrator before users can benefit from them. Speak with your administrator — we can help.

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