FinancialForce announced general availability of its Summer 2022 Release. The new release introduces FinancialForce's Services-as-a-Business (SaaB) approach that 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.

"Organizations continue to be buffeted by market disruptions, from spiraling inflation, to new COVID variants, and unanticipated supply chain issues," said Scott Brown, President and Chief Executive Officer of FinancialForce. "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."

"As Scott Brown has noted, organizations need to become more agile so they can expertly cope with constant change. This resonates with us at Philips. We saw the need for a Services-as-a-Business platform when we transformed from offering equipment to offering solutions. We are happy to see the FinancialForce Summer 2022 release will continue to support our goals," said Kim McCullough, Business Capability Leader at Philips.

FinancialForce's Services-as-a-Business platform powers all aspects of services operations -from sales, to delivery, to customer success management, to financial management and planning-all built on Salesforce.com. The platform provides a 360-degree view of every customer, from marketing and sales to delivery, customer success, and ongoing project and services support. With FinancialForce, services businesses can elevate customer experience to new heights, driving accelerated growth, improved profitability, market-leading customer satisfaction, and consistent renewals.

A Better Professional Services Cloud for Enterprise Agility

The Summer ‘22 release represents a significant debut for FinancialForce's Services-as-a-Business vision, providing substantial capability updates to extend enterprise agility. For instance, it delivers greater flexibility in skills-matching, by empowering Resource Managers to distinguish skills related to open roles as either Essential or Desirable, delivering a more sophisticated assignment process. It also enhances the market-leading auto-assign capability to consider weighted preferences in resource assignment rules. 

Alongside these enhancements, this release also unveils critical insights into the financial impact of resource assignment decisions, enabling greater profitability while maintaining world-class customer experience. Combined, these enhancements give resource managers greater insight into, and impact on, the performance of their organization, elevating their organizational contribution to overcome a challenging macroeconomic environment.

Optimizing Project Delivery with Deeper Intelligence

To help services businesses deliver with intelligence, the Summer ‘22 release includes significant enhancements to the out-of-the-box analytic capabilities of Professional Services (PS) Cloud. Organizations will have complimentary access to a utilization dashboard that monitors utilization performance and staffing efficiency; a revenue forecasting dashboard to help make strategic, business-enhancing, forward-looking, decisions; and a project burn-up dashboard to visualize work completed in order to support more cost-efficient project delivery. Dashboards are powered by the leading business intelligence platform, CRM Analytics by Salesforce.

Additionally, FinancialForce has extended the capabilities of Services CPQ, a fully connected services estimating solution. New role configurability features-including role templates, role grouping, and skill requirements-have been introduced to service estimates, allowing for a seamless journey from opportunity to estimate and project delivery.

Running a Connected Business with Intelligence and Full Visibility 

The FinancialForce Summer ‘22 release makes it easier to run a connected business. This commitment to a whole-organization platform is exemplified by innovative enhancements to FinancialForce Planning, the recently-launched Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) solution. In this release, FP&A teams can now perform headcount planning at the resource level to gain a better understanding of how compensation adjustments will impact future budgets. Using flexible budget templates, businesses can better align headcount planning with overall company goals and objectives to deliver optimal results. 

Planning managers within FP&A teams will now have access to an intuitive new Planning Workspace where they can view key budget information and actions all in one place: current budget status, alerts, key indicators, and more. By leveraging a familiar user experience, FP&A managers will have the insights they need to accelerate planning cycles and deliver more accurate forecasting.

Intelligent bank reconciliation gives accounting teams the agility to define flexible matching criteria through a rules-based engine. End-to-end intelligent transaction matching will streamline reconciliation procedures, empowering accounting teams to accelerate their processes, increase productivity, and free up time for higher-value activities. 

Additionally, Summer ‘22 further simplifies revenue recognition with Revenue Schedules, which allows Revenue Managers to see all revenue to be recognized in a single view, resulting in a much faster revenue recognition process.

UX Improvements

FinancialForce ERP Cloud and PS Cloud now run entirely on the Salesforce Lightning Experience (LEX), providing a uniquely 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.