New Features and Enhancements in Billing Central Spring 2021

The following new features have been introduced in the Spring 2021 release of FinancialForce Billing Central.

Dependencies on other FinancialForce Packages

This release of Billing Central requires the following FinancialForce package to be installed:

• FinancialForce Foundations Spring 2021

You must install this package before installing or upgrading to this release of Billing Central.

Billing Central is Optimized for Lightning Experience by Default

Billing Central Spring 2021 is optimized for Lightning Experience by default. To complete the optimization, both new and upgrading customers must enable the Switch to Lightning Experience feature in Feature Console.

By enabling the Switch to Lightning Experience feature, Lightning record pages are assigned as org defaults, and upgrading customers have the Billing Document button overrides to enhanced detail pages (sometimes known as "Sencha") removed. For customers upgrading to Spring 2021, this means that the New, Edit and View buttons on the Billing Document, Billing Contract, and Plan objects open Lightning pages rather than the previous Sencha pages. If you want to continue using the Sencha pages for plans, billing contracts and billing documents see Reinstating the Enhanced Detail Pages.

Warning:

The Sencha pages are no longer being developed. FinancialForce recommends you use Billing Central in Lightning Experience to take advantage of new functionality.

Lightning Page Layouts

Billing Central now supplies only Lightning page layouts for the following objects:

Object	Page Layout	Notes for New Installations
Plan	Plan Layout - Lightning	Assigned by default to user profiles in the org.
Billing Contract	Contract Layout - Lightning	Assigned by default to user profiles in the org.
Billing Document	Billing Document Layout - Lightning (Billing Central)	You must assign this layout to user profiles in the org.

If you are upgrading, we recommend that you assign these page layouts to your user profiles and delete the Plan Layout, Contract Layout, and Billing Document Layout (Billing Central) page layouts which were originally designed for Salesforce Classic and are no longer being maintained. We also recommend that you assign the compact layouts for these objects because they are used by their Lightning record pages. For more information about upgrading see Upgrading Billing Central to Spring 2021.

Updated Lightning Record Pages

The Lightning record pages for plans, billing contracts and billing documents have been updated. Related lists are displayed on separate tabs, and standard Salesforce related lists are also included on a general Related tab. The tab that displays each object's line items uses a custom Lightning component (see Lightning Component Related Lists below).

The Details tab now includes the Analysis Mapping fields.

The Lightning record page for billing documents includes a Summary panel containing number tiles.

Lightning Component Related Lists

The Lightning record pages for plans, billing contracts, and billing documents now use custom Lightning components to display their related line items:

• The Plan Lightning Page uses the BC Plan Line Items Lightning component
• The Contract Lightning Page uses the BC Contract Line Items Lightning component
• The Billing Document Lightning Page (Billing Central) uses the BC Billing Document Line Items Lightning component

If you are using custom Lightning record pages, open them in the Lightning App Builder and manually add the components to your pages so that you can take advantage of the enhanced functionality offered by the components. Remove any standard related lists that duplicate the line items shown in the new Lightning components. See the Salesforce Help for more information about editing Lightning pages.

Adding and Editing Line Items via the Lighting Component Related Lists

The Lightning components for plan line items, contract line items, and billing document line items include Add and Edit buttons which enable you to easily add and edit multiple line items. When adding line items, the products available in a price book are now listed automatically when you select the price book. After selecting one or more products, you complete the line item details on the Edit Selected Products page. When editing line items, the current line items are presented on the Edit Selected Products page where you can edit their details.

In Spring 2021, more fields have been added to the Edit Selected Products page so that you can complete the line item details on that page instead of editing lines individually. The following fields have been added as defaults:

• For plan line items: Billing Type, Unit of Measure*, and Charge Term*
• For contract line items: Billing Type, Billing Term*, Charge Term*, Discount*, and Pricing Structure*
• For billing document line items: Unit of Measure

Fields marked with an asterisk (*) are lookups with the option to add new records. For example, when you click the Discount field on a contract line item, you can either select an existing discount or click +New Discount to create a new one.

The fields shown by default on the Edit Selected Products page for plans, contracts, and billing documents are also shown by default in their Lightning component related lists.

In addition to those extra default fields:

• The Edit Selected Products page for contract line items includes fields from the Enhanced Contract Additional Fields field set on the Billing Contract Line Item custom object.
• The Edit Selected Products page for billing document line items includes fields from the Enhanced Billing Document Additional Fields field set on the Billing Document Line Item custom object.

This means that the fields shown on the Edit Selected Products page for contracts and billing documents, and the fields shown in their Lightning component related lists, now match. The Edit Selected Products page also takes account of the Replace Fields in Custom Related List field (in Billing Central Settings custom setting) to determine whether fields in the field sets are added to, or replace, the default fields. For more information, see Billing Contract Field Sets and Billing Document Field Sets.

Notes:

You can apply custom filters to the Products list on the Add Products page, to reduce the number of products listed. For more information, see Filtering the Product List.

For full details of using the Lightning component related lists to add and edit line items, see Lightning Component Related Lists.

More Fields Available for Adding to the Enhanced Field Sets

To further support customization of the Lightning component related lists, and the Edit Selected Products page, more fields are available to be added to the Enhanced Contract Additional Fields field set on the Billing Contract Line Item custom object and the Enhanced Billing Document Additional Fields field set on the Billing Document Line Item custom object.

A small number of fields cannot be added to these field sets. They are:

• Billing Contract Line Item fields: Currency, Deleted, Description, Value Calculation Warning
• Billing Document Line Item fields: Currency, Deleted, Description, Shipping Street

If you add lookups to the enhanced field sets, when completing those fields on the Edit Selected Products page you might have the option to add new records if you have the necessary permissions.

Customer Engagement

Starting from Spring 2021, Foundations contains the Engagement object. An engagement record links together related products and services that can originate from multiple revenue streams, such as professional services, subscriptions, and goods. By leveraging the Salesforce platform and Analytics, we aim to provide you with an accurate, relevant, and visually engaging snapshot of the metrics that matter most to you. For more information about the Engagement object, see New Features and Enhancements in Foundations Spring 2021 in the Foundations Help.

Billing Central adds the subscriptions revenue stream to your customer engagements. You can link billing contracts to an engagement record. This allows you to group together billing contracts that relate to the same customer within a given time frame. For example, you might have two billing contracts for the same customer in 2021. The first contract covers software licenses for the entire year, while the second contract provides premium support for the first quarter of the year. By linking the two contracts to the same engagement, you can easily report on both contracts at the same time.

Engagement and Billing Documents

When you create billing documents from billing contracts linked to an engagement, the billing documents are also automatically linked to the same engagement. In addition, the new Document Source field is automatically set to "Subscriptions", allowing you to easily identify where the documents originate from.

If you use the Consolidated Invoicing feature, you can consolidate all draft billing documents linked to the same engagement, regardless of where they originate from. The new consolidation rule named Engagement retrieves draft billing documents. Documents with the same engagement, account, company, currency, and document type are then grouped together and consolidated into a single draft billing document.

Engagement Analytics

If you use Business Analytics, you can leverage your existing Financial Analytics app to create visually rich dashboards for your engagements with subscription data. The dashboards can then be embedded into the engagement Lightning record page. This allows you to easily view and analyze the KPIs for an engagement record.

The Engagement Subscriptions dashboard focuses on the subscriptions revenue stream. It allows you to view the revenue and invoiced amounts per each active billing contract related to the engagement.

In addition, the existing Billing Contracts dataset now contains the Engagement field. You can use this to create your own dashboards that include engagement information.

For more information, see New Features and Enhancements Spring 2021 in the Business Analytics Help.

Convert to Credit Note as Ready for Review

The Convert to Credit Note feature allows you to roll back a "Complete" billing document of type Invoice by creating a billing document of type Credit Note that cancels out the invoice. In previous releases, the resulting credit note was created with the status "Complete" meaning that no further action could be performed on it. From Spring 2021 you can configure the Convert to Credit Note feature to create credit notes with the status "Ready for Review".

When a credit note has the "Ready for Review" status you can:

• Submit it for approval via a Salesforce approval process
• Calculate its tax, and commit its tax to Avalara AvaTax
• Delete or discard it
• Complete it
• Edit the same fields that are editable on a "Complete" billing document.

Whether the Convert to Credit Note feature creates credit notes with the status "Complete" or "Ready for Review" is determined by the Convert to Credit Note Allows Review field in the Billing Central Settings custom setting. For compatibility with previous releases, this field is false by default, meaning that credit notes are created as "Complete". If you want credit notes to be created with the status "Ready for Review", see Enable Convert to Credit Note For Review for information about using Feature Console to perform the necessary setup.

For more information about the Convert to Credit Note feature, see Convert to Credit Note Overview.

Rounding Tax Values on Billing Document Line Items

Tax values on billing document line items are now rounded using Salesforce's HALF-UP rounding method. This is consistent with how values are rounded throughout FinancialForce's applications. In previous releases, tax values on billing document line items were rounded using Salesforce's HALF-EVEN rounding method (sometimes known as bankers rounding).

If necessary you can choose to retain the previous behavior, but this means that you will get differing results between Billing Central and FinancialForce Accounting. To retain the previous behavior, enable the Tax Calculation Uses Bankers Rounding field in the FDN Common Object Settings custom setting.

Billing Central in Business Analytics

We have added read access to the Billing Schedules object in the Billing Central Analytics Read Access permission set. This enables the Business Analytics applications to use and display data from your billing schedules.

Changes to Permission Sets and Other Technical Documentation

We have updated the way we provide information about FinancialForce permissions. Comprehensive web resources are now available to help you manage security and user access.

For more information about the permissions provided by Billing Central, see Permission Sets and Other Technical Documentation.

Technical Documentation Pack

FinancialForce provides additional documentation to support technical users. For more information, see the Billing Central Technical Documentation Pack, available from the FinancialForce Community. This pack includes:

• API developer reference
• Permission sets
• Object model
• Schema model

FinancialForce In-App Guidance

FinancialForce In-App Guidance uses Salesforce user engagement features to deliver FinancialForce content, such as tutorials and learning paths, directly from our products.

As Salesforce delivers further user engagement features, FinancialForce will leverage their capabilities in order to make the adoption and use of our products a far simpler experience for our customers.

This functionality enables you or your administrator to activate in-app user engagement prompts to object record pages and object home pages. The following categories of prompts are available:

• Docked Prompts: these enable administrators to display FinancialForce video tutorials in your org.
• Floating Prompts: these enable users to view and launch updated features, and provide links to FinancialForce Learning Paths that are hosted on the FinancialForce Community.

Note:

Users must have access to the FinancialForce Community to access the Learning Paths.

To find out more about FinancialForce In-App Guidance, see the FinancialForce In-App Guidance Quick Start Guide - Spring 2021.

To find out more about Salesforce User Engagement, see the Salesforce Help.

Fixes

Fixes are now listed on the Known Issues page of the FinancialForce Community. You can access this page from the Products menu. For a brief description of the issues that have been fixed in this version of Billing Central, see the related section of the Known Issues page.