New Features and Enhancements in Accounting Spring 2023

The following new features have been introduced in the Spring 2023 release of Accounting.

If you are upgrading from a previous version, see Upgrading to Accounting Spring 2023. This provides a summary of the items that have been added for each feature and details of any required upgrade steps.

FinancialForce is Now Certinia

We have made the following changes to align with our new Certinia brand:

  • The publisher name has been updated to Certinia
  • Package names no longer reference FinancialForce
  • In most cases, text referring to FinancialForce has been replaced with Certinia

For more information about these updates and related text changes, see the Package Name Updates article in the Certinia Community and the Technical Documentation Pack.

To learn more about our rebrand, visit the Certinia Community for a message from our CEO, Scott Brown.

Note:

Major versions include updates to both package and publisher names. In service packs, only the package name has changed. Some elements, such as theming and logos, have not been updated and other references to FinancialForce might remain visible in your org.

Dependencies on other Certinia Packages

Accounting Spring 2023 requires the following Certinia packages to be installed in this order:

  1. Foundations Spring 2023
  2. Reporting Spring 2020

You must install these packages before installing or upgrading to Accounting Spring 2023.

Mandatory Steps to Upgrade Payments Plus

In the Spring 2023 release, Payments Plus requires additional mandatory upgrade steps to be performed. For more information, see Upgrading to Accounting Spring 2023 in the Accounting Help.

Local GLAs for Subsidiary Companies

We have enhanced the following functional areas and related documents to now support local GLAs:

  • Accounts
  • Accounting Companies
  • Aged Analysis Definitions
  • Aged Analysis Reports
  • Bank Accounts
  • Bank Reconciliation Charges
  • Cash Entries
  • Cash Matching
  • Currency Revaluation and Translation
  • Currency Revaluation Templates
  • Income Schedules
  • Income Schedule Definitions
  • Opportunity Products
  • Payable Credit Notes
  • Payable Invoices
  • Payments Plus
  • Products
  • Sales Credit Notes
  • Sales Invoices
  • Tax Codes

This means that subsidiary companies can use their local GLAs. As a result, you can now generate payable and sales documents that include accounts, bank accounts, products, and tax codes associated only with local GLAs.

For more information, see Local GLAs for Subsidiary Companies.

Related Enhancements

The local GLA support detailed above results in the following enhancements.

Cash Entries

We have enhanced the generation process of cash entries to support local GLAs.

For more information, see:

Cash Matching

We have enhanced Cash Matching to support local GLAs. The values for local general ledger accounts are now copied from the accounts receivable analysis details on the company record for currency write-offs, settlement discounts, and write-offs.

For more information, see About Cash Matching.

Currency Revaluation and Translation

We have enhanced the currency revaluation and translation process to support local GLAs and local companies.

For more information, see:

We have also enabled the following reports for balance sheets and income statements to support local GLAs:

  • Balance Sheet Revalue - Local
  • Balance Sheet Revalue - Local & Corp
  • Income Statement Revalue - Local
  • Income Statement Revalue - Local & Corp

You can now generate these reports when you apply currency revaluation criteria for local companies.

For more information, see Currency Revaluation and Translation Reports.

Income Schedules

We have enhanced the income schedules to support local GLAs.

For more information, see Defining Income Schedules.

Note:
This feature is not supported in Lightning Experience.

Payments Plus

We have enhanced Payments Plus to support documents that include accounts, bank accounts, expenses, products, and tax codes associated only with local GLAs.

For more information, see:

Note:

The use of local GLAs is only supported in Payments Plus. This functionality is not available in Payments.

Period Close Template

We have introduced a new feature to schedule the period closing time and day for the selected companies on a period close template. Using this feature, you can now schedule the closing of periods if you do not want to do it manually. Scheduling prevents you from failing to close periods on time and also enables you to close the periods outside your working hours.

For more information, see:

Consolidation Group Page

A new action is added on the Consolidation Group page to view a consolidated financial statement or any other financial report defined for the financial year in the Financial Report Builder. For more information, see About Consolidation Group.

Background Matching

Enhancements to Cash Entry Lines

A new Documents to Match field is added to the Cash Entry Lines grid to assign high volume of document numbers to match with the cash entry line in the background. This new field is an alternative to the existing Account Reference field on the Cash Entry Lines grid. You can still use the Account Reference field to assign document numbers to the line, but it is limited to a maximum of 25 document numbers, unlike the Documents to Match field which allows you to assign high volumes.

Prior to this release, the only delimiter available to separate the customer references or document numbers added to the Account Reference fields was the pipe "|" character. In this release, we have introduced a new Custom Delimiter custom setting that allows you to choose your preferred character as the delimiter. This delimiter is supported by both the Account Reference and the Documents to Match fields. For more information, see Matching Cash Entries.

Enhancements to Journal Lines

A new Account Reference field is added to the Journal Lines grid to enter the customer references or the document numbers to match with the journal line in the background. For more information, see Journal Line Item Fields.

Enhancements to Background Matching in the Accounting Task Launcher

Background Matching now also supports journals and negative invoices. The following new matching sequences have been added to the Background Matching in the Accounting Task Launcher:

  • Cash Receipt to Journal
  • Cash Refund to Journal
  • Journal to Credit Note
  • Journal to Invoice
  • Negative Invoice to Invoice

For more information, see:

Collections Plus

Multi-Company Support for Reminder and Customer Statement Rules

In this release we have started to introduce new functionality to support the use of multi-company reminder and customer statement rules, which will reduce the number of rules that you need to create and support.

In this release the reminder rules and statement rules creation processes have been updated so that you will be able to assign multiple companies to these rules in future releases. As a result of these changes you cannot edit or update existing reminder and statement rules. For more information, see Creating Reminder Rules and Creating Customer Statement Rules.

The reminders process has been updated so that you can send reminders and customer statements using both existing reminder and statement rules and new rules created using the multi-company reminder and statement rules processes. For more information, see Sending Reminders and Sending Customer Statements.

To access this new functionality you must enable the new steps added to the Collections Plus feature in Feature Console. For more information, see Upgrading to Accounting Spring 2023

Deleting Reminder and Customer Statement Logs

We have added a new component, accessible from the Accounting Task Launcher, to allow you to schedule jobs to delete Collections Plus reminder logs and customer statement logs. You can specify the type of log that you want to delete and the frequency of the job. For more information, see Deleting Collections Plus Logs.

To support the deletion process we have added a field to the Collections Plus custom setting. The Reminder Log Retention Period field allows you to specify the minimum number of days that reminder logs and customer statement logs must be retained before you can delete them. The minimum, and default, value for this field is 90. For more information, see Collections Plus Settings

Payments Lightning Experience

Enhancement to Payments

We have introduced Payments in Lightning Experience. This provides an enhanced approach in the creation of payment proposals and creation of electronic transactions within few iterations.

Tip: As Payment for Lightning Experience is implemented over subsequent releases, we recommend you to use Payment Plus for all your payment activities in Accounting.

Using this functionality, you can:

Payable Documents

Creating Payable Credit Notes in Multi-Company Mode

For the Spring 2023 release, we have added the ability to create and process payable credit notes in multi-company mode when using Lightning Experience. In multi-company mode you do not need to change the current company when processing payable credit notes. For more information, see Activating and Configuring Lightning Record Pages for Documents.

Improved Processing of Large Payable Credit Notes

We have also improved the support for large documents by adding the ability to create payable credit notes with up to 9,980 lines using Lightning Experience. For more information, see Payable Credit Note Line Volumes

Customizing External Tax Mappings

You can now view and optionally customize the mappings that are sent to your external tax provider, such as Avalara AvaTax. You can use FDN Mappings functionality to customize the mappings for the following records:
  • Payable credit notes
  • Payable invoices
  • Sales credit notes
  • Sales invoices

You can specify that you want to use the new mappings component by selecting the new Use Mappings Component for External Tax checkbox. This field is available from the Accounting Settings section of the Tax Calculation Settings tab. You can deselect this option at any time if you want to use the default process, for example, to process extremely large volumes of data.

Default mappings are provided to help you get started. To view and update mapping details, navigate to one of the following tabs:

  • External PCR Tax Mappings
  • External SCR Tax Mappings
  • External PIN Tax Mappings
  • External SIN Tax Mappings

For more information, see Customizing External Tax Calculation Mappings.

Certinia Trailhead: Release Highlights

If you want to learn more about the new features in this release, see the ERP Cloud - Spring 2023 Release Highlights Certinia Trailhead module. This module will guide you through the new features in our ERP Cloud products.

New Income Tax Type Picklist Update on Form 1099-MISC

We have added a new Feature Console feature to update the Income Tax Types picklist values related to the boxes on Form 1099-MISC and used by the Certinia 1099-MISC Export package. This updates the Income Tax Type picklist values by:

  1. Removing unnecessary values from the picklists on the following objects: Account, Payable Credit Note, Payable Invoice, and Transaction Line Item.
  2. Reordering the values in the updated picklists.

For more information, see Enabling the 1099 Income Tax Type Picklist Update Feature.

New Lightning Quick Actions on Salesforce Pages

We have added new Lightning quick actions to the following Salesforce page layouts:

  • Automated Elimination Layout
  • Bank Account Connection Detail Layout
  • Bank Reconciliation Detail Layout
  • Currency Revaluation Detail Layout
  • Payable Credit Note Detail Layout
  • Payable Invoice Detail Layout
  • Transaction Reconciliation Detail Layout

To update the quick actions on these page layouts to Lightning, enable the Lightning Quick Actions on SF Pages feature in the Feature Console. For more information, see Enabling the Lightning Quick Actions on SF Pages Feature.

Note:

To use the new quick actions on your Lightning pages, you must add them to your pages using the Lightning App Builder.

Plaid Bank Integration Key Rotation

We have rotated the client ID and secret keys in the Plaid Bank Integration. For security purposes, we rotate these keys on a regular basis, at least every twelve months.

If you are an existing user, to continue retrieving your bank account transactions you might need to rotate your Plaid Bank Integration keys. This depends on your version of Accounting and the last rotation date. For more information, see Upgrading to Accounting Spring 2023.