New Features and Enhancements in Accounting Summer 2023

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

If you are upgrading from a previous version, see Upgrading to Accounting Summer 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 Summer 2023 requires the following Certinia packages to be installed in this order:

  1. Foundations Summer 2023
  2. Reporting Spring 2020

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

Mandatory Steps to Upgrade Payments Plus

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

Vendor Payments

We have introduced Vendor Payments in Lightning Experience. In this release, Payments Lightning Experience has been renamed to Vendor Payment Lightning Experience. This provides an enhanced approach in the creation of payment proposals and electronic transactions within few iterations.

Note: 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:

Period Close Templates and Schedules

A new View or Set Public Holidays action to display the Public Holidays page is added on the Period Close Template page. Using this action you can view or set public holidays for your organization directly from the period close template. For more information, see Defining Public Holidays.

You can now view the scheduled period close templates on the new Period Close Schedules list view. For more information, see Scheduling Period Close Templates.

Year End Process

We have made the following enhancements to the year end process:

  • You can now split the year end journals by document currency using the new Enable Year End by Document Currency custom setting field added to the Accounting Settings custom setting.
  • The General Ledger Account value in the Retained Earnings and the Suspense GLAs lines on the year end journals is set to 0.00, as it is set for the Dimension 1-4 values.
  • The currencies of the Retained Earnings and Suspense GLAs are no longer restricted to be in home currency but they must be set up as one of the accounting currencies of the company.

The Reports tab that you can access from the App Launcher has been updated to include a new Year End Reports folder. You can easily access the following standard year end reports from this folder:

  • YE Trial Balance Check
  • YE Suspense Accounts Check
  • YE Sales Invoices - Not Posted
  • YE Sales Credit Notes - Not Posted
  • YE Payable Invoices - Not Posted
  • YE Payable Credit Notes - Not Posted
  • YE Cash Entries - Not Posted
  • YE Journals - Not Posted
  • YE Currency Revaluations - Not Posted

For more information, see:

Mass Actions

We have added the following Lightning mass actions, which enable you to process your sales and payable documents more efficiently:

  • Amend
  • Discard
  • Duplicate
  • Post

Amending Multiple Documents

You can now update selected details on multiple payable credit notes, payable invoices, sales credit notes, or sales invoices in one go. It is no longer necessary to amend individual documents separately and the process automatically skips any documents with a status other than "Complete".

Note that once you have posted a payable or sales document and its status is "Complete", you can only amend the values on the editable fields. To update the editable fields on the selected documents, you can either enter new field values or clear the existing ones, and then apply the changes to the selected documents.

For more information, see:

Discarding Multiple Documents

You can now discard multiple payable credit notes, payable invoices, sales credit notes, or sales invoices in one go. It is no longer necessary to discard individual documents separately and the process automatically skips any documents with a status other than "In Progress".

For more information, see:

Duplicating Multiple Documents

You can now duplicate multiple payable credit notes, payable invoices, sales credit notes, or sales invoices in one go. It is no longer necessary to duplicate individual documents separately.

For more information, see:

In addition, we have added new Mass Actions custom setting fields and updated the existing ones to help you duplicate sales and payable documents, as well as journals, more efficiently. The Parallel Document Duplication custom setting field enables you to select whether to duplicate documents in parallel or serially. When duplicating documents in parallel, Accounting can process multiple records at the same time, resulting in faster processing. You can control the number of documents duplicated in one go using the following custom setting fields:

  • Journal Duplication Scope Size
  • PCR Duplication Scope Size
  • PIN Duplication Scope Size
  • SCR Duplication Scope Size
  • SIN Duplication Scope Size

For more information, see Mass Actions Settings.

Posting Multiple Documents

You can now post multiple payable or sales documents in one go. You can select multiple payable credit notes, payable invoices, sales credit notes, or sales invoices and post them either immediately or as a batch job using the Background Posting Scheduler. It is no longer necessary to post individual documents separately and the process automatically skips any documents with a status other than "In Progress". Note that to post multiple documents that belong to more than one company you must post them as a batch job.

For more information, see:

Other Quick Action Enhancements

We have migrated the following existing mass actions to Lightning to provide a modern user experience:

  • Calculate Tax for payable credit notes, payable invoices, sales credit notes, and sales invoices
  • Place on Hold for payable invoices and sales invoices
  • Release for Collection for sales invoices
  • Release for Payment for payable invoices

For more information, see:

Finally, we have deprecated several Visualforce list view actions and pages related to payable and sales documents. For more information, see:

Cash Matching

We have made the following enhancements to the Cash Matching page enabling you to check the matched documents easily and to locate the correct document references when you want to undo any matched transactions.

  • The Document, Document Date, and Type columns have been added to the Matched Transactions grid on the Cash Matching page in Lightning.
  • You can now view the matching reference value and the account name with the related document numbers in a group in one field on the grid. By default, the groups are expanded. If required, you can collapse the groups.
  • The Retrieve Matched Transactions button has been removed and replaced with the Filters panel to refine the displayed list of matched transactions.
  • You can now also search for a specific document number in the search box on the Matched Transactions page to refine the list.

For more information, see:

Cash Entries

We have enhanced the Cash Entry page by:

  • Adding a new Duplicate action to duplicate the cash entry along with its lines.
  • Adding a new Duplicate list button on the Cash Entries list view to duplicate multiple cash entries at once.
  • Displaying the following dimension fields of the Details tab in the Amend Details window when the Enable Edit Dimensions (after posting) custom setting field in Accounting Settings is selected:
    • Bank Account Dimension 1-4
    • Bank Charges GLA Dimension 1-4

For more information, see:

Advanced Account Lookup

We have added the following enhancements to the Account lookup on the Cash Entry Line Items page:

  • In the Account column for each line, you can now easily search for an account. Type the first two letters of your search term and either select the account from the alphabetically sorted records displayed in the drop-down list or click Show All Results for: " " that opens the lookup window with the related records.
  • We have added the new Select Account Lookup Columns field set to the Account object. It will be used to display the additional columns in the lookup window enabling you to select the correct account.
  • The second field of the Select Account Lookup Columns field set will be displayed along with the account name in the drop-down list when you search for the account. This enables you to differentiate between the accounts with the same name.

For more information, see:

Sales Invoices

The following enhancements have been made to the sales invoices:

  • The Edit Income Schedule button has been added to the Sales Invoice page. It is visible on an in progress sales invoice to preview or edit the income schedule lines.
  • The View Income Schedule button has been added to the ready to post or completed sales invoices.
  • The Income Schedule field is also added to the Sales Invoice Line Items grid from where you can search and add the income schedule definition to a particular line.

For more information, see:

Payable Invoices

Note: The Accounts Payable Automation feature is part of the Certinia Early Adopter Program. This program is only available to a limited number of customers. For more information, contact your Customer Success Manager.

A new Accounts Payable Automation functionality is added in Foundations that provides a simple and effective way to streamline your invoicing process by allowing payable invoices to be created automatically from scanned payable document records. To support this functionality and allow the creation of payable invoices in Accounting, a new Create Payable Invoice button is added on the Scanned Payable Document tab.

You can also configure the field mappings between the Scanned Payable Document and Payable Invoice fields. For information related to mappings, see Mappings Scanned Payable Document To Payable Invoice.

For more information, see the following in the Foundations Help:

Local GLAs for Intercompany Transactions

We have enhanced the intercompany transactions to support local GLAs. This means that subsidiary companies can use their local GLAs for intercompany transactions including the following documents:

  • Cash Entry
  • Payable Credit Note
  • Payable Invoice
  • Sales Credit Note
  • Sales Invoice

For more information, see:

We have also enhanced the journals to support local GLAs for the Intercompany line type. Local GLAs are also supported for currency overrides for Intercompany line types.

For more information, see:

Journals

To support journal summarization in Fixed Asset Management, we have added new fields to the Accounting Company and Journal objects. You can use the Journal Summarization feature in Fixed Asset Management to reduce the number of fixed asset journals, optimizing their generation and storage in Accounting.

For more information, see:

Accounting Playbooks

We have introduced the new Accounting Playbooks functionality to enable you perform various Accounting activities in one place. To use this feature, we have created the Lightning record pages for Accounting Playbook, Accounting Playbook Template, Accounting Playbook Task, and Accounting Playbook Task Template objects. You can access these pages from the App Launcher.

In this release, you can create only period end playbooks. You can also generate period end playbooks from an accounting playbook template using the new Period End Playbooks page instead of creating them manually.

We will introduce other types of accounting playbooks in future releases.

Finally, we have provided you with sample period end playbook templates for single-company and multi-company scenarios. These templates include task templates, notes, and guidelines to help you create your period end playbooks and tasks. You can generate the sample period end playbook templates and associated task templates from the Sample Period End Templates in-app prompt in Accounting. Note that you might need to contact your administrator to activate to the prompt in your org.

For more information, see:

Collections Plus

The following enhancements have been made as part of the continuing improvements to Collections Plus.

Multi-company Support in Reminder Rules

Reminder rules have been updated so that you can now add multiple companies to a rule. You can add multiple companies using either the reminder rule page or by uploading reminder rules using Data Loader. You can now send reminders for multiple companies using the same rule. When you send reminders for a multi-company rule, you must have all companies in the rule selected as your current company. For more information, see Creating Reminder Rules.

Automated Collections Page

A new page, Automated Collections has been added in this release. You can use this page to send reminders using multi-company reminder rules. You can review the reminders that will be sent for a reminder rule, exclude invoices from the reminder process, review the reminders that have been sent or excluded, and review any errors. You can filter the rules displayed by company and rule.

Single company reminder rules created in Accounting Winter 2023 or earlier are not displayed in the Automated Collections page. If you have both single company rules and multi-company rules configured for the same company, you can manage reminders using the existing Collections Plus page.

For more information, see Automated Collections.

Logging Improvements

A number of changes have been made to improve the logging process and provide additional information to users.

A new field, Detailed Reminders Batch Process Logs, has been added to the Collections Plus custom setting. This field determines whether detailed process logs are created for reminders. The default value is true. For more information, see Collections Plus Settings.

A new object, Reminder Contact Details Log, has been added. This stores details of the contacts that a reminder has been sent to and the status of the reminder. You can use this information to troubleshoot any errors when sending reminders. For more information, see Reminder Log Fields.

Performance Improvements

A new field, Maximum Invoice Age for Reminders (Days) has been added to reminder rules. You can use this field to limit the maximum age, from the due date, of the invoices retrieved for reminders. For example, when you initially run the reminder process, you might have a large number of invoices that are eligible for your reminder rules. This might cause performance issues when opening the Automated Collections page. The default value for this field is 365 and you can reduce it if required. We recommend you set this to the same value for all reminder rules. For more information see Reminder Rule Fields.

Additionally a new field, Reminder Batch Scope Size, has been added to the Collections Plus custom setting. You can use this field to specify the number of reminders processed in each batch. The default value is 60. For more information see Collections Plus Settings.

API Changes

The Accounting API has been updated to include a new global class for sending reminders for reminder rules that have multiple companies assigned. For more information, see the "Accounting Summer 2023 Apex API Developer Reference" on Certinia Community.

Tax Reporting

We have renamed the VAT Reporting package to Tax Reporting to support the new Business Activity Statement functionality for Australian companies. We have added this new functionality in the Tax Reporting package to centralize the tax reporting service in the same package.

For more information, see:

Avalara VAT Reporting Mappings for Intrastat

We have included the payable credit note mappings for Intrastat in the Avalara VAT Reporting Integration custom metadata type. This follows the enhancements to Order and Inventory Management – Accounting Connector, which now supports creating payable credit notes from AP voucher credits.

For more information about the enhancements to Order and Inventory Management – Accounting Connector, see New Features and Enhancements in Order and Inventory Management – Accounting Connector Summer 2023.

Bank Integrations

We have added a new Lightning quick action, Import Statements, to the Bank Account Detail Layout Salesforce page layout.

​​To update the quick action on this page layout 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.

Electronic Invoicing

To improve sending sales invoices and sales credit notes and receiving payable invoices and payable credit notes as electronic invoices, Accounting now supports bank detail field mappings to the Payment Means target in Storecove. For more information, see:

Release Content

We want to help you find all of the information and help that you need to be productive with our products.

Certinia Trailhead

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

In-App Guidance

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

In this release, we have updated several in-app guidance prompts. For a full list of the updates, see New Features and Enhancements in In-App Guidance Summer 2023

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