New Features and Enhancements in Services CPQ September 2024

The following new features have been introduced in the September 2024 release of Services CPQ.

If you are upgrading from a previous version, see Upgrading to Services CPQ September 2024. This provides a summary of the items that have been added for each feature and details of any required upgrade steps.

Adding Billable Contingencies to an Estimate

We have introduced billable contingency to estimates, enabling you to account for unexpected costs that may arise during service work. This ensures additional costs are included in the estimate and can be billed to the customer. You can easily add a contingency by using the new Create Estimate Contingency button on the Estimate record page. When a project is created, the billable contingency will be added to the associated customer purchase order budget in PSA.

For more information, see Estimate Contingency Overview.

Monthly Estimating in the Hours Breakdown

You can now view estimates in a Month view in the Hours Breakdown view of the Estimate Builder. This provides a comprehensive overview of an estimate, enabling you to examine details over extended time frames. The Month view can also be exported as a CSV file.

Additionally, you can view phases in the Month view of the Hours Breakdown. You cannot edit cells in the Month view.

We have also added visual indicators to the Month view of the Hours Breakdown. The following indicators are displayed when:

  • Over allocated a role request has been over allocated for the month.
  • Palm tree the role request's work calendar includes one or more holidays during the month.
  • Red palm tree the role request has holidays and is over allocated for the whole month.

To facilitate this new functionality, you can no longer resize columns in the Hours Breakdown view, which ensures a more consistent user experience.

For more information, see Hours Breakdown Overview.

Guided Scoping Usability Enhancements

Custom Response

Within your scoping requirement sets, you can now create custom responses. This enables you to add a response that differs from other options such as multiple choice responses.

For more information, see Creating a Scoping Requirement and Creating a Scoping Requirement Response.

Scoping Session Sections

We have enabled expanding and collapsing sections in scoping sessions. You can now expand or collapse all sections, multiple sections, or single sections simultaneously.

For more information, see Creating an Estimate in a Scoping Session.

Set Input as Value

We have introduced a new scoping action type, "Set Input as Value". This action type enables you to map a value from the scoping session to a field on a specified target object.

For example, you can create a custom response by selecting Discount Percent as the target field and Role Request as the target object. In the Manage Actions window, select the "Set Input as Value" action and then add the estimate product to a scoping session. This will automatically populate the Discount Percent field on the associated role requests with the value entered in the scoping session.

For more information, see Scoping Action Fields and Managing Scoping Actions.

Rate Card Matching Enhancement

We've introduced the disable-rate-card-matching configuration option to provide greater flexibility in managing records. When set to true, this option disables rate card matching, improving performance and scalability. By turning off rate card matching, the system can process a larger volume of records more efficiently.

For more information, see Resource Request Settings.

Permissions

For information about the changes to permissions in this release, see Permission Sets and Other Technical Documentation.

Fixes

Fixes are listed on the Known Issues page of the Certinia Community. You can access this page from the Community Support Hub. For a brief description of the issues that have been fixed in this version of Services CPQ, see the relevant section of the Known Issues page.