New Features and Enhancements in Accounting Summer 2022

The following new features have been introduced in the Summer 2022 release of FinancialForce Accounting.

Dependencies on other FinancialForce Packages

FinancialForce Accounting Summer 2022 requires the following FinancialForce packages to be installed in this order:

  1. FinancialForce Foundations Summer 2022
  2. FinancialForce Reporting Spring 2020

You must install these packages before installing or upgrading to FinancialForce Accounting Summer 2022.

Mandatory Steps to Upgrade Payments Plus

If you have used the vendor payments using Asperato feature in your Spring 2022 org, you must perform additional mandatory upgrade steps to use Payments Plus in the Summer 2022 release. For more information, see Upgrading to Accounting Summer 2022.

Disable Dimensions

This allows you to disable certain dimensions. This is useful when posting documents in order to minimize the possibility of selecting an incorrect or, for any other reason, no longer valid dimension. If you select the Disabled checkbox, dimensions that are no longer required are ignored. By default all dimensions are enabled.

For more information, see Disabling Dimensions.

Currency Exchange Gains and Losses

In some countries, it is a legal requirement to differentiate between currency exchange gains and losses by using different general ledger accounts for each. We have updated the currency exchange functionality to include this functionality. If your country has this requirement, you can use this functionality.

This new functionality is available in the following:

Note: You must perform manual steps to start using this functionality. For more information, see Setting up Currency Exchange Gain/Loss GLAs.

Local GLAs in Currency Write-Off

We have enhanced the Currency Write-Off GLA field to support local GLAs. This allows subsidiary companies to use their local GLAs.

Accounting and Datastream

In order to make it easier for you to set up your org, the following sample templates have been added and can be imported using Datastream.

Chart of Accounts:

Chart of Accounts Mappings:

SAF-T Mappings:

Intercompany:

To use this functionality, you must download the sample Excel (XLSX) templates from Community, and have Datastream installed and configured. For more information, see FinancialForce Datastream in Community.

Support Multiple Tax Statuses on Account

We have enhanced Accounting by enabling you to define default tax information for multiple companies. Instead of retrieving the information from the Tax Status field on the Account object, this information is retrieved from the Tax Status field of the Multiple Companies Account Config custom object.

For more information, see Enabling Multiple Companies Configuration.

Bank Reconciliation

Bank reconciliation has been updated to make automatically reconciling cash entries to your bank statements easier. You can now select the company that you want to run reconciliation for and select the criteria that are used to match cash entries to statements.

Auto-Match Settings

Automated bank reconciliation has been updated to include new auto-match settings, that you can apply when running a reconciliation, to specify how transactions are selected for matching with bank statement lines. You can select the following:

You can select up to five statement fields to match with transactions fields. You can set your auto match settings as defaults, used in future bank reconciliations.

For more information, see Reconciling your Bank Statement Automatically.

Feature Console Updates

New steps have been added to the Reconciliation Processes Feature Console feature to add values to the Reconciliation Status and Bank Statement Status picklists.

For more information, see Reconciliation Processes.

Performance Enhancements

As part of the improvements to the process we have increased the volumes of transactions that you can reconcile and commit. You can now reconcile and commit up to 9,000 transactions at one time.

Enhancements to the Consolidation Group Structure

The following enhancements have been made to the Consolidation Group Structure.

Consolidation Group Structure Feature Console

We have improved the existing Consolidation Group Structure feature.

If you are using the Consolidation Group Structure feature and want to amend the fields displayed on the company cards and the company details window, then you must set the default values for the fields. To set the default values you must run the new step added in the Feature Console.

If you have not used the Consolidation Group Structure feature, then to view the Consolidation Group Structure you must perform all the steps mentioned in the Feature Console.

For more information, see:

Consolidation Group Structure Chart

We have added new Quick Action buttons and a Search companies field to view the Consolidation Group Structure Chart in a much easier and optimized way. You can also easily customize and select the fields you want to display on the company card and company details window.

You can now select a date to display a Consolidation Group Structure Chart of the companies based on the control ownership records valid on the selected date.

For more information, see:

Lightning Experience

For the Summer 2022 release, we have improved our user experience using Lightning Experience across FinancialForce Accounting. This ensures that Accounting is intuitive, consistent, configurable, and flexible.

New Lightning Record Pages for Journals

We have redesigned Accounting Journals in Lightning Experience to provide a robust and focused approach for manage journals. From Summer 2022, we have started implementing a series of basic journal features in Lightning Experience. For more information on the updates for this release, see Upgrading to Accounting Summer 2022.

The Local Chart of Account, Override Currency, Duplicate Document and other features will be implemented in the future releases.

We have introduced the Journal Lightning record page. This page provides a modern user experience and enables you to perform your daily tasks in a streamlined way.

Using the new page, you can:

The Journal Lightning page is organized as tabs. You can customize the look and feel of the page by adding and removing tabs. For more information about the tabs in the Journal Lightning page, see Journal Fields.

The Journal Lightning page is organized as tabs. You can customize the look and feel of the page by adding and removing tabs. For more information about the tabs in the Journal page, see Journal Fields.

To support the new pages, we have added several reusable Lightning components. This enables you to build custom record pages and tailor them to user profiles.

For more information about the configuration required to start using the Journal Lightning page and a list of Lightning components included with this page, see Upgrading to Accounting Summer 2022.

New Lightning Actions for the Year End Processes

For the Summer 2022 release, we have migrated the following year end processes to Lightning Experience:

For more information about the items that have been added in this release, see Upgrading to Accounting Summer 2022 in the Accounting Help.

Year-End

Multi-Company Year End Processing

You can now run the year end process for up to 300 companies and years as a single batch job using the Run Year End For Multiple Companies task. Before running the process, FinancialForce Accounting checks if:

For more information about the new Run Year End For Multiple Companies task, see Accounting Task Launcher Overview in the Accounting Help.

Opening Periods in a Closed Year

You can now reopen and adjust the following periods of the last closed year:

For more information on closing and reopening a period, and on how different closing options control the saving and posting of documents, see Editing and Deleting Years and Periods in the Accounting Help.

Foundations Tax Connector

We have updated the external tax calculation processes in FinancialForce Accounting to use centralized Foundations processes. This update streamlines setup tasks for administrators who manage integrations between several FinancialForce applications and an external tax calculation service, such as Avalara AvaTax. These changes provide a common area for shared settings and do not impact the features of Accounting’s integration with Avalara AvaTax.

Previously, settings were provided in the External Tax Calculation Settings page in Accounting. As an administrator, you can now view and manage external tax settings for all your products from the Tax Calculation Settings page in Foundations. This contains all common settings on one page to reduce duplication, followed by product-specific settings. The Tax Calculation Settings page is available directly from its own tab or from the Foundations & Integrations Tax Launcher tab in Foundations.

Accounting tax details are saved to the existing External Tax Calculation Settings custom settings object.

All new customers use the Foundations processes by default. If you are an upgrading customer, you can use the Foundations Tax Connector feature in the Feature Console to enable the new features. When you upgrade, the External Tax Calculation Settings page in Accounting redirects you to the Tax Calculation Settings page in Foundations.

For more information, see Setting up External Tax Calculation.

Creating Sales Credit Notes Using the API

From this release, you can use only the default values for the Credit Note Reason when using the API to create sales credit notes. Custom credit note reason values are no longer supported when using the API.

Creating Documents and Dimensions from Integrations without an Accounting License

From Summer 2022, Accounting enables integration users to create documents without needing an Accounting license or user company records. In addition, integration users can create dimension records without needing an Accounting license. SRP leverages this feature to enable PSA users to create Accounting documents and dimensions from PSA records. For more information, see New Features and Enhancements in SRP Summer 2022 in the SRP Help.

Enhancements to the Billing Document to Sales Invoice or Credit Note Integration

When creating a sales invoice from a billing document, the Unit Price field on the sales invoice line is now populated from the new Derived Unit Price field on the billing document line item. This ensures that the Unit Price field is always populated on the sales invoice line. The same applies when creating a sales credit note from a credit billing document. For more information about the new field, see Billing Document Line Item Fields in the Foundations Help.

In addition, when the integration is enabled, the value of the Quantity field on the billing document line item must be greater than zero.

For more information, see the following:

Sales Invoice Consolidation Enhancements

Small enhancements have been made to sales invoices and sales credit notes to improve the sales invoice consolidation functionality.

The Discard and Duplicate buttons have been removed from the sales invoice Lightning page layout for consolidated invoices. These actions are not valid for consolidated invoices. To discard consolidated invoices, you must undo the consolidation and then discard the original invoices. You cannot duplicate a consolidated invoice.

The Original Invoice field has been added to credit note line item fields, so that you can convert consolidated invoices to credit notes.

Archiving Billing Documents

Archiving now supports billing documents. You must have both Accounting and Billing Central installed to run the archiving process for billing documents.

The full list of document types supported by archiving is:

Also a custom setting has been added to allow you to disable grouping by account in the summarization journal. For more information, see Upgrading to Accounting Summer 2022.

Warning:

The archiving process must be performed by a FinancialForce business consultant. Contact your FinancialForce business consultant if you have a requirement to archive data from your org.

Inbound Customer Payments using Asperato

We have made several improvements to the inbound customer payments using Asperato, including:

For more information about further improvements, see New Features and Enhancements in Asperato Integration Summer 2022 in the Integrations Help.

Outbound Vendor Payments using Asperato

We have improved the setup process for outbound vendor payments and updated some of the custom values on the following objects:

If you have previously set up this feature in your Spring 2022 org, you must rename or remove the relevant custom field values where necessary. For more information, see Upgrading to Accounting Summer 2022 in the Accounting Help.

For more information about further improvements, see New Features and Enhancements in Asperato Integration Summer 2022 in the Integrations Help.