A deeper dive into Certinia’s Winter 2024 release
Dan Brown is Chief Product and Strategy Officer at Certinia. His focus is to guide the company’s product strategy to deliver on its ambitious growth plans. Read his blog here on the Winter 2024 Release that will help do just that.
We are excited to announce the availability of our Winter ‘24 release, a significant step forward in our journey to transform services business operations. This release is focused on leveraging the power of Certinia AI to generate more accurate forecasts, make smarter decisions, and improve team productivity, thus driving growth and efficiency.
In this blog post I’ll walk you through our latest updates, highlighting how each one can elevate your business operations. Let’s dive into the transformative features, starting with Certinia AI.
Delivering actionable and real-world benefits with Certinia AI
Certinia AI is not just about surfacing information. It is about transforming insights into action. We have continued our AI journey across our portfolio, refining and expanding our use cases including the ability to identify each customer’s payment trends and predict their days to pay, leading to more precise cash flow forecasts. Certinia AI can also help identify and mitigate potential risk to planned margins, allowing services businesses to optimize project margins and realize a project’s full profit potential. And with staffing risk prediction models, project managers can identify possible project bottlenecks and roadblocks to keep projects on schedule and manage customer expectations on delivery dates. Click here to learn more about Certinia AI and contact your Customer Success Manager to express interest in joining the early adopter program.
Improving Resource Productivity with Defined Course of Actions
Winter ‘24 uplevels how project and resource managers can view and manage tasks with a simplified interface. Task boards deliver enhanced task details, improved filtering and searching capabilities, and convenient due date badges, accelerating job readiness and resource productivity. In addition, project managers can easily monitor the progress of their project portfolios to understand dependencies and overall program health. With a flexible destination page, projects can be quickly grouped and viewed by different criteria, allowing users to save time by focusing on what matters most when tracking delivery.
Greater Scheduling Visibility for More Precise Estimates
Usability improvements have been prioritized for streamlined estimating. Estimators and resource managers can get more clarity into the time required to deliver work through an updated hours breakdown view that automatically supplies a scheduling starting point. Winter ‘24 also introduces estimate phases, enabling estimators to scope their work in phases that align with their delivery methodology. Together, these enhancements will provide early visibility into resource capacity and demand, leading to more accurate estimates and ultimately more project wins.
Increasing Utilization with Work Planner Advancements
Usability improvements also highlight our resource management capabilities, helping businesses evenly balance demand and capacity at all times. With enhanced work planner features, such as adaptable allocation panels, utilization targets, and flexible filtering views, resource managers can reduce resource bench time, optimize resource utilization, and reduce costs. The Work Planner can now also be made available in Salesforce experience sites for partners to self-serve the management of their resourcing allocations, reducing communication blockers and promoting collaboration on joint delivery.
Boosting Accounting Team Efficiency with Streamlined Workflows
Winter ‘24 includes improvements aimed at accelerating accounting team efficiency. These include streamlined approvals in period end playbooks for a simplified and faster close and automated scheduling for a less manual revenue recognition process. Journal entries can also be set to automatically reverse, simplifying one of the most tedious parts of the financial close process, resulting in more timely financial statements. We are also pleased to share that after receiving substantial interest in the EA program for Accounts Payable (AP) Automation (announced in Summer ‘23), the program is now full. With ongoing customer feedback from our EAs, we will continue to simplify the processing of inbound invoices.
Expanding FP&A Beyond Financials and Across the Enterprise
In today’s dynamic environment, business leaders need line-of-sight across the enterprise to deliver services more efficiently and profitably, where strategic objectives of every business unit are in lockstep. Winter ‘24 includes improvements to services revenue forecasting, providing services leaders with a simplified view of future services revenue and the foresight to minimize revenue leakage.
This release also marks the evolution of Financial Report Builder (FRB) to Extended Report Builder (xRB), broadening reporting beyond financials and empowering finance teams to become leaders of data-driven insights across the entire organization. We are pleased to announce Board Books which allow Financial Controllers and Analysts to efficiently compile and share comprehensive report books to key stakeholders. Board books can include monthly, quarterly, and yearly reports, as well as PSA Utilization report packs (available on the Certinia Community in January 2024). New fields have also been added to financial and operational datasets, enhancing the user experience with greater reporting capabilities, leading to more comprehensive cash flow forecasts.
The Winter 2024 release is packed with even more innovative features and enhancements. To explore the complete range of these new capabilities, we invite you to visit the Release Hub on the Certinia Community. And don’t miss our detailed Winter ‘24 Release Customer Webinar, where we’ll guide you through the new features with live demos and expert insights, helping you maximize the benefits of our latest advancements!
