Today marks an exciting milestone as we unveil our latest innovations designed to help our customers transform their professional services to deliver predictable and profitable value. At the forefront of the Spring 2024 Release is our continued commitment to harnessing the power of AI, empowering professional services organizations to drive informed decision-making and unlock tangible results.
Infusing pragmatic AI capabilities throughout the services journey promises enormous gains for service organizations as they streamline their end-to-end processes, leading to stronger growth, profitability, and customer satisfaction. Our Spring 2024 release features a range of new and enhanced capabilities — including several major developments incorporating AI into our platform — to help services businesses generate more accurate forecasts, make more informed decisions, and boost their team’s productivity.
Unlocking real-world benefits with AI
We continue to lead the way in helping global enterprises integrate AI into their finance and professional services operations, delivering actionable insights that drive informed decision-making. In fact, a number of our early adopter customers, including Jellyfish, a global digital marketing agency, are already using and benefiting from Certinia AI. By simulating the likelihood of closing opportunities on a related estimate and conducting what-if analysis, users can strategically adjust inputs to maximize their chances of success. This capability enables businesses to swiftly approve statements of work and kickstart projects, giving them a competitive edge in the market.
Accelerating accurate and timely estimates
This release introduces enhancements that enable users to accurately scope projects and easily analyze estimates. With a predefined set of questions specific to each service product in Services CPQ, organizations can achieve seamless connectivity across teams, from sales to finance, resulting in a more cohesive customer experience. Additionally, Services CPQ offers an estimated overview, allowing the extended team to analyze estimates, identify areas of risk, and make informed adjustments. These enhancements will drive more accurate estimates, streamline the review and approval process, and increase the speed of quoting, ultimately reducing the time between closing the deal and starting the project.
Optimizing resource utilization with efficient staffing decisions
With the latest work planner enhancements, resource managers can easily view and manage resourcing and scheduling for various types of work, including billable and non-billable tasks. These improvements include the ability to pivot between hours and percentages, as well as new filters for matching resources based on skills and distance. Updated resource request features allow for better management and visualization of scheduled hours for suggested resources. This enables resource managers to visualize future assignments and consider capacity and scheduling needs at the point of assignment, ultimately leading to scalable and higher-quality staffing decisions.
Connecting delivery to project financials
Aligning delivery management with project financials is essential for protecting revenue and profit. Project managers can now monitor the progress of a project compared to the original plan. With insights into scheduling variance, budget utilization, and forecasted revenue, project managers can gain a financial perspective of the project’s performance.
With this release, we’re also empowering project managers with enhanced control to proactively identify and address any necessary course corrections when there are deviations from the planned delivery. By viewing resources’ schedules in Gantt charts and overviews of key performance indicators, project managers can easily assess project progress and take prompt action. This reduces the risk of schedule delays, budget overruns, and inaccurate revenue forecasts.
In addition, with automated billing event splits, project managers no longer have to worry about reaching a billing cap and halting the billing process. Instead, they can continue billing up to the cap and split the remaining amount. This eliminates the need for manual intervention, reducing administrative oversight and minimizing the risk of payment interruptions. Project costs can also be split and attached to milestones allocated to specific budgets, allowing for more accurate project costing and improved profit accuracy. As a result, project managers can ensure more precise reporting, improved customer satisfaction, and reduced billing delays.
Time and resource-saving capabilities for greater efficiency
This latest release empowers accounting teams to lighten the load of routine tasks, resulting in saved time and resources and enabling them to prioritize more strategic initiatives. Mass actions for cash entry and flexible cash matching will reduce manual effort in accounts receivable workflows. Ul enhancements will also simplify the process of replacing users in accounting playbook records, improving efficiency and reducing the risk of missed tasks during team member unavailability. Through our partnership with Envestnet, accounting teams can conveniently import bank statements directly from their bank accounts for end-to-end bank reconciliation, saving time and effort. Lastly, early adopters of AP Automation can also access automated rule-based processes for recording and approving vendor invoices, which streamlines the allocation of payable invoice lines.
Empowering finance and operational teams as business storytellers
We’re empowering finance teams to take the lead in data-driven decision-making. This release introduces the ability to provide report-level commentary within Report Builder, enabling users to add contextual commentary and forward-looking statements directly to reports. This feature improves efficiency, reduces time spent on report preparation, and enables faster and more informed decision-making.
Transforming customer success across the entire enterprise
We’re thrilled to share the impressive progress of our Early Adopter program for Customer Success Cloud. With several customers ready to go live, we’ve made significant strides in fostering a team-centric approach to customer success. Existing customers interested in more information on the Early Adopter program should contact their Customer Success Manager.
Every enhancement has been developed to help services organizations drive more certainty in their businesses, from the opportunity to renewal, and we’re excited about the range of updates and new capabilities to our Services-as-a-Business platform and the value it will unlock for our customers. For full release details and additional resources, check out the Release Hub on Certina Community!
