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Professional Services Enterprise Winter ’10 Release Notes

December 28, 2009 Appirio

By Todd Bursey

Note: As of Jan 1, 2011, Professional Services Enterprise, an application formerly provided by Appirio Inc. on Force.com, is now owned, developed and supported by FinancialForce.com.

Appirio launches the Winter ’10 release of its Professional Services Enterprise (PS Enterprise) product. We have added a wide range of exciting new features and enhancements based on feedback from customer implementations of the Fall ’09 release. Timecards, expenses, projects, resourcing and billing have been enhanced. And, a major feature called Vendor Management has been added to integrate vendor invoicing into PS Enterprise.

New Vendor Management Features

PS Enterprise has new functionality that allows a customer’s vendors to proactively manage their own invoices and budgets on projects. This provides a level of transparency to allow vendors to add value in the process, not just throw an invoice over the wall. This will help reduce budget overruns on projects, increase efficiency in the process and provide checks and balances between operations and vendors. Also, this will reduce the work needed on the customer end to review submitted items and reconcile vendor invoices, and help prevent duplicate invoicing.
Vendors can create invoices directly through the Partner Portal. After creating an invoice, vendor users can search for un-invoiced items by account, and PS Enterprise automatically adds them as line items to the invoice. PS Enterprise customer operations personnel can manually approve invoices for payment, or set up Salesforce approval processes as desired.

Vendors can access reports and views to help manage the services management process:
  1. All items submitted and the links to the invoices
  2. Status of invoices submitted
  3. Un-invoiced business records
  4. Invoiced business records
  5. Report on all budgets assigned and the remaining amounts

Vendors can also attach a file with the vendor’s own previously created invoice instead of searching for and adding line items. Customer operations personnel would need to manually reconcile items in this case.

Other notes on Vendor invoices:
  1. Once an item is chosen to be on an invoice, it cannot be added to another invoice, preventing duplicate invoices.
  2. The status of an invoice can be updated, and communicated to the vendor, as desired.
  3. Vendors can submit a single invoice for a many projects, or a single project per invoice.
  4. Vendors can submit a single invoice for line items that span budgets.
Timecard Enhancements
These enhancements have been added to Timecard functionality:
  1. An option to move specific fields from the “Notes” section of the Timecard to the main screen (Phase, Methodology and Milestone Fields)
  2. The ability to specify which Timecards will appear on the Missing Timecard Report, based on Timecard status
  3. An option to set which Timecards are used for the Estimates Vs. Actuals reporting, based on Timecard status
  4. More assignments displayed on the Timecard screen drop down menu, configurable
Expense Reporting Enhancements
These enhancements have been added to Expense Reporting functionality:
  1. The ability to enter Expenses in multiple currencies, using either the Salesforce or PSE Advanced Multi Currency function for dated exchange rates
  2. The ability to enter expenses directly against project Milestones           
Projects
These enhancements have been added to Project functionality:
  1. The ability to choose Milestones when creating a Project from a template
  2. The ability to automatically create Project budgets from product line Items on an Opportunity
  3.  Advanced searching and filtering of Resources by role in the Project Planner
Resource Assignments and Staffing
These enhancements have been added to Resource Assignments and Staffing functionality:
  1. The ability to create multiple assignments instead of one at a time: Resources to Projects, and Projects to Resources
  2. Resource Planner enhancements: open a Resource or Assignment from the Resource Planner; perform advanced searches on Resources
  3. Staffer enhancements: expanded search, view and grouping capabilities; True/False value usage improvements
Forecasts
These enhancements have been added to Forecasts functionality:
  1. Forecast worksheet separates actuals for internal and external resources
  2.  Forecast against planned revenue or billings
  3.  Forecasting for Projects           
  4.  Forecast audit history for unscheduled backlog and Milestones
  5.  Forecast numbers displayed in user’s currency
  6.  Forecast revenue and open time report, exportable to Excel
Billing
These enhancements have been added to Billing functionality:
  1. Pre-billed amounts tracked at Project level
  2. Billing events optionally generated for past time periods
  3. Ability to: manually stop specific billable items from billing event generation; filter billing events by transaction categories; manage billing events before processing; and remove billing event batches and specific events

Thanks! We look forward to everyone’s feedback as we roll out these new features and enhancements.

– Todd and the entire Appirio team

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