Novembers update sees some important changes to Enable's Cash App including additional reporting columns and a brand new final earnings indicator. These changes go alongside a number of additional feature enhancements and performance improvements that have been made throughout the system.
Our latest update was deployed to your UAT environment on 2nd November 2018 and is now available for testing. This UAT environment is separate to your Live environment and provides a suitable testing platform without any risk to the integrity of your live data.
The UAT process will last for approximately 5 weeks. During this time you will be able to try out the new features and give us your feedback. The update will be deployed to your Live Enable environment on 13th December 2018.
The payment history report, which is currently available within the Cash App, now has two new columns visible in both the UI and download versions. The columns have been labelled VAT and Payment method. These columns display the VAT value entered and Payment method option selected when creating a new receipt.
A new configuration setting has been added for Enable administrators to control whether the selection rule functionality is displayed for the corresponding dimension within the dimension item selection pane that is found on the deal details page. This will be in the form of a single-select dropdown list labelled Selection style in the dimension display controls. If a dimension already has selection rules configured for any deals, this setting cannot be changed.
A number of feature enhancements have been made to allow users to mark external earnings as Final and to view the status of these earnings in other areas of the system.
To allow users to edit the earnings or mark the earnings as Final for a deal that uses the External earnings or Apportioned external earnings plug-in without having to access the deal edit page, a new UI feature has been added to Enable.
This new feature, External earnings, will be available as a new menu item within the Browse menu and will include filter settings to find a list of deals for which a user can edit the earnings and mark the earnings as Final.
Results can be filtered by date, supplier and based on ‘Final’ status.
When viewing all results there is an indicator to show which rows have been marked as final.
Within the Payment allocation area of the Cash App, new columns have been added to indicate whether the earnings for a deal or deal line are final. A column labelled Final earnings has been added to both the deal level and deal line level UI views. For the deal lines pane, the column will only appear if the selected deal uses either the External earnings or Apportioned external earnings plug-in.
A column to highlight whether the earnings for a deal are final has also be added to the Payment allocation report. This will appear between the Deal line earnings and Deal line paid columns and be titled Final earnings.
An indicator has been added to the deal edit page in the Mechanism details pane. This indicates whether the deal’s earnings have been marked as Final and will only appear for deals that use either the External earnings or the Apportioned external earnings plug-in.
The current description for the activity log entry (Edit mechanism details) has been changed to Edit earnings, whenever earnings are edited for a deal with one of the following plug-ins: External earnings, Apportioned external earnings, Fixed amount or Apportioned fixed amount.
In addition, the Old value and New value columns will now be populated with the old and new earnings values. Also, whenever earnings are marked as Final for a deal with the External earnings or Apportioned external earnings plug-in, an entry will be added to the activity log with the description of Earnings marked as final.
A visual marker has been added to the Enable UAT environment that indicates to the user that they are using the UAT instance of the system. This can be seen at the top right of the screen.
As part of the November update, we have completed the first phase of work on a new Enable module called Forecasting. Depending on their permission settings, this module will allow a user to view or edit a forecast for a deal. This view will show the forecast spend and earnings for the deal, per phasing period. Once this module has been completed in a future release, it will be available any client by request.
After clicking on a deal in the deal listing area, the user will be navigated to the deal forecast page. The information available in the deal forecast page to users with ‘view’ access will be: full deal term forecast spend, per phasing unit spend and the current earnings band for the deal (if it is a targeted deal).
Instances of dates being exported in ‘MMM D, YYYY’ format, in certain core Enable and client-specific reports, have been changed such that they are written in ‘DD MMM YYYY’ format – e.g. ‘05 Apr 2018’.
An update has been made to the scaled accrual earnings replication process to modify the triggers to solve an issue around the pausing of turnover uploads around month end.
Additional validation has been implemented on the scheme type configuration page to ensure that it is impossible to change a scheme type version from Automatic to Manual if there are schemes that use that scheme type version and they have started workflow.
Multiple new triggers have been set up in Enable for the recalculation of the net spend for a scheme. These additional triggers include when any deal within a previous scheme is created, deleted or recalculated, when a previous scheme is edited, created or deleted, when certain client settings are changed and when there are modifications to the client divisions. There is also now an indication within the UI when net spend calculations are pending. This will only be relevant for users who have automatic workflow set up.
The processing of net spend calculation has been enhanced so it now uses a queue based system, where net spend calculation events are added to a queue when recalculation is necessary, and then consumed by a background process. This will lead to more responsive and efficient processing of these calculations compared to the existing implementation.
A number of updates have been made to Enable security infrastructure. This has included the implementation of HTTP Strict Transport Security, upgrading the third-party JavaScript library jQuery and updating the most up-to-date language features.
We have also made improvements to help prevent potential attackers ‘brute forcing’ their way into the system by limiting the number of login attempts Enable will accept.
A number of performance improvements have been made to the Executive summary feature in order to significantly improve the speed at which pages load. As part of these improvements new warning and confirmation messages regarding pending calculations have been added. A number of improvements have also been made to the calculation processes behind Executive summary data.
Visibility will be added in the user interface for calculation jobs that are processed with newer Enable calculation processes, such as baseline earnings calculations.
In line with Enable’s commitment to release an Enable update every six weeks, our next update will be deployed for testing within your UAT environment on 14th December, with deployment to your Live environment to take place on 19th February.
As part of our December update, we will be making further performance optimisations and platform enhancements. Alongside this, we will be introducing a series of new functionality, as well as enhancing existing Enable features. Here’s what you can expect in the next cycle.
The new Forecasting module will be available in Enable to provide enhanced earnings forecasting capabilities, and accessed through a new area within Enable. It will allow a user to view and edit forecasts on a per-deal basis. The output will be a forecast for a deal within that deal’s period, or a fixed Forecast period. This period will be configured on a per-client basis. For instance, this could be a single calendar year.
The module will allow for phased forecasts with a client-level custom phasing period. For this build phase, forecasts will only be based on purchase data. This means the module will be concerned with forecasting purchasing behaviour by the client and the rebate earnings that are expected if these forecast purchases are actualised.
A new forecasting report will also be added to the existing reports section of the Enable application. This will present a summary of forecast earnings where values are presented for the forecast period rather than on a per deal basis. The user will be able to control the granularity of the report through various options.
Users will also be able to aggregate results by forecast or phasing period, with the forecast period being the default. A user will be able to download the forecasting report as a CSV.
Currently, a user can see a report after turnover lines have been reconciled. This report presents a long list of suppliers that often reports zero values. To enhance the user experience, the panel presented to the right of such reports will be redesigned and offer additional functionality.
This panel will allow a user to order the report by any of the displayed columns. It will also allow a user to search for a particular supplier to view that supplier’s reconciliation details. The UI of the panel will be updated to incorporate the above, while the existing download functionality will remain unchanged.
The way that weekly recalculation of baseline earnings are triggered for deals will change in response to recent feedback received. A deal’s baseline earnings will be recalculated when the deal’s latest transaction date is prior to when the weekly process last ran, or the deal latest transaction date has never been set, in addition to the baseline period end date being after the date that the weekly process last ran.
If you have any questions regarding our current or upcoming Enable updates, please contact your Client Services team at projects@enable.com.
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