The latest batch of updates provides payment workflow functionality and includes several features that might aid your year-end bookkeeping and the setup of your trading programs for next year. You will now have greater flexibility when configuring additional conditions for your deals, and in addition to added support for tax accounting, the matter of payment reallocation for interim deals has been addressed. Users of the Deals app will notice improvements to the PDFs along with many new options for filtering and viewing their data.
These and many other updates are already available to test in your UAT channel. Deployment to your live channel will take place on Saturday, December 4th.
We’ve made several changes to improve your ability to control payment workflow for customer rebates. Payment authorization roles can now be set up and used to configure a payment authorization hierarchy that is separate from the existing trading programs hierarchy. These can be configured per trading program type so that each program type can support its own workflow hierarchy. A payment approval process will begin with a notification email being sent to each workflow role whose authorization is required, and each user will be able to record notes within the system, if needed, to explain their decision. The flexible setup makes it possible to authorize individual payment lines across multiple trading partners and even authorize a partial payment with the remainder to be authorized at a later date. All of this new functionality will roll out in a beta state and can be toggled on or off in each channel.
We know that configuring program lines to match rebate agreements can get complicated, so we've fortified our Additional Conditions area. Now the number of additional conditions is unlimited, and each transaction condition may be manually marked as met if desired. More complex program lines that require a certain number of conditions to be satisfied before rebate can be earned are also now easily representable. Finally, we've added a new Individuals tab to support the management of additional conditions on an individual basis such as in the case of a buying group wishing to cater to certain distinguished members.
We're also pleased to bring a number of quality-of-life improvements to the Payment History interface, beginning with the ability to filter by date received and search by 'External Reference'. Reallocating and reversing payments will now produce records in the Payment History report for improved auditability, and as an added bonus, attachments associated with the original payment will automatically be migrated to the new payment line.
Additionally, allocation now behaves more intelligently when replacing interim trading programs. Now, when an interim program is replaced, any existing payments allocated against program lines that don’t have a counterpart in the new program will be deallocated, recorded as unallocated, and retain their 'External Reference', 'Date entered', 'Record ID' and original attachments. These fields are also preserved if a payment is reallocated to an equivalent program line (with matching time period, payment frequency, currency and program line reference) regardless of the trading program status. This will prevent you from having to make tedious changes.
Many accounting teams will rejoice in the improved tax bookkeeping for payment allocation. An option can now be toggled on so that a VAT Paid column will appear adjacent to the extant Paid column. This new column records the allocated tax for each payment line, which is calculated by the same automatic apportionment method as in the usual Allocated Value column. The bulk payment upload template and interface will reflect this change, and reversing an allocation will now reverse both the allocated value and allocated tax.
The latest update also includes a number of smaller enhancements to Trading Programs. For example, accounting teams will find that unmatched transactions are now easier to delete and that the Finance app has gotten some design updates. All users will notice that the top navigation bar has a new Trading Programs button for easy access and that it's now possible to search for trading partners by their reference in all of the listings. In addition, safeguards against downloading a template while selection rules are being processed have been implemented. Finally, a new forms design has improved the look of the Reporting module, and a large portion of Trading Programs is now available in French.
To better organize our functionality, the current Deals listing will be split into three new listings: SPAs, Templates, and Ad Hoc Deals. So that you can more easily reference your ad hoc deals within the system, we've added a new, unique incremental ID number to each. These numbers are system generated and will begin at AH00000001. We've also given you many more ways to view information about your deals. For example, the details view for ad hoc deals has been enhanced to include: Incremental ID, Trading Partner Reference, Deal Type, External Reference, Event Code and Date Created. To increase clarity, the existing Net, VAT and Gross fields have also been renamed to Net value, Tax value and Gross value respectively. The workflow view has been enhanced to include: Approval Date, Originator (the user who created the entity) and Sign-off contact (contact name for the user who signed-off the Deal).
In addition to all this, a new finance view has been added. You can select the finance view to show: Reference, Trading Partner Reference, To be invoiced?, Invoice Date, Apportionment (a comma separated list of the divisions and their apportionment percentages selected for the deal), Paid (including tax), Paid (excluding tax), Tax paid, Outstanding (including tax), Outstanding (excluding tax), Outstanding tax, Payment Date (a comma separated list of the dates of payments recorded against this deal), Payment Method (a comma separated list of the methods of payments recorded against this deal), and Payment Code (a comma separated list of the external references for payments recorded against this deal).
To help you make use of all these new views, we have enhanced the CSV download functionality to give you the option to either download the current view or all views. This will allow you to return all information about your deals, if you would like, or see a more targeted set of information. Any filters that you apply to the listing will be respected within the downloaded CSV.
Improvements to our PDF application will be similarly useful for all of the newly accessible data. We have updated the B2B Deals PDF design to be in line with the Enable Standard Document Design (ESDD). This will keep PDFs generated from our system more consistent, will eliminate any concerns raised with the PDFs produced in our system, and will create a more seamless product, which is especially important if you have Trading Programs, Ad Hoc Deals and Special Pricing Agreements with the same trading partner.
We have also made enhancements to the Special Pricing Agreement (SPA). First, the SPA PDF will now be a single PDF which amalgamates the information from its parent distributor support contract and customer pricing contract. This is because DSCs and CPCs are closely related and need to be understood together. Second, the PDF now displays all products which have been included in the contract (regardless of whether they are included directly or indirectly) alongside their relevant mechanism values for each delivery type. Previously, only the directly included products were listed and neither the product groups or rates were displayed.
Finally, we have introduced a Pricing Programs PDF which is closely modeled after the SPA PDF. The main difference between the two is that the Pricing Program requires a grid to be displayed for each individual product in addition to the grid displayed for product groups.
Among the usual collection of important but lower-profile updates, we have a few items that might be of particular interest to some readers. It’s now possible to complete the entire onboarding process on a mobile device, for example. You might notice convenient links to organization profiles when using organization pickers throughout the system, and if you use channel members functionality, you'll find that you can now filter earnings by member and review both group and individual targets. The new Progress Tracker app got some UI and UX improvements and is now available for all customers to start using. Finally, as a part of the ongoing internationalization project, welcome emails will now go out in the user’s default language, and the sign-on screens will have language selectors in case, for example, two people who prefer different languages might use the same machine.
In line with Enable’s commitment to release a product update every six weeks, we have numerous new features under development that will be ready to test in your UAT environment on Thursday, December 9th. Deployment of this next set of features to your live environment will take place on Saturday, February 19th.
Included in the next update:
If you have any questions about current or future updates, please contact us at projects@enable.com or book an appointment with a member of the Customer Success team. As always you can log a ticket with any feedback or questions you might have. We look forward to hearing from you!
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