Certinia, the platform for services business, has announced its summer 2023 product release with new AI capabilities to streamline resource management and enhance productivity for accounting teams.
The new release incorporates what the company calls “pragmatic AI”, which reduces the risk of investing in AI by providing curated datasets, closed-loop models and recommendations to improve model accuracy.
The latest enhancements combine Salesforce’s Einstein Discovery ML models with a platform that ingests financial and operational data for enhanced cash flow forecasting, planning, staffing and decision-making.
The product suite’s Resource Management component also now integrates with Google LLC’s and Microsoft’s Outlook calendars to give project managers quick assessments of worker availability when scheduling events from within a project.
Moreover, accounting teams will have access to new resources for managing collections, vendor payments and generating depreciation schedules, while accounting playbooks will now include associated tasks and due dates for faster closing.
New procurement enhancements will additionally enable teams to analyze and control spending by category and supplier, enforce spending limits for vendor contracts, receive renewal reminders for subscription licenses, automatically create renewals with uplift and proration and automate cost recognition based on company rules.
One of the added features, called Project Overview, looks to reduce administrative work and enable more accurate revenue forecasting. The Scheduling Risk Dashboard feature additionally identifies potential risks to upcoming scheduled work and claims to take timely precautionary measures to uphold margins.
Dan Brown, chief product and strategy officer, Certinia, said: “We’ve had AI capabilities such as autoregressions and optimizations for a while, but with the summer release we’re introducing a different set that is more about how you take the data in your Salesforce system, bring it into Einstein Discovery and then bring it back to your application.
“This provides greater visibility into how you use AI as opposed to it being a black box.”
Since the company rebranded from FinancialForce Inc to Certinia over the past year, its operations have looked to expand from an ERP provider running on top of the Salesforce Inc. sales automation platform to “the platform for services business”, turning its attention to new products such as Customer Success Cloud and Services CPQ (configure, price, quote).
Last month the company was acquired by private equity firms Haveli Investments and General Atlantic LP. Salesforce remains an investor and says it runs its entire professional services business on Certinia.
