FinancialForce.com Drives Finance Department Productivity With Spring '11 Release

SAN MATEO, CA--(Marketwire - Jun 7, 2011) - FinancialForce.com, the global leader in online cloud accounting solutions built natively on the Force.com platform from salesforce.com, today released FinancialForce Accounting Spring '11. The release is focused on improving the productivity of finance departments by streamlining tasks and using clever automation and wizards to simplify complex processes that can consume a finance department's time. Spring '11 reduces the number of touches and keystrokes in many accounting processes and now fully leverages the electronic authorization capabilities provided by the Force.com platform.

"Our primary goal with Spring '11 is to help finance departments improve productivity," said Debbie Ashton, VP of product and customer success. "We talked with a large number of companies about processes that were draining their time. Finance teams are clearly under tremendous pressure to do more with fewer staff. We found several areas where we could eliminate steps, automate functions, or make complex accounting processes simpler. Spring '11 will improve the work velocity and efficiency of the finance department over and above the efficiency gains they derive with a cloud solution."

Spring '11 includes a number of new functions to eliminate touches, and where it is necessary, dramatically increase the speed of data entry. More streamlined and innovative automation has also been introduced in areas such as Searching, Bank Reconciliation and Currency Revaluation. For instance, a Currency Revaluation Wizard takes users through all the steps of a currency revaluation and culminates in automated entries to book both the unrealized gain/loss and the subsequent reversing journal.

"Too often, accounting software and financial systems get in the way of doing day-to-day business," said Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director, THINKstrategies. "By reducing the number of touches and keystrokes involved in many accounting processes, FinancialForce.com's Spring '11 release enables financial departments to improve their productivity, save time and money."

A significant addition to the release was the use of Force.com's authorization workflow. "One big complaint financial managers shared with us was how much time they spend chasing line managers and executives for transaction authorizations. Repeated emails and phone calls just don't cut it anymore," said Ashton. "Besides adding to the period close task list, financial managers have better things to do than chasing their colleagues."

When combined with Force.com authorization workflow, financial managers can create simple or multi-tiered electronic approval processes and have complete visibility to any authorization bottlenecks. Unlike emails, the system tracks and attaches the authorization history to each transaction, providing an iron clad audit trail and solid controls. The system uses the same authorization engine used by Salesforce CRM users, so companies don't have to invest in additional authorization workflow tools, allowing them to use a familiar tool company wide.

FinancialForce Accounting Spring '11 is available immediately to FinancialForce Accounting users as part of their monthly subscription fee.

About FinancialForce.com

FinancialForce.com is the cloud applications company. We focus 100% on building business applications for Force.com, the world's leading cloud computing platform from salesforce.com. Our applications include Accounting, Billing, Professional Services Automation (PSA) and Services Resource Planning (SRP). We serve fast-growing organizations and dynamic enterprises, helping them to align Finance, Sales and Service in a way that enables profitable growth. We are backed by two of the biggest and best players in the business, UNIT4 and salesforce.com.

To learn more please visit www.FinancialForce.com.