Highlights of the latest round of updates include the option to let collaborators view estimated earnings on their uploads and support for accessing the system in German. You can also now incorporate unit of measure conversions in your forecasting, and you have more options when reversing payment allocations. Work on the special pricing and ad hoc deals functionality will provide more flexibility when representing those types of agreements, and the system continues to evolve to securely store and quickly process incredible amounts of data.
These and many other updates are already available to test in your UAT channel, and deployment to your live channel will take place on Saturday, May 14th. Information about our product update process and a full calendar of deployment dates are available in our Help Center.
Customers and their trading partners already prize Collaborator for sharing and discussing rebate deals, and we continue to make it even better. With the latest updates, we have made it possible for you to allow your trading partners to get estimated earnings when they review the information about the transactions they upload. This enhanced visibility will allow you and your partners to form timely accrual plans, and it will provide increased value for partners who upload their transactions earlier.
We are also continuing to improve Progress Tracker, a new Enable app that highlights opportunities within your targeted rebates and provides key information on each of your program lines. In addition to implementing performance and navigation improvements for the app, we’ve added the ability to exclude transactions for particular dimension items from your Progress Tracker calculations. This lets you upload your information in a variety of forms without worrying about double counting, so you can be confident that you're seeing exactly the data that you want to see. For example, if you want to upload both invoices and purchase orders into the system, you can specify which of these should represent the transactions with your trading partner. These changes have also been applied to the Organizations area, where you can view summaries of your trading relationships with your partners. If you're interested in Progress Tracker or want to review how it is set up in your channel, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
Following up on our recent introduction of partial payment allocation, we’ve continued to fine tune the way payments are allocated in the system. Previously, reversing allocated payments required the entire payment to be reversed, even if only a portion of the payment needed to be returned or revised. Now, in the Finance app’s payment history section, you’ll be able to partially reverse such payments. For example, you might receive $150,000 in January while you're owed $100,000, and then in February you might be owed $50,000 but receive nothing because you were paid in advance. You'll want to allocate the $150,000 in January, but you might not know yet whether you'll receive any payment in February. The new update will let you neatly move the $50,000 from January's accounting to February's when the time comes.
Next, some of you create trading agreements with multiple independent periods. For example, you might reset transaction totals at the start of each month instead of accruing over the course of a year. Many customers have been using a collection of separate program lines to represent these deals, but we are happy to announce that we’ve developed some target period functionality to address this situation. The beta release will support the granularity that such deals require while allowing you to view the varied parts together as a single agreement. If this option might be of value to you, please let us know. We'd be happy to help set things up.
Finally, we’ve also made some changes to the unit of measure conversion functionality to make it fully compatible with the Forecasting module.
Special pricing agreements, such as when a manufacturer supports a distributor in honoring a deep price cut promised to a customer, have grown increasingly popular over the past decade, as have ad hoc deals, which are straightforward, one-off agreements addressing things like advertising support. We are continuing to add valuable new features for both special pricing agreements and ad hoc deals as we work toward a beta release.
With this round of updates, we made major improvements to the special pricing data model to improve our flexibility to represent different types of special pricing agreements that arise in a variety of industries. Similarly, we’re taking steps to ensure that the ad hoc deals functionality can support different use cases by providing configuration options that allow fixed amounts to be represented in a variety of ways. This technical work will help optimize system performance in this area and will provide a better foundation for other special pricing functionality on our roadmap such as approval workflow and additional calculations.
This round of updates is replete with performance and usability enhancements, and one broad collection falls under the scope of our internationalization project. In short, we’ve added support for the German language in all applications that accommodate translations, and we’ve added language support to system reports like the payment history and to system-generated emails such as those sent as part of workflow. Since we've thoroughly tested our approach to language support, these updates went directly to the live channels to make them available immediately.
The system has also been upgraded to handle the ever-increasing volume of transactions being uploaded by you and your collaborators. For example, it no longer suffices for some of our tables to admit "only" 2 billion entries, so they've been expanded to handle up to 9 quintillion, which is 9 billion billion. We look forward to the day when your volume of business makes us upgrade even further! These changes will lead to performance improvements, especially if you already upload and store a lot of data. Some other tweaks have improved availability by making the system resilient against component downtime.
You’ll see for yourself that certain forms like those in the workflow report and external earnings pages have become visually clearer and easier to use, and you’ll probably also notice appealing things like organization logos on the dashboard and a handy button for dismissing pop up notifications. API users can now modify trading partner records as described in the updated API documentation and, lastly, we have an interesting project underway involving system-guided walkthroughs to help onboard new system users.
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, May 19th. Deployment of this next set of features to your live environment will take place on Saturday, June 25th.
Included in the next update:
If you have any questions about current or future updates, please check out our product roadmap, contact us at help@enable.com, or book an appointment with a member of the Customer Success team. As always, you can raise a ticket with any feedback or questions you might have. We look forward to hearing from you!
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