We’re delighted to let you know that our most recent host of updates to Enable will bring you some great new functionality! This is now all ready to be tried out in your testing channel.

Some of the work we’ve done in the Trading Programs app will vastly improve your reporting suite, allowing you to make smarter, more informed decisions for your business. On top of this, you can now add advanced target conditions to your program lines. These allow you to create more complex conditions for a program line to qualify for the rebate, giving you a wider variety of functionality to draw from. There have also been enhancements brought to your Finance app including a brand new snapshot for your company’s accounting, as well as the ability to authorize payment lines for export in snapshots. Collaborator has also received UI upgrades to support you and your partners with easier, more seamless negotiations. Enable apps as a whole has received massive performance improvements to ensure your different apps are all running as smoothly as possible.

These updates are already available to test in your UAT channel. Deployment to your Live channel will take place on Saturday, Dec 5th.

We’d love to hear any suggestions you have for Enable, and maybe they’ll appear in our product newsletter one day! To raise these with us, just log a feedback ticket here.

What’s new?

Trading Programs

The Trading Programs app is where you can store your rebate agreements. From here, Enable can send the agreements through an automated workflow for sign off, calculate the earnings for these agreements and even give you the tools to report on them. You can find out more about Trading Programs here.

We have added a new additional condition called advanced target conditions. Adding one or more advanced target conditions allows you to specify additional targets that must be met before the program line can earn rebate. These additional targets can be set so they automatically keep track of when the target has been met, ensuring your rebate earnings are accurate without the need for manual intervention.

While we were adding this functionality, we've also improved additional conditions as a whole. You can now add a description field for additional conditions to explain exactly what these conditions are. Furthermore, you can add more than one condition to a program line, each of which may be of any condition type, thus giving you the flexibility to represent your trading programs even better. All conditions will need to be met before the rebate is earned. The PDF of a program displays all the relevant information and includes any additional conditions that have been set.

We've also made some changes to our reporting suite. Here, you can run reports to view how well each trading program is doing or to see how much you have accrued in the past month. You can also run a report to show how the transactional data is attributed in your channel and even save your most commonly ran reports.

This cycle's updates mean that you can now pick multiple program line results types in the report’s criteria. For example,  you can add both accrual earnings and actual earnings to the same daily earnings report.  The report will then show each of the chosen result types by column, allowing you to easily compare actual and forecast earnings.  This will show accrual earnings in the daily earnings report instead of forecast earnings. If you only choose a single result type, then the report will still show the type of earnings in the column header. As well as this, you can now also filter by either trading partner or trading program, giving you an even wider range of options when reporting. If these filters give an invalid combination, then the least recent conflicting selection will be cleared. Finally, we have also added the transaction date filter to the program earnings report. This will act in the same way as it does for the daily earnings report. Please note that fixed amount or externally calculated earnings which cannot be apportioned are not tied to a specific date, and so will not be displayed in the program earnings report when a date filter is used.

When adding a View by setting in the program earnings report, any attributes or dimension items included in a program line by the dimension item selection function will be included in the report results, even if they have not received any earnings to help you uncover any missed opportunities.

The following columns are now available within the Trading Programs reporting suite:

• Effective rate field is now also available in the daily earnings report when it is run by program line. This rate is calculated as the total earnings divided by total transacted value.
• Effective transacted value is available in the program earnings report. This displays the transactional value for the program line after all deductions and discounts have taken effect.
• Total transacted value in both the program earnings and daily earnings report. This is the sum of the values of the transaction lines which earned the rebate. This column was previously called the value column.
• Total transacted units in both the program earnings and daily earnings report. This is the sum of the number of units of the transaction lines which earned the rebate. This column was previously called the value column.

Deductions can now be calculated at a more granular level. This is the new default behavior, where deductions are deducted at the transaction level. Any existing program lines in the system have been set to continue to be calculated at the program line level. Your customer success team will be on hand if you want your existing program lines to use the new default setting.

Program lines within a series also support the new transaction line matched deduction behavior detailed above. Deductions only apply to the time frame of the series program line as they will not match any transaction lines outside of those dates. In line with current functionality, you can select whether a set of deductions apply to any currently implemented transaction type.

Following the feedback given to us by you, the trading program description and program line description fields are now optional fields in both cases. Emails and PDFs have been updated to reflect the optional nature of these fields. These columns will also be removed from the new trading programs listing, the program and program line wizards, and the report preview.

Also new in Trading Programs:

• You can inverse the sign of a program line by using inverse earnings, which is reflected within the PDF. This was previously called contra earnings.
• The selection state filter for the dimension collection item UI is now a multi-select filter. It now defaults to showing both direct and indirect selections.
• The effective rate for a fixed rate program line will now be set to that fixed rate, regardless of whether that program line has any earnings.
• The trading program filters in the program earnings report will be replaced by a trading program field, and the program line filters replaced by a program line field, each allowing to filter by reference, description, and ID.

Finance

We have made a handful of great enhancements to our Finance app. Some of these include the ability to authorize payments, more informative snapshots, and even a whole new snapshot in itself! You can learn more about the Finance app here.

We’ve added a setting titled record authorized values as paid. Enabling this option will automatically record authorized balances in the Finance app as remittances to save you time and effort. The value of a recorded remittance has also been updated to be the difference between the previously authorized value and the newly authorized value.

A new Cash Module Authorized Balances Snapshot (CMABSNAP) is now available in the Finance app. This snapshot can be used to report the authorized balance stored against payment lines. This will help you hugely with the generation of invoices and credit notes.

The calculation of the per-transaction line result outstanding accrual earnings has been amended for the Outstanding Rebate Accrual Earnings Snapshot (ORAESNAP). The calculation is now updated to handle payment lines with zero earnings but non-zero payments to give you a more informative snapshot. There is also a new Payment line ID column which can be configured for your Finance snapshots. This is initially only available for the Cash Module Authorized Balances Snapshot (CMABSNAP). Finally, the Outstanding Rebate Accrual Earnings Snapshot (ORAESNAP) has been amended to exclude earnings that relate to your proposals.

Also new in the Finance app:

• The snapshot row, which can be clicked to download a snapshot, now allows clicks anywhere on the tile to make the user experience smoother.
• The Authorize button has been changed such that it is now disabled when a user has read-only access.
• The authorized balance calculation will no longer account for existing payments. It now represents the running total of the total amount authorized for a payment line.
• The type filter on the payment history page has been improved.
• Other optimizations have also been made such as modal panel styling, supporting lower resolutions, scrolling improvements, and IE11 support.

Deals

Our Deals application is the perfect tool to help you set up your special pricing agreements (SPAs) and really make huge strides in streamlining your B2B negotiations. Special pricing agreements are offered jointly between a manufacturer and a distributor to supply products to a market segment at a reduced price. The Deals app allows you and your partners to create and keep these in a central library.  

A button to create a contract has now been added to the agreement template page. This will take you straight to the contract wizard where the agreement template step has been pre-selected. The wizard will then help you set up a contract with ease. You are also able to control the visibility for each contract and template with our new visibility setting. This setting can be set to either shared or internal. This controls whether they are shared with your partners or if just your team can see them.

It’s now possible to make selections against an agreement template. These agreement templates will define a superset of products that contacts are permitted to use. Any products which are not in this superset cannot be selected.

We've added some logic to prevent invalid contracts from being created. An SPA will need to have branches selected before the SPA can be used. It is not possible to select a branch for a SPA which was not included in the associated distributor support contract (DSC). For product inclusions, at least one product will need to be included before an agreement template, customer pricing contract (CPC) or DSC can be used. It is not possible to include a product for a DSC that was not included in the associated agreement template.

Also new in the Deals app:

• It is not possible to select a delivery type for a DSC or a CPC which was not included in the associated agreement template.
• Users will now also be able to override both the pricing and support mechanism item inclusion level fields for any valid item inclusions.
• You will now be able to see a full listing of contracts within the contracts tab of an agreement template. This is to show you all the contracts which use that template.

Collaborator

This latest release of improvements to the Collaborator app will improve your collaborator’s experience by making the UI more user-friendly, reducing loading times, and incorporating the Enable Core view into what they see. We believe that all of this will encourage them to keep using Collaborator, which in turn will make negotiations between yourselves and your partners even easier. To learn more about Collaborator, click here.  

Menu-crumbs have now been implemented in the trading programs tile in Collaborator. If the collaborator has an Enable channel of their own, they will get the full Enable Trading Programs navigation menu.

Also new in Collaborator:

• Collaborator’s handling of large messages with many attachments in the comment's tab has been improved, giving you and your collaborators a smoother experience.
• The header in the trading programs tile in Collaborator used to be channel-agnostic, while in Trading Programs the header items depended on the user’s channel. To resolve this, the system now remembers a user’s recent channel and renders the menu structure accordingly.
• We have changed the look and feel of the trading program's view within Collaborator so that it aligns better with the view which users see in Enable
• The performance of several functions within the Collaborator app has been improved with the use of caching and carefully chosen database indexes.

Enable apps

Your experience when using Enable is of paramount importance to us. For that, we have made numerous improvements to Enable apps, as well as our Support hub in case you ever need additional help using one of our many offerings.

A search box has been added to the Help center tile in the Support Hub. When searching, this takes you to the search results page in the Help Center. This will streamline your whole experience when looking for assistance using Enable apps.

The Enable apps platform features a centralized notifications facility and UI widget. To provide a foundation for ensuring that is rolled out across Enable’s offering, we have integrated Trading Programs with the notifications data source so that you will receive notifications for Trading Programs from the notifications tab on the Enable apps homepage.

Typography and grid pages have been added and existing guidance and color pallets have also been updated.

What else has changed?

Along with all the great new updates detailed above, we have also made the following improvements to Enable apps:

• We have made changes across the board to improve Enable deployment speeds. This should mean we cause as little disruption to you as possible when releasing new functionality.
• Your configured account profile image will now be displayed in the hub switcher for a more personalized feel.
• Font sizes have changed to 16px across Enable to promote a more unified look throughout all of our applications and improve readability.
• If you have access to multiple channels, you will now be able to access them in the same domain.
• The remaining Enable channels and its users will be migrated into Enable apps.

What's coming up?

In line with Enable’s commitment to release a product update every six weeks, we have a ton of updates coming up that will be ready to test in your UAT channel on Thursday, Dec 10th. Deployment to your Live channel will take place on Saturday, Feb 13th.

Included in the next update:

• The much-awaited evergreen trading programs will be available in your Trading Programs channel.
• It will be possible to flag any terms item as mandatory upon configuration. This will prevent your users from activating Trading Programs until all mandatory fields have a value.
• We'll make some improvements to make the PDFs easier to read and understand.
• In our Deals app, there will be validation and rules in place regarding managing and enrolling contracts based on the new contract status flag that will be introduced.

If you have any questions regarding our current or upcoming updates, please contact our Customer Success team at [email protected], or book an appointment with a member of our team. As always, you can log a ticket with any feedback or questions you have about the latest set of releases. We look forward to hearing from you!