They’re finally here! Our most recent host of updates to Enable will bring you some amazing new functionality. This is now all ready to be tried out in your testing channel. We can’t wait for you to use our new features!
Our updates to the Trading Programs app bring you some fantastic new functionality. We’re pleased to let you know that Enable has made some massive strides with regards to how we handle evergreen trading programs by adding an option to set your agreement to be evergreen. We’ve also brought you the much-awaited list of trading programs, a new centralized place to view all of your agreements. On top of this, there has been a revamp of the trading program PDFs, giving a tidier, clearer look to your agreements and hence reducing the chance of any disputes with your trading partners. But the Trading Programs app isn’t the only app we have brought great new features to. The Deals app has received plenty of love from our team as well, with payment fields such as payment days, to be invoiced and more options available in the set up of an Ad Hoc deal. You can now also change the status of your Ad Hoc Deals from draft to approved. All of these changes have also been reflected in the agreement PDF. In a nutshell, we’ve provided some huge upgrades to your Enable apps offerings. We can’t wait to provide you with even more in future deployments!
These updates are already available to test in your UAT channel. Deployment to your Live channel will take place on Saturday, February 13th.
We’d love to hear any suggestions you have for any of our apps, and maybe they’ll appear in our product newsletter one day! To raise these with us, just log a feedback ticket here.
The Trading Programs app is the place for you to store all your rebate agreements, send programs off to your trading partners for signing, and report on how your trading programs are doing. To find out more about what the Trading Programs app can do for you, click here.
We know how important evergreen trading programs are for many of you. Therefore, we’ve given you access to a beta version of this functionality. When evergreen programs have been enabled for your channel, you can create an evergreen program by selecting the aptly named Evergreen option situated near the end date field of a program. This beta version will remove the date from the PDF and in Collaborator, with more functionality coming in a future release.
Also, you now have access to a beta version of the list of trading programs. This list displays all trading programs accessible to you across any of your channels. Beta versions give you early access to newly built areas so you don’t have to wait until all functionality has been built for you to start using it. Your feedback on any beta versions is especially appreciated.
This new area primarily consists of a listing that contains a range of information on each trading program, such as the reference, workflow status, start and end dates, whether you’re subscribed to it, and if there are unread comments. You can also search this listing based on various fields such as ID, reference, trading partner, and the user who last updated the program. Filtering is also possible in most of the fields available. This new listing serves as a great, centralized place to keep all your agreements and find the one you are after with ease.
In a future release, access to this page will also be granted to your collaborators, improving transparency so that all parties have access to the same view of trading programs established between them. Once your partners have access, potentially sensitive information will be obscured from their view such as the last updated date and who the program currently sits with.
You can also create a new trading program straight from the list. The wizard will help you select your trading partner and create your trading program, or you can create these manually if you prefer. When a trading partner has been selected, you will jump straight to program creation. This create button will not be visible to your collaborators when they receive access in the future.
For even greater transparency, you’re now able to see your program as your collaborator sees it in Collaborator, creating a more unified experience for all users. This view is accessible from the List of trading programs, or from the Summary tab on a program within the Trading Programs app. This Summary lists all details of the program, including an activity log, PDF, and comments.
Thanks to some of your great feedback, we've made our PDFs easier to read and understand. Minor changes have been made to some of the text where users have indicated the meaning is difficult to understand. This will minimize any ambiguity which may impact your negotiations with trading partners. We’ve also taken the opportunity to modernize the PDF by changes to fonts, percentage values displays, headings, alignment, and page breaks.
Some of you told us that you saw an opportunity to maximize efficiency by making some additional information (terms items) on your trading program mandatory. For example, if you need to record how your partner will follow no-touch deliveries you can add this as a mandatory item which prevents a program from having to go through workflow again if this is missed when setting up your program. Please let us know if you’d like us to configure this for you.
You can now filter the program earnings report by date, which was previously only possible for the daily earnings report. Effective rates are now available for fixed-rate program lines, even if they have no earnings yet. The report now also includes all dimension items that have been selected via a View by, regardless of whether they have any earnings so you can spot any that are underperforming. These changes come off the back of Enable’s drive to continue improving our reports as we know many of you rely on them to boost your performance.
The daily earnings report also has some recent updates as well; the effective rate will be included which is total earnings divided by total transacted value. Searchable trading program and program line fields have been added as modal popups too. This is to match the program earnings report, creating more consistency across the reporting suite we offer.
Our trading partner reconciliation report can be used to validate Enable’s transactional data and earnings data regularly. This is a great report to share with your trading partners, even more so following the recent changes. The first being a Target transactions type field which has been added to the rebates section of the YTD reconciliation tab. This field only shows if there are program lines present with this value available, and the channel uses client member functionality. Secondly, the rebates section of the reconciliation tab is now alphabetically sorted to improve the readability of the report. The primary sort is by program line type and the secondary sort by dimension item. Lastly, a bug causing total YTD sales to be miscalculated when there are months without sales has been fixed. All dimension items with existing YTD values will now appear in each subsequent month, regardless of sales.
When selecting a program line mechanism, there are now help links available to you that will take you to the existing Help Center article on mechanisms. We have articles on all of the available mechanisms which run through detailed examples showing you how to correctly use that mechanism. The range of mechanisms we offer helps you create either simple or complex rebate agreements with just a few clicks. If you would like any further assistance using any of these mechanisms, please raise a ticket or book an appointment.
Lastly, we’re making it easier for you so manual imports is more in line with automatic imports. You can now upload your dimension items and their attributes in a single upload. This is to keep the process consistent for you across both the UI and uploads which go in via automated imports.
Also new in Trading Programs:
Trading Programs has been updated to use the latest version of the Trading Programs API. Our API helps you run the reports you need which aren’t readily available through the UI. If this sounds like it could be of use, please reach out to your Customer Success Team.
In the last string of updates, we've brought the following changes to the API:
The Deals app is one of our newer pieces of functionality. It allows you to set your Special Pricing Agreements and Ad-Hoc Deals up with ease. It also creates the agreement PDF, similar to the Trading Programs app, so that the sign off process with your trading partners will become a breeze.
There have been plenty of updates to our Ad Hoc Deals. When creating an Ad Hoc Deal, there will be five new fields regarding payment terms; payment days, payment method, to be invoiced, to be receipted, and VAT applicable. These fields are always visible and will only be editable by users with create/edit permissions for Ad Hoc Deals. These fields and their values are displayed in the Ad Hoc Deal PDF under a terms heading.
If your organization has divisions, then you are now able to select them for an Ad Hoc Deal. This is found under the details tab. Depending on the division/divisions chosen when setting up the deal, the branding of the PDF will change.
In addition to this, when multiple divisions have been selected, you will be able to assign an apportionment percentage to indicate each division’s share of the deal's fixed earnings. It is important to note that the apportionment percentages and values will not be displayed on the Ad Hoc Deal PDF.
The ability to add agreement items such as products and branches to an Ad-hoc Deal has been added. When these items are included in the deal, the earnings for the deal are apportioned equally between each item.
A few more features have been added to Ad Hoc Deals; addition of address fields to support better modeling of Ad Hoc Deals (as seen above), removal of the receiving goods step of the contract wizard when your organization is different to the selected supplier organization and allowing users to navigate the wizard without having to click next.
These changes have made their way through to the PDF, making sure it fully represents the entire deal. As well as this, The PDF will have a draft status when the Ad Hoc Deal has a contract status of draft, which will be indicated by a DRAFT watermark overlaid across it - just how it is in Trading Programs.
There have been enhancements to permissions, allowing you to configure whether your users belonging to your organization (or acting on behalf of your organization) are able to approve contracts for each contract type. Currently, this will need to be configured by a member of the Customer Success team at Enable but further down the line, this could be done by you.
We've made changes to the approval area so that the edit page of a contract/template now includes a new contract status to indicate whether the contract is either a draft or approved. You can also edit the contract status if you have permission (unless the contract is locked). There are new validation and rules in place regarding managing and enrolling in these contracts based on this new contract status. For example, you will not be able to delete any contract/template/Ad Hoc deal with an approved status.
A single marketplace attribute called product group has been defined for the products marketplace dimension, which allows dimension items to be grouped together. They can then be selected to be the organization’s product group attribute and modeled indirectly by virtue of their grouping. It’s also possible to indirectly include products based on their product group on agreement templates, distributor support contracts, customer pricing contracts, and special pricing agreements. There will be an option to select all available products or product groups.
Also new in Deals:
Our menu-crumbs have been implemented in the entire Enable Apps hub to unify all our apps together. This ensures all our apps are easy to navigate through, making a seamless experience for you. Did you know that you can reach any of our apps and products (including the support hub) from apps.enable.com?
What else has changed?
We have also made the following, more succinct changes:
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 environment on Thursday, Feb 18th. Deployment to your Live environment will take place on Saturday, Mar 27th.
Included in the next update:
If you have any questions regarding our current or upcoming updates, please contact our Customer Success team at projects@enable.com, 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!
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