FinancialForce - One Administrator’s Toolkit
Overview
In working with customers, I’ve found it useful to have a standard (custom built) Administration App. This is a custom Lightning App that aggregates all of my most commonly used admin functions in FinancialForce. Technology-wise, it's nothing special, but it's a great way to consolidate all of the hidden administration 'goodness' needed to effectively run the platform.
Note that this is for the the PSA side - I might do a similar blog post for the FFA side in the future.
The Good Stuff
Actuals Verifier - FinancialForce has an aggregation engine called the “Actuals Engine”. Running periodically, it rolls up all of the financial information on your projects into a time-series of records. The Actuals Verifier is good to have on hand in case you receive a report of a project showing incorrect financials. It’s also a good way to identify if you have any Transaction Deltas - the inputs to the Actuals process - lingering around and needing to be processed. More on those later.
App Logs - On that note - if you have ‘stuck’ Actuals, it’s probably because you have Application Logs hanging around, which block the processing of Actuals. It’s always good to watch your App Logs to see what has been going awry with your system.
Configuration Groups - While FinancialForce has largely migrated to Custom Settings to drive configuration, several sub-systems in FinancialForce still rely on Configuration Groups. Notably, Actuals, Billing, and Timecards all have configurations that live here and may be used periodically.
Contacts - FinancialForce leverages Salesforce’s Contacts mechanisms to store data about Resources - the lifeblood of your PSA. It’s always good to have quick access to these for any changes needed to your Resource set.
Est vs Actuals - A lot of interesting reporting can be driven off of Est. vs Actuals. Full explanation of Est vs Actuals is beyond the scope of this post - but I like to have these quickly on hand for review and troubleshooting.
Holidays - Having accurate utilization metrics depends on your Holidays being right. I keep these handy as the year progresses. That said, it’s good to go ahead and populate these very far in advance if possible.
Permission Controls - A typical part of PM onboarding involves assigning Permission Controls. Permission Controls are another layer of security that sits on top of the existing (and typical) Salesforce permissioning scheme, and allows for permissioning down the Region, Practice, Group dimensions. Enough said.
Project Actuals Recalc - Skips the ‘verification’ part, and allows for nuanced recalculation of Actuals at the Project level.
PSA Administration - So much administrative goodness here! This is a great starting point for learning about some of the different scheduled jobs on which FF relies. I’ll especially note here that this page is where you can schedule your Actuals calculations to happen regularly.
Time Periods - As mentioned earlier, Actuals slices it’s data across different Time Periods. Note that several of FinancialForce’s ‘engines’ does this - Utilization, Est. vs Actuals, and some aspects of Forecasting. Therefore it is vital your Time Periods be both correct and up-to-date… and populated as far into the future as you’d like to generate data for.
Transaction Deltas - I’ve touched on this previously, but Transaction Deltas are the incremental calculations used to modify the Actuals over time. Timecards are frequent sources of Transaction Deltas. I like to keep these on hand in case I have a tough issue involving Actuals to sort out.
Utilization Calculations - I drive a *lot* of reporting in FinancialForce using Utilization. Therefore I like to keep these readily accessible.
Work Calendars - Depending on the complexity of your implementation, you may access Work Calendars a lot, or not at all. Work Calendars are used to set the available working hours for a Resource, and therefore correct Utilization numbers are dependent on having accurate Work Calendars.
Reports - Reports are key to maintaining a working and healthy system. I recommend a suite of “monitoring” reports to verify that all your jobs are running regularly and returning the expected output.
