At COLLABORATE 19, Amira Marcos, Senior Director of Oracle Product Strategy, gave an update for the PeopleSoft Financials roadmap.

The PeopleSoft Financials team is constantly looking to build simplicity, power, and innovation into products. Of the three, innovation drives down costs. With customers in mind, this is the primary aim for PeopleSoft. While there are a variety of ways to approach this challenge, the focus is to improve the collaboration and simplicity of the user interface.

PeopleSoft wants to make the best use of customers’ time – giving you efficiency and freedom. The team also strives to give you more access to information and provide greater insight into your analytics. Thirdly, PeopleSoft wants to improve the business solutions or automation of business flow.

The COLLABORATE 19 PeopleSoft Financials roadmap presentation explored both recent PeopleSoft updates that are already available and the roadmap for future endeavors.

PeopleSoft Financials Roadmap

Emerging Technologies

First, when it comes to interaction with mobile devices, PeopleSoft aims to improve the human experience by:

• Simplifying interactions
• Submitting transactions
• Anticipating questions
• Offering suggestions
• Providing guidance

Two areas of emerging technology in PeopleSoft involve improving finance productivity and transformation of processes. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the means by which this will be achieved, and several of the expected product offerings are outlined in the slide below:

For a demonstration of one of the emerging technologies on the PeopleSoft Financials roadmap – the PeopleSoft Assistant for Financials – check out the video below.

Financial Analytics Dashboard

Another item on the PeopleSoft Financials roadmap is the Financial Analytics Dashboard, which is expected to display under the My Organization tab.
The Financial Analytics Dashboard offers a comprehensive look at your financials with a simple user interface. Information and tiles like Revenue Analysis, Top 5 Cost Centers, Expense Comparison, Current Ratio, and Debt Ratio are included on this homepage.

The default view takes a year-to-date perspective, but you can easily toggle to a monthly view via the new banner at the top of the page. To take a closer look at any of the tiled items, simply click on them. One example of interaction within the Expense Comparison tile is the ability to select the prior period, budget, or forecast to compare with current expenses. Even further, you can click on a row within the table to view numbers as a pivot grid of detail.

For a demonstration of the Financial Analytics Dashboard, check out the video below.

Additional PeopleSoft Financials Roadmap Items

A few other items on the roadmap include:

• Business Entity Lifecycle Management will allow copying of sub-ledger business units in the existing structure, link GL business units, and configure the shutdown process.
• Procurement Card Maintenance: Processing and Reporting will include the abilities to mass update expiration dates, attach receipts to lines, and manage “like” merchants for reporting purposes.
• Match Collaboration Center streamlines the match exception resolution through the match exception collaboration center.
• Visibility to Supplier Spent Procure to Pay will display your payments against the procure to pay activity.
• GL Run Control Date Update Framework will allow a Fluid mass update.
• Financial Close will speed up Period Close and focus on period end activities.
• Run Control Management Framework is going to allow multiple run control deletions and allow the end user to manage their own run controls.

Other Useful Features for PeopleSoft Financials

Payables Operations Homepage

At PeopleSoft, tools are built for you to use in order to best leverage your business. One item that was already delivered is the Payables Operations Homepage, which can be accessed by an Accounts Payable user. Within the page, the Accounts Payable Navigations Collections alleviate navigator issues and loss of breadcrumbs as reported in older versions.

The Fluid Accounts Payable WorkCenter is also already available for users. Other available tiles on the homepage include Approvals, Voucher Approval Cycle Time, and Average Payment Days, Late Payments, Team Metrics, and Operational Analysis.

The Operational Analysis tile can display data such as Invoice Creation Cycle Time, Voucher Volume, Payments by Type, Cancelled Payments, Vouchers on Hold and any other data you would like to add to your homepage.

Within the Payables Operations Homepage, you have the ability to personalize your Billing WorkCenter by creating a pivot grid with fields and thresholds.

For a demonstration of the Payables Operations homepage, check out the video below.

Credit to Cash

Another area of Financials with both already delivered and to-be-delivered updates is the Credit to Cash Operations for the Credits to Cash Manager. This page includes the Receivables WorkCenter, Billing WorkCenter, Approvals, Billing, Receivables, Operational Analysis, and more.

One of these additional tiles is the new feature, Invoice Mass Maintenance. The Operational Analysis tile is extremely helpful for diving into the ins and outs of billing and receivables. What or who is blocking up your billing and receivables? Discover this within Operational Analysis, and then utilize Invoice Mass Maintenance to make quick and easy adaptations to your processes.

For a demonstration of these features within Credit to Cash Operations, check out the video below.

Supplier Portal

For an update to the user interface for a non-employee, you can view the Supplier Portal. From this portal, suppliers can check on invoices and payments and utilize the full content of e-services. E-services include a self-service invoice, invoice inquiry, payment inquiry, dispute resolution, upload invoices, messages, and my agreements.

Most impressively, the Supplier Portal now offers a one-click pay option which auto-fills the total balance and supplier debit information in order to submit payment in an instant. Essentially, the Supplier Portal is intended to eliminate unnecessary vendor calls to increase efficiency in your Accounts Payable department.

For a demonstration of Supplier Portal, check out the video below.

eBill Payment

Another non-employee, your customer, has access to the mirror image of eSettlement – eBill Payment. EBill Payment allows users to receive and pay an electronic invoice in real time. The customer can view Invoices, Payment History, Payment Cart, Statements, Account Summary, and more.

For a demonstration of eBill Payment, check out the video below.

Additional Updates

This list covers additional features in PeopleSoft Financials that you need to know about. This is in no way a comprehensive list of available features, and any items mentioned in conjunction with a roadmap are still in development. Roadmap items are not guaranteed to come to market.

• Within Global Search, Credit to Cash for Projects, Contracts, Grants, Billing and AR are all now part of Elasticsearch, meaning they are indexed for searching. Becoming familiar with Elasticsearch is highly recommended for efficiency moving forward.
• By popular demand, Fluid Payment Request now includes the application of Drop Zones at the top and bottom of any Fluid page.
• The updated Cash Management homepage gives you expansive visibility of cash that accurately forecasts short- and long-term cash needs with the ability to drill to the source of cash transactions.
• The “What if?” feature of Fluid Bank Transfers allows you to test out a transfer before actually going through with it by viewing the effects it will have in your accounts. This feature will efficiently reduce overdraft fees.
• Business Unit Management is an update to Business Units which acts as an activity guide to leverage questionnaires and copy existing structure.
• Financial Structure gives you the ability to add a department, causing it to become fluid via the financial structure change request. It retained the Classic features and added more, even allowing you to update the tree.
• As an update to Business Process and Automation, the Credit to Cash feature now offers a view of multiple copies of invoices at once, allows deletion of bills in canceled status, emails statements, and greater interaction with collection workbench.
• Customer Analysis now offers Comprehensive Customer View, a holistic view of a particular customer. You can also see Comparative Customer View.
• Invoice to Pay is a voucher stating clean-up in lieu of a sequel update, pre-validation of invoices, and up-front matching.
• Supplier Scorecarding creates a scorecard to send surveys internally and receive important feedback. You can view both the scoring and a homepage for the supplier scorecard.

Quick Tips and Tricks

Here are a few quick tips and tricks to help you get the most out of your PeopleSoft Financials module:

• Use materialized views instead of the default views for your homepage.
• Elasticsearch will continue to become more important in the PeopleSoft Financials world.
• In GL Focused Expansions, use the new spreadsheet upload. There is no facility to fix bugs in the old one.
• Modernize your applications and UX. If PeopleSoft is going to enhance a page, the Classic Plus version will be enhanced, as is the case already with Mobile Approvals.

For more information about the PeopleSoft Financials roadmap, check out the full presentation from COLLABORATE 19 attached below.

Additional Resources

To learn from the experiences of your peers within the Quest Oracle Community, check out the PeopleSoft Customer Stories page that houses 30+ PeopleSoft customer stories about Selective Adoption, user experience, PeopleSoft in the Cloud, PeopleSoft Human Capital Management, PeopleSoft Enterprise Resource Planning, and PeopleSoft tools and technology!