February 2022
2022 Financials Roadmap
The Unit4 Financials continuous release model helps to ensure that finance departments are equipped to handle their most pressing operational challenges. This includes new regulations, volatile market conditions, and internal pressures to do more with less.
To ease your transactional workload, 2022 looks set to see the introduction of some welcome additions to the Unit4 Financials platform. Here’s a closer look at what’s in the update pipeline.
One of the most attractive features of Unit4 Financials is its multi-everything design (country, company, currency, tax, language), ensuring the ability to handle even the most complex or evolving corporate structures.
You can run your system as a single version worldwide, thereby ensuring consistency and visibility across the enterprise. But alongside this, you also get the flexibility to satisfy a huge range of local statutory and accounting approaches found around the world.
We are set to see further evidence of this ‘global yet local’ approach in 2022. A prime example comes in the form of new structured output for closer integration with ELSTER, Germany’s electronic tax return system.
The solution already includes the ability to produce invoices in an xml format. Unit4 is in the process of enabling this with billing, also.
The solution should also shortly accommodate QR codes on print formats.
For auditing and general ease of admin, life becomes so much easier if you can save actual billing documents within the platform itself. Unit4 added attachments to billing in early 2021. They are now going a step further, enabling you to copy those attachments over to the Financials document.
The last couple of years have seen a gradual extension of Financials’ ‘scheduled tasks’ functionality, (hierarchy updates, asset depreciation and reconciliation are a few recent examples). Driven by customer demand, you will also shortly be able to add a scheduled task for the Open/Close Period.
A new Supplier Filter will be added to procurement.
Future vision for 2022 and beyond
This functionality is already available with an on-premise set-up, Unit4 is looking at creating a cloud version.
Introduced in Continuous Release 2020, tablelink for cloud gives you an on-premise version of your link tables, and an API that takes the data into the cloud. Expect further enhancements to this function over the coming years.
• Define name for email attachments
Certain activities within the product involve emailing attachments to customers or suppliers (invoices and statements, for instance). This upcoming new function enables you to define the names of these attachments. This can be useful for preventing the messages from being caught by user email filters.
• Expiry for element banks and addresses
You will shortly be able to expire a bank as against a customer or supplier account. You can still see it (but not use it) when inputting your documents.
• Specify address for email output
At the moment, the system picks up the default email address for a customer or a supplier account. Unit4 looks set to make it easier to send different categories of communications to different email addresses within the same customer organisation.
• Copy company set open number range
It will shortly become easier to copy and move defined extracts of company information.
Areas of focus for Unit4 over the next few continuous releases include:
• Support for Wildfly 25
• 3rd party library updates
• Corrective maintenance
Seamless interoperability with business applications of all types is a further major benefit of the Financials product. Building on this, Unit4 will be looking to introduce further ways to integrate Financials with the Microsoft Office 365 suite. Other technical enhancements include the following:
• Clustering performance
• Cloud SaaS improvements
• Cloud product usage
• Rationalised and centralised DB access
• A simpler cloud deployment system
• Upgrade script improvements
• Audit trail upgrade improvements
• Download xml client libraries
• Alternative document repository
• People platform integration
Important upgrade information
Support for Unit4 Financials V13 has already been withdrawn. Support for V14 will expire at the end of 2022. Failure to upgrade before then increases the likelihood of incurring extended support charges from Unit4.
Upgrading enables you to:
• Access the latest functionality
• Reduce operational risk and processing costs
• Continue to access Unit4’s “in support” software maintenance and support package
• Ensure you are up to date with Unit4’s latest software security package
As an Elite Unit4 Partner, Millennium Consulting specialises in delivering a seamless upgrade, while also ensuring your upgraded solution is fully aligned with organisational requirements.
To explore your options in Unit4 Financials, contact us today.