Release v2.31 - New Features

Date: 07.10.2023

In this release, Centime has introduced  Customer Portal, a better alternative for invoice management for the customers of its Receivables clients, and provided Centime clients better control over receiving online payments through the new online payment preferences.

Features List:

• Feature 1: Customer Portal for the customer of Manage Receivables’ clients
• Feature 2: Customer contact roles
• Feature 3: Users can now modify the priority rating of an approval policy in Manage Payables
• Feature 4: Defining Prediction Preferences in Cash Flow Forecasts
• Feature 5: Scatterplots in the Cash flow forecast will now show daily, weekly and monthly frequency

Feature 1: Customer Portal for the customer of Manage Receivables’ clients

Details:

Centime users can now enable access to Customer Portal for their customers. The Customer Portal enables client customers to easily access their open invoices and make payments directly on the payment page, limiting the back and forth between client & customer and facilitating payments. 

Activating Customer Portal:

• Users must have activated CentimePay. 

You can refer to this article for activating CentimePay

• Users must have toggled the ‘Receive online payments’ to ‘ON’ in the ‘Online Payments’ tab of the ‘Receivables’ section on the ‘Settings page.

• Once online payments are turned on, users will get the URL of the Customer Portal.

Providing customers access to the Customer Portal:

• Once online payments are turned on and the Customer Portal is activated for your account, the Customer Portal URL will be included in all the reminder emails (campaign and ad-hoc) and statements sent to the customers.

• Only customers identified as the communication contacts under the customer contact role will be able to access the Customer Portal. To know more about communication contacts, click here.

• The customers will receive a verification code to the email registered as a communication contact which will enable their access.

Using Customer Portal:

• Customers are able to view open invoices, identify overdue invoices, identify invoices with eligible discounts, and make online payments via ACH or Credit card in the Customer Portal.

• Centime clients can customize receiving online payments via credit card in the ‘Credit card preferences’ settings under the ‘Online payments’ section of the ‘Receivables’ settings. Clients can choose to allow credit card payments, enable credit card payments over a certain amount, add a surcharge, etc.

• Client’s credit card preferences control the credit card payment options available to their customers.

• Customer Portal customers will receive a confirmation email after payments are successful.

Online Payment Settings:

• Besides enabling online payments, users can also enable and customize receiving online payments via credit card. Click here to know more.

• When users have early pay discounts in their payment terms, they need to specify the General Ledger account for the same from the Early Pay Discounts section to ensure successful posting.

Customer profile - Payments

• Users can customize payment options for their customers on an individual level.

• Users can set preferred payment options for the customer from the Customer Portal, Payment links, or can choose to disable online payments for a customer.

• When a preference for a customer is set, the customer will always receive payment options according to the set preference.

Permissions required:

Feature 2: Customer contact roles

Details:

• Customer contacts will now be imported from the user’s General Ledger, along with the role assigned to the contact. Click here to learn more about customer contact roles.
• Customers can also create a role in the “Customer contact roles’ tab in the ‘Receivables’ section of the settings page.
• Customers can choose to assign the role of a communication contact. Contacts under communication contacts will receive communications such as reminder emails and monthly statements.

• A customer contact must be a communication contact to be able to access the Customer Portal.
  
• Contacts under the ‘Primary contacts’ for every customer will now be moved to the new ‘Contacts’ tab in the customer side profile. Existing contacts will be assigned a ‘Custom contacts’ role which will be a communication contact.

For NetSuite users:

• Every role created on NetSuite will be imported to Centime.
  
• In addition to this, a default role called “Company contact” will also be present. This role will be used for:
  1. Assigning when primary contact is changed - Primary Contact role can be assigned only to 1 contact. If there is an existing primary contact for a customer, and the client is trying to assign the Primary contact role to another contact then the new contact gets assigned the Primary contact role, and the old contact gets assigned the default role
  2. When a role assigned to contacts is deleted - assign these contacts to a default role
  3. For the company contact email
• All contacts present on NetSuite will be created as separate contacts on Centime. Incremental syncs will ensure that information is always in sync unless contact is edited.
• If a contact has a blank role / blank email / blank phone number on NetSuite - their contacts on Centime will reflect the same blank fields.

For QuickBooks Online & QuickBooks Desktop users

• All contacts imported from QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop will be assigned a company contact role, which will not be a communication contact. Users will have to identify communication contacts on Centime.

Modifying imported contacts on Centime:

• Contacts imported from GLs are always in-sync with the latest information from the GL. This means that if the contact’s name or email or phone number is updated on the GL, then these updates will reflect on Centime as well (since the contact in Centime is also in-sync). In-sync contacts can be identified using the in-sync icon. If on the GL the contact is deleted, it will get deleted from Centime too.

• This sync breaks if the user edits the contact on Centime directly. 

• If a contact is deleted on the GL even for an out-of sync contact, the contact gets deleted from Centime as well.

Permissions required:

Feature 3: Users can now modify the priority rating of an approval policy in Manage Payables

Details:

1. Users can now assign the priority rating of an approval policy as per their preference in the Policies tab of the Payables section of the Settings page.

2. Under the Policies tab, users can find the policies added for Invoice approvals and Payment approvals. Users can also add new policies here.

3. To change the priority rating of a policy, users can simply drag the desired policy up or down to adjust the priority accordingly.

4. Priority rating of an approval policy impacts the approvers defined for an invoice or a scheduled payment.

Permissions required:

Feature 4: Defining prediction preferences in Cash Flow Forecasts

Details:

1. Users can now set preferences for predictions to further increase the accuracy of their cash flow forecast from the ‘Prediction settings’ section in Cash flow settings and Cash flow groups settings section under the Forecast tab on the Settings page.

2. In the Cash flow settings, the following preferences are available to the users to modify:

   1. Consolidate predictions by: Users can choose from the frequency of day, month, or week. According to the preference, predictions for the chosen frequencies are consolidated to the end of the range an displayed in the forecast.

   2. Exclude predictions for: Users can specify the number of days from the current date to exclude predictions from their forecast. This is done to accommodate actual transactions in the forecast and avoids overcounting with the corresponding invoice.

   3. Exclude manual transactions for: Users can specify the number of days from the current date to exclude manual transactions from their forecast.

3. In the Cash flow group settings, users have the following prediction preference when they edit an existing group or create a new group:

   1. Exclude cash flow predictions: Users can choose to include cash flow predictions from this group in their forecast. When the predictions are included, the following options become available for customization.

   2. Consolidate predictions by: Users can choose from the frequency of day, month, or week. According to the preference, predictions for the chosen frequencies are consolidated to the end of the range and displayed in the forecast.

   3. Exclude predictions for: Users can specify the number of days from the current date to exclude predictions from their forecast. This accommodates actual transactions in the forecast and avoids overcounting with the corresponding invoice.

   4. Exclude manual transactions for: Users can specify the number of days from the current date to exclude manual transactions from their forecast.

4. At the customer or supplier level, users are able to modify the prediction settings by clicking on the customer or Supplier name from the Cash flow table, cash inflow or outflow in the Cash flow forecast. In the customer/supplier side panel, the user can click on the cash flow settings to access these settings. 

5. When prediction preferences are modified for customer or supplier, these preferences will take precedence over the global prediction settings.

6. Whenever prediction preferences are modified, forecast is regenerated to accommodate the modified prediction settings. Users will be able to modify the settings again only after the forecast generation is complete.

Permissions required:

Feature 5: Scatterplots in the Cash flow forecast will now show daily, weekly and monthly frequency

Details:

1. The customer or supplier level scatterplot in the cash flow forecast will now reflect the daily, weekly, or monthly period of the forecast as selected by the user.

2. The scatterplot will change as per the following selection:

   1. For daily, the scatterplot dot will show one dot for the day's total amount 

   2. For weekly, the scatterplot dot will show one dot for the week's total 

   3. For monthly, the scatterplot dot will show one dot for the month

Permissions needed to access this feature:

If you want to know more about this release, please contact our Customer Success team at [email protected]