Category: Certinia

Certinia in one paragraph

Certinia is a cloud software platform for services businesses, built natively on Salesforce. It helps companies sell, deliver, bill and account for project-based work in one system. The company was known as FinancialForce until 2023, when it rebranded to Certinia, describing its offer as a “Services-as-a-Business” platform. In the same year Haveli Investments acquired the company.

What “Salesforce-native” means

Certinia applications are built on the Salesforce platform rather than connected to it from outside. In practice:

• Opportunities, projects, resources, timecards, invoices and journals live in the same database as your CRM data.
• Users work in the familiar Salesforce interface, with the same security model, reports and dashboards.
• There is no separate integration to keep CRM and ERP in sync, which removes a common source of errors and reconciliation work.
• Salesforce tools such as Flow, reports and AI features can be used across sales, delivery and finance data.

Main Certinia products

Product area	What it covers	Typical users
Professional Services Automation (PS Cloud)	Resource management, project management, time and expenses, utilisation, billing, services quoting and forecasting	Delivery leaders, project and resource managers, consultants
Financial Management (FM Cloud)	General ledger, receivables, payables, cash management, multi-company, multi-currency, consolidation, revenue recognition	Finance teams, controllers, CFOs
Customer Success (CS Cloud)	Customer health scores, success plans, playbooks, renewal and expansion signals	Customer success managers, account teams
Veda AI	AI agents and generative features across services operations, launched in April 2026	Resource managers, project managers, customer success teams

Companies can use PSA alone with another ERP, Financial Management alone, or both together for a full quote-to-cash process.

Who Certinia is built for

Certinia focuses on businesses that sell people’s time and expertise. Good fits include:

• IT services and consulting firms
• Software companies with implementation or professional services teams
• Engineering, architecture and project-based consultancies
• Marketing, events and other agencies that run client projects
• Businesses already using Salesforce that want finance and delivery on the same platform

It is usually not the first choice for manufacturing or retail businesses whose core needs are inventory, production and warehouse management.

How the end-to-end process works

1. Sell: sales teams manage opportunities in Salesforce and create services estimates.
2. Staff: resource managers match skills and availability to project roles.
3. Deliver: project managers track milestones, budgets and margin; consultants submit time and expenses.
4. Bill: billing events are generated from time, milestones or fixed fees.
5. Account: invoices, revenue recognition and journals flow into the general ledger.
6. Grow: customer success teams track health and renewals on the same account record.

Certinia in the UAE

For UAE services firms, the main questions are local tax and reporting needs, including 5% VAT, corporate tax record-keeping and the phased e-invoicing mandate from 2027. These are covered in our guide to Certinia implementation in the UAE. Confirm localisation and e-invoicing support for your specific needs with Certinia during evaluation.

Learn more

See our Certinia services overview, our Certinia implementation services, or the Certinia financial implementation case study.

Frequently asked questions

Related articles

Sources

• Business Wire: FinancialForce rebrands to Certinia
• Business Wire: Haveli Investments acquires Certinia
• CPA Practice Advisor: Certinia unveils Veda

What a Certinia implementation covers

A Certinia implementation configures PSA, Financial Management or both on your Salesforce org, migrates data and trains your teams. Because it touches finance, delivery and sales at the same time, success depends on agreeing processes across all three before configuration starts.

Phase 1: Discovery and design

• Map your quote-to-cash process: how work is sold, staffed, delivered, billed and accounted for.
• List legal entities, branches and free-zone companies, and how they are consolidated.
• Define billing models: time and materials, fixed fee, milestones, retainers or subscriptions.
• Document revenue recognition policies with your finance team and auditors.
• Agree reports and dashboards for leadership, finance and delivery.

Phase 2: UAE finance and tax setup

Chart of accounts and entities

Design a chart of accounts that supports management reporting and statutory needs. Set up each legal entity with its own books, currencies and intercompany relationships. Many UAE groups operate a mainland company alongside one or more free-zone entities, and each may have different reporting needs.

VAT

The UAE applies VAT at a standard rate of 5%, with zero-rated and exempt categories. Configure tax codes and rates for each type of supply, and make sure customer and supplier Tax Registration Numbers are captured on accounts. Agree with your tax adviser how VAT returns will be prepared from Certinia data.

Corporate tax

UAE corporate tax applies at 9% on taxable income above AED 375,000 for financial years starting on or after 1 June 2023, with reliefs and special regimes for some businesses. The ERP will not calculate your corporate tax return on its own, but it must keep complete, well-structured accounting records that support it.

E-invoicing

The Ministry of Finance has published a phased timeline for mandatory e-invoicing through Accredited Service Providers:

Who	Appoint an ASP by	Mandatory from
Businesses with revenue of AED 50 million or more	30 October 2026	1 January 2027
Businesses with revenue below AED 50 million	31 March 2027	1 July 2027
Government entities	31 March 2027	1 October 2027

For a Certinia project, this means planning how invoices and credit notes created in Certinia reach your chosen Accredited Service Provider in the required structured format, and making sure every mandatory data field is captured at source. Certinia has released e-invoicing for some countries, such as Malaysia in its Winter 2026 release, so confirm the current UAE approach with Certinia and your service provider during design.

Phase 3: Build and configure

• Configure PSA: resource roles, skills, rate cards, project templates, timecard rules and billing rules.
• Configure Financial Management: accounting periods, tax codes, bank accounts, payment methods and invoice templates.
• Build approvals, automation and dashboards in Salesforce.
• Set up integrations, for example to banks, payroll or e-invoicing providers.

Phase 4: Data migration

• Opening balances by account and entity at the cutover date
• Open receivables and payables at invoice level
• Active projects with budgets, actuals and remaining billing
• Resources, skills and rate cards
• Customers and suppliers with complete tax details

Reconcile every migrated balance against the legacy system and get finance sign-off before go-live.

Phase 5: Testing, parallel run and go-live

Test full scenarios, from a won opportunity through staffing, time entry, billing and posting to the ledger. For finance, a parallel run of at least one period-end close in both systems is a strong safety net. Go live at the start of an accounting period where possible.

Common risks

• Starting configuration before finance policies are agreed
• Underestimating data cleansing for customers, suppliers and open items
• Leaving e-invoicing and tax reporting design until after go-live
• Training only finance users, not the consultants who submit time and expenses

How we can help

Our Certinia implementation services cover design, configuration, migration and go-live support, and our Certinia services include ongoing administration. For an example, see the Certinia financial implementation case study. This article is general guidance, not tax advice; confirm tax and e-invoicing obligations with a qualified adviser.

Frequently asked questions

Related articles

Sources

• WAM: UAE issues Federal Decree-Law on corporate tax, 9% rate above AED 375,000
• KPMG: UAE phased implementation of e-invoicing beginning 1 January 2027
• UAE Ministry of Finance: eInvoicing Programme update (June 2026)
• CPA Practice Advisor: Certinia 2026 Winter Release

Why utilisation and profitability are hard to manage

In a services business, people are both the main cost and the product. Margins leak in familiar ways: consultants on the bench while others are overloaded, time not recorded or not billed, discounts agreed in sales but not reflected in delivery plans, and fixed-fee projects that quietly overrun. Spreadsheets struggle because staffing, delivery and finance data sit in different places.

What Certinia PSA covers

Certinia’s Professional Services Automation runs natively on Salesforce and covers:

• Resource management: roles, skills, availability, resource requests and assignments
• Project management: budgets, milestones, tasks, and a workspace showing hours, late projects and margins
• Time and expenses: timecards and expense capture against projects
• Billing: time and materials, fixed fee, milestone and other billing models
• Forecasting: resource demand, revenue and project profitability forecasts
• Services quoting: estimates built from roles, rates and effort

The metrics that matter

Metric	What it shows	How PSA helps
Billable utilisation	Share of available hours spent on billable work	Timecards against projects and capacity calendars
Realisation	Share of billable value actually invoiced	Links time, rates, write-offs and billing events
Project margin	Revenue minus delivery cost per project	Combines cost rates, actuals and billing on one record
Bench time	Unassigned capacity by role and skill	Availability views and resource requests
Forecast accuracy	Gap between forecast and actual revenue	Project and pipeline-based forecasts

Set targets that fit your business model. A strategy consultancy and a managed services provider will have very different healthy utilisation levels.

Practical ways to improve utilisation

1. Staff from the pipeline. Create resource requests from probable opportunities, so resource managers see demand before contracts are signed.
2. Keep skills data current. Matching is only as good as the skills and certification data on each resource.
3. Make bench time visible. Review unassigned capacity weekly and redirect people to sales support, training or internal work deliberately.
4. Enforce timely timecards. Weekly submission and approval rules keep utilisation and billing data reliable.

Practical ways to protect project margin

1. Estimate from roles and rates. Build quotes from the same rate cards used in delivery, so the plan and the price match.
2. Track budget versus actuals weekly. Flag projects that pass agreed thresholds early.
3. Manage change formally. Record change requests and update budgets and billing, rather than absorbing extra scope.
4. Close the loop with finance. When PSA and Financial Management both run on Certinia, project billing and revenue flow directly into accounting.

Where AI fits

Certinia has added AI features aimed at these problems. Its Winter 2026 release introduced a Project Assistant agent that flags issues such as missing timecards and overdue items, and its Veda AI suite, launched in April 2026, includes a Reallocation Agent that proposes replacement resources when someone must leave a project. Read more in our article on Certinia AI and automation.

A note on data discipline

PSA does not fix margin on its own. It makes problems visible, quickly. The firms that benefit most agree clear ownership: resource managers own assignments, project managers own budgets and forecasts, and every consultant owns their timecard.

How we can help

We help services firms configure Certinia PSA, from rate cards and project templates to utilisation dashboards. See our Certinia implementation services or our wider Certinia services.

Frequently asked questions

Related articles

Sources

• Certinia: PSA overview
• CPA Practice Advisor: Certinia 2026 Winter Release
• CPA Practice Advisor: Certinia unveils Veda

Why project-based businesses need different accounting

A product company invoices goods when they ship. A services firm may bill monthly for time, at milestones, upfront for a retainer, or as a fixed fee spread over months. Revenue often needs to be recognised on a different schedule from billing. And leadership wants profitability by project, client, practice and entity, not only by account code.

Generic accounting systems can do this with spreadsheets and manual journals. That works at small scale but becomes slow and error-prone as the business grows.

What Certinia Financial Management covers

Area	Typical capabilities
General ledger	Chart of accounts, journals, allocations, intercompany, period close
Accounts receivable	Invoicing, credit notes, collections, cash receipts
Accounts payable	Supplier invoices, approvals, payments, matching
Cash management	Bank accounts, statement import, reconciliation and cash matching
Multi-company and multi-currency	Separate legal entities, exchange rates, intercompany relationships
Consolidation	Consolidation hierarchies with eliminations
Revenue recognition	Recognition templates, schedules, revenue contracts and forecasts
Reporting	Financial statements and services performance analysis using Salesforce reports and dashboards

Certinia continues to update these modules. Its Winter 2026 release, for example, added a new revenue recognition interface for large data volumes, contract cancellation automation that creates credit notes and matches them to open invoices, and an updated cash matching experience.

Project accounting in practice

When Certinia PSA and Financial Management run together, a typical flow looks like this:

1. A project is created from a won opportunity, with its budget and billing model.
2. Consultants submit time and expenses against the project.
3. Approved time, milestones or fixed-fee schedules generate billing events.
4. Billing events become customer invoices in receivables.
5. Revenue is recognised according to the agreed policy, which may differ from the billing schedule.
6. Postings flow to the general ledger with project and practice dimensions for reporting.

Because every step sits on Salesforce, account managers can see invoices and overdue balances for their clients without asking finance.

Revenue recognition

Services firms commonly recognise revenue on a time-and-materials basis, on percentage of completion, on milestones, or evenly over a contract term. Certinia uses recognition templates and schedules to apply these rules consistently. Your accounting policies, which should follow the applicable standard such as IFRS 15 for most UAE companies, must be defined by your finance team and auditors first. The system then applies them.

Multi-entity groups

Many UAE groups run a mainland company, free-zone entities and sometimes companies in other GCC countries or overseas. Certinia’s multi-company and multi-currency features support separate books per entity, intercompany transactions and consolidated reporting. Plan the entity structure, currencies and intercompany rules during design rather than adding them later.

Implementation tips

• Design the chart of accounts and reporting dimensions (entity, practice, project, region) together.
• Document billing and revenue rules for each contract type before configuration.
• Migrate open items and project balances carefully, and reconcile them.
• Plan local tax and e-invoicing requirements, covered in our UAE Certinia implementation guide.

Real-world example

In our Certinia financial implementation case study, an event services group used Certinia and Salesforce on one platform to manage receivables, payables, general ledger and cash entry, with invoices generated automatically from sales orders.

Get started

Explore our Certinia services and Certinia implementation services, or contact us to discuss your finance processes.

Frequently asked questions

Related articles

Sources

• ERP Research: Certinia Financial Management capabilities
• CPA Practice Advisor: Certinia 2026 Winter Release

Why AI matters for services operations

Resource managers, project managers and customer success teams spend a lot of time gathering information: who is available, which projects are at risk, what changed on an account. These are the tasks AI agents handle well, because the data already sits in Certinia and Salesforce.

How Certinia’s AI has developed

• Summer 2025: Certinia released its first AI agents, focused on staffing and customer success and built on Salesforce’s Agentforce platform.
• Winter 2026 release: added a Project Assistant agent that proactively flags issues such as missing timecards, overdue items and milestones nearing critical status. It also added AI-generated customer account summaries and dynamic playbooks in Customer Success.
• April 2026: Certinia launched Veda, described as an enterprise-grade intelligent operations engine for services firms.

What Veda includes

Capability	What it does	Who benefits
Reallocation Agent	When someone must leave a project, finds their assignments, identifies best-match replacements and proposes them to resource managers	Resource managers
Project Summary	Generates a concise digest of a project’s financials, risks, staffing, schedule and deliverables	Project managers and delivery leaders
Business Review Summary	Pulls account, opportunity, activity and playbook data into a structured business review narrative	Customer success managers
Natural-language requests	Routes user requests to the right specialist agent, inside Certinia and in Slack and Microsoft Teams	All services teams

Certinia also states that Veda automates staffing analysis, bench matching, success planning and activity summaries, and surfaces renewal risks and expansion signals. According to coverage of the launch, a Veda subscription gives access to Certinia’s AI suite, priced with per-user fees and usage-based scaling. Certinia has published capacity and revenue benefit claims; treat these as vendor estimates and test them in your own environment.

Practical use cases

• Weekly project reviews: start meetings from AI-generated project summaries instead of manual status reports.
• Staffing changes: when a consultant becomes unavailable, get replacement options in minutes rather than hours of searching.
• Timecard compliance: let the Project Assistant flag missing or late timecards before billing runs.
• Quarterly business reviews: draft customer review narratives from account and project data, then refine them.

Prepare your data first

AI agents can only reason over the data they can see. Before you enable them, check:

1. Resource data: roles, skills, locations and availability are current.
2. Project data: budgets, milestones and forecasts are maintained weekly.
3. Timecards: submitted and approved on time.
4. Customer data: health scores, success plans and activities are recorded consistently.
5. Permissions: agents respect the same access rules as users, so review sharing settings.

Certinia AI and Salesforce Agentforce

Because Certinia runs natively on Salesforce, its AI sits on the same platform as Salesforce’s own AI tools. If you also use Salesforce Agentforce for sales or service, plan one AI governance approach covering permissions, data use and human review across both.

How to start

1. Choose one pain point, such as reallocation or project reporting.
2. Clean the related data and confirm process ownership.
3. Pilot with a small group of managers and review outputs for accuracy.
4. Measure time saved and decision quality, then expand.

Our Certinia services team can help you prepare data and processes, and our implementation services cover configuration of PSA and Customer Success features. Check licensing and availability of specific AI features with Certinia, as these change between releases.

Frequently asked questions

Related articles

Sources

• CPA Practice Advisor: Certinia unveils Veda
• CPA Practice Advisor: Certinia 2026 Winter Release
• Constellation Research: Certinia’s AI agent strategy