New Product

Planning & Budgeting

FastClose version 3.1 introduces our brand-new planning & budgeting product, which introduces planning capabilities within the existing FastClose applications.

FastClose Planning enables your budget holders to submit their budget or forecast data from within Excel, using all the formulas & modelling power which that offers, alongside the benefits of the FastClose Excel Add-In.

It enables you to report on planned scenarios alongside the latest actuals in real time: no need to replicate balances or transactions out of your ERP into a separate planning system. In addition it eliminates the time spent manually collating spreadsheets from budget holders and merging the results with actuals to allow for reporting.

FastClose offers the flexibility to budget at your preferred level e.g. by division or for all divisions, along with unlimited scenarios and revisions. You can also control data entry by person or group, specifying periods, years, divisions, etc. that budgets can be submitted for.

It takes just a few moments to set up and costs a fraction of the price of some of the traditional planning products available, while also not overwhelming your staff with training requirements or saddling your IT team with a complex system to maintain.

Improvements

Single Sign On

FastClose clients now support Single Sign On (SSO) using an OAuth 2.0 provider such as Microsoft Entra (formerly Azure AD), which allows for the additional security of Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), as well as centralized management and monitoring.

You do still need a user account within FastClose, but you no longer need to maintain and remember a FastClose specific password. And if you are already logged in to your SSO provider, you will not usually have to login again for FastClose.

If your ERP is Nextworld, and you use an SSO provider, FastClose handles all the communication with the ERP under the user's Nextworld identity, which is therefore then subject to any data access rules defined in Nextworld.

Performance

• The time to open a sample report whose filters and calculations reference a large number of dimensions and members has been improved by over 20%. (FC-1776)

All Client Applications

• In date filters, the special items <Today> and <AsOfDate> can now be used within range selections. (FC-411)

• When using FastClose usernames & passwords (basic authentication), users can tick a "Remember Me" option. This is configured in the Admin web app. (FC-20/FC-1619)

• The logic which decides whether a filter for a variable should be displayed in the filter panel has been made a lot smarter, including checking if any active calculation refers to the variable. (FC-346)

• When the Connections filter is left empty and more than one connection is available, a caution is now displayed in the filter as this can be unintentional (FC-721)

• When changing a password, if the password doesn't meet all the policy requirements, all the unmet requirements are reported, not just the first one. (FC-1594)

Desktop Client Applications

• The Home dialog now remembers which tab you were last on (Templates, Reports or Solutions), between sessions. (FC-1805)

• The client apps now remember the last username you logged in with, if you are using FastClose authentication. (FC-1604)

Designer

• In the Bucketing dialog, there is a new menu option to automatically create monthly buckets. (FC-1662)

Web-based Reader

• Reader now offers an option for full screen mode. (FC-901)

• Support for the frozen column count option has been added. (FC-1610)

• It is now possible to set or override filter selections via the URL that opens a report. (FC-1764)

• The right-click menu in the results grid offers options to completely expand or collapse the hierarchy or subtotal groupings, if expand/collapse is enabled in the report. (FC-1783)

• If you login to Reader on a second device, your first device is logged out, rather than your new login being declined. (FC-1784)

Administration

• Internet Explorer 11 and Legacy Edge are no longer supported. (FC-568)

• The password policy feature now has an option to prevent a user using their username for their password (FC-1673)

• In the Publish to Endpoint Task of a Scheduler workflow, the retrieval URL box is now wider and offers a 'copy to clipboard' button (FC-1772)

• If there is only one catalog or data source available, it will be selected automatically when creating an ERP connection. (FC-1822)

Fixes

Version 3.1.0 contains all the fixes released for 3.0.x up to 3.0.6, plus those below.

Platform

• Many third-party libraries used by FastClose applications have been updated to eliminate or mitigate disclosed security vulnerabilities. (FC-1622, FC-1695, FC-1768, FC-1829)

• Additional validation is performed on API inputs to improve security. (FC-1771, FC-1773)

All Desktop Clients

• When opening multiple reports in quick succession, it was possible for a caption override defined in one report to be mistakenly applied in a subsequent one. (FC-1736)

• When exporting a report to Excel, if the hierarchy depth exceeds what Excel's grouping feature supports, the user is now informed that grouping will be omitted. (FC-1543)

• A report with a calculation whose expression starts with a range, where the start of the range was a variable, would error on running. (FC-1748)

Designer

• In the Edit Format Style dialog, the layout of the Display Format tab has been improved. (FC-1801)

Web-based Reader

• If a filter selection is changed such that it refers to a variable, the Reader now adds a filter for the variable. (FC-1659)

Administration

• The MaximumPasswordAgeInDays policy option for password expiry was not being enforced. (FC-1817)

• The Repository Explorer no longer lets you rename or delete connections: that must be done from the Connections page. (FC-1703)

• An error would occur when creating a new ERP connection if you used the keyboard to make selections instead of the mouse. (FC-1799)

Nextworld

• FastClose can now handle a Nextworld number field which contains an integer greater than 2,147,483,648. (FC-1666)