Sales and Accounting Integration through the Cloud

Transcription

1 Sales and Accounting Integration through the Cloud by Julie Hahnke, President Sponsored by:

2 Table of Contents Executive Summary... 1 The Current Landscape... 2 A Call for Change... 2 Benefits of Integration... 3 Case Study: Bulk TV & Internet... 7 Conclusion... 8

3 Sales and Accounting Integration through the Cloud Executive Summary The current business climate leaves little room for inefficiencies and organizational mistakes. To remain competitive, companies must work smarter and respond faster, or they will miss valuable opportunities. But you can t work smarter until you can see farther. Stove-piped departments are a relic we can no longer afford: transparency is required throughout the organization. So how can we achieve this transparency and arm our business with the tools that will enable success? The seamless integration of on-demand providers Salesforce (for CRM) and Intacct (for financial management) offers transformational opportunities to businesses vying to compete in today s challenging economy. You get the expertise and technology from the leader in on-demand CRM services and the preferred provider of financial applications for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the AICPA. We look first at what s already working, and then extend the solution outward. 1

4 The Current Landscape The Salesforce Advantage Salesforce is the undisputed leader in on-demand CRM services sixty thousand organizations worldwide rely on Salesforce for their customer relationship management functionality. This success is based on rich functionality that s tightly integrated in a customizable and easy-to-use environment: an on-demand environment that eliminates the upfront costs and ongoing maintenance of on-premise servers and software licenses. Is Only Half the Story And yet, for all the advantages Salesforce customers enjoy, the front office is only half of a business s story. Imagine what s possible if that same depth of functionality and seamless integration could extend from the front office through to the back office. This has been the promise technology has held for businesses for decades, but it s a promise that s been largely unfulfilled until now. It s finally possible to extend the Salesforce advantage into the back office and integrate CRM and financial management functionality into a single transparent on-demand environment. Intacct, the leading on-demand financial management and accounting applications provider, offers sophisticated financial management applications fully integrated with Salesforce so that customers can enjoy the benefits of a seamless front and back office out of the box. How We Got Here: Departmental Needs Versus Enterprise Needs In the early years of Information Technology, business software supported the workflow and business process requirements of individual departments. De facto interoperability standards and corporate data models were non-existent at that time. Independent silos of business data and functionality proliferated the corporate landscape and the roll-up of these disparate data sets was a tiresome manual task. Software, at the time, couldn t support the enterprise need to see the big picture, so it didn t. It sacrificed the enterprise s requirements and instead catered to individual departmental needs. The growth and consolidation of large corporations and the wave of globalization in the nineties pushed the enterprise demand for a single consistent corporate view to the fore. Integrated software suites replaced the departmental silos suites offered the critically needed integration and data consistency, but at a cost. Software suites tried to offer broad functional support for every area of the business, but while they were impressive in the breadth of their scope, they suffered in quality. Departmental functionality was shallow in many areas, and rigidly inflexible. In their desperation for an enterprise view, organizations were willing to sacrifice departmental functionality and instead adapt their workflow and business processes around how the software worked, and not how the company preferred to work. While perhaps necessary for a time, neither approach is healthy for a business. Both the departmental and enterprise needs must be provided for. And it s now possible to satisfy both. A Call for Change Improve Support for Sales and Finance Without Sacrificing Enterprise Needs If front and back office systems don t integrate at a deep functional level, a chasm can form between the sales and finance departments. Something as simple as getting sales details into a financial system, for example, becomes a time-consuming process the sales team wastes time writing down order specifics and basic customer information, while the finance team wastes time manually re-keying the data into a financial system. Not only is this inefficient for both teams, but significant time is often spent chasing down missing or incomplete data and reconciling conflicting information. Neither department wants ownership of data entry and reconciliation headaches, but the company as a whole can t remain competitive without operational efficiency at the departmental level and robust data integrity at the enterprise level. Highly integrated front and back office systems allow the data entered into a sales / CRM system like Salesforce to automatically flow seamlessly into a financial system, making it easy for finance to generate orders when a deal closes and minimizing data errors. In addition to the improvements in operational efficiency and overall data integrity, both sales and finance departments are freed to focus on business strategy and its effective execution. What Change Will Look Like for Sales The sales team s priority is to sell. Anything that distracts or draws time away from the sales effort undermines the department s bottom-line productivity and ability to generate revenue. These distractions can take many forms: writing up an order, updating pricing lists, calling the accounting department to check on the status of a customer s account. These tasks seem minor, and in fact are, but they can consume tremendous amounts of time in the course of a business day. And most can be eliminated when sales and finance systems transparently share their data and business functionality in real time. 2

5 What Change Will Look Like for Finance When the finance team is bogged down with re-keying sales orders, resolving data discrepancies, or looking up order history and account status to satisfy sales queries, they re pulled away from their core job of fiscal management. But all too often finance teams are buried in administrative trivialities that could be eliminated with effective integration between front and back office systems. Accurate and auditable data and processes could be shared across the organization allowing sales and management to self-serve their data and reporting requests, freeing the finance team to refocus on forecasting and planning, managing fiscal strategies and overseeing corporate compliance and reporting. What Change Will Look Like for the Enterprise Departments can once again tailor their workflow and business processes in a way that best fits their needs, but now they can do it without sacrificing a consistent context for enterprise data and the operational efficiencies of the organization as a whole. An integrated and automated front and back office allows flexible departmental solutions driven by business information that s reliable from data-field to consolidation, and visible throughout the organization. The bottom-line result is that the business can now respond in real-time when valuable opportunities arise. The Benefits of Salesforce-Intacct Integration The tight integration of Salesforce with Intacct enables an impressive degree of seamless transparency and showcases the benefits of powerful front and back office connectivity. Sales Finance Manage Accounts Develop Leads Cover Territories Close Deals Budget and Forecast Manage Compliance Recognize Revenue Bill and Collect Order Details Account History Customer Aging Data resident is Salesforce and Intacct is bidirectionally synced, ensuring that you always have the same data in both locations. Fufillment Status From Lead to Order Those already familiar with Salesforce will recognize the lead-to-order process as Salesforce territory. The Salesforce- Intacct handoff occurs at the point the traditional sales-to-finance handoff occurs when the deal is Closed/Won. For users satisfied with their current Salesforce instance, the Intacct integration will add functionality, without changing the familiar Salesforce look and feel. It ll provide a broader view into your accounts and make financial data and reports easily accessible, right from within the Salesforce environment. From a Salesforce Account screen, it s now possible to view a customer s outstanding balance and the aging of that balance to determine delinquency. Likewise, from a given Salesforce Account Screen not only can you select and view the complete history of a customer s orders and invoices, but you can also see fulfillment status. This is all core financial data that s not normally visible in Salesforce. This degree of transparent data access between the front and back office empowers the sales team with real-time financial data they can use to better manage customer relationships. 3

6 With a single click, the sales team can create an order from their Salesforce Opportunity screen that automatically synchronizes account and opportunity details with Intacct, freeing finance staff from the need to rekey volumes of such data manually. In an integrated Salesforce-Intacct environment, the sales team can now self-serve and view the financial details of orders, invoicing, and fulfillment for each account. From Order to Cash When the sales deal is Closed/Won, a single click on the Salesforce Opportunity screen will automatically generate an invoice in Intacct using all of the deal specifics stored in Salesforce. This frees the finance team from having to re-enter details that already exist in Salesforce. Most importantly, it ensures that only a single accurate view of the data exists across the enterprise. Similarly, Intacct can create an invoice from an order with a single click. The ease with which Intacct allows users to create invoices from existing orders, and then define granular schedules for revenue recognition, means finance teams can spend less time wrestling with the technicalities of capturing and accurately representing their revenue data, and more time analyzing and responding to what that data tells them. 4

7 When Salesforce data automatically syncs with Intacct, the finance team can process and post Salesforce transactions without requiring the re-keying of sales order specifics. How Best-of-Breed Supports Deferred Revenue Recognition The complex compliance requirements of the Sarbanes- Oxley Act (SOX) and other regulatory acts during the last several years have grown to be one of the most daunting challenges for finance departments, yet the need to report revenue accurately and efficiently is essential. As businesses rely on complex orders and contracts, where multiple goods or services are delivered at varying times over the life of the contract, SOX requires the recognition of revenue at the precise time each component of a product or service is delivered. If a financial management application can t support deferred revenue recognition and reporting, finance teams have to resort to complex spreadsheets in order to account for complex revenue streams, to create revenue recognition schedules for future periods, and to report on future revenue streams. This proliferation of spreadsheets itself violates fundamental compliance principles and places businesses in compliance risk. Revenue recognition is one of the greatest challenges facing corporate finance departments today. A Salesforce/Intacct environment frees finance departments from revenue recognition headaches, because Intacct provides best-of-breed functionality that supports deferred revenue recognition at the most granular item level within a contract and enables finance teams to both track and manage even the most complex order with ease. 5

8 The synergies of integrating two best-of-breed platforms, such as Salesforce and Intacct, are evidenced on this Intacct Deferred Revenue Dashboard. Transparent access between systems provides a richer, more complete picture of an organization s health. Underlying details like a Deferred Revenue Forecast Report are only a click away. 6

9 Case Study Bulk TV and Internet Based in Raleigh, NC, Bulk TV & Internet provides wholesale dish network and DIRECTV services to hospitality, health care, and multi-dwelling unit properties nationwide. With only twenty employees, Bulk TV & Internet is critically dependent on productivity and efficiency, from both its staff and its software solutions. Bulk TV was running its front office on salesforce.com and using QuickBooks for financial management, but there were problems. QuickBooks couldn t provide all the functionality the company needed and ancillary spreadsheets began to proliferate. The software didn t scale as the company grew, and server crashes weren t unusual. QuickBooks couldn t interface with Salesforce so there was no real-time view of financial data. But the most serious problem was with data entry. While satellite companies provide the TV content, commercial dealers such as Bulk TV negotiate the contracts with customers and arrange for installation of the satellite equipment. Contracts are complex and detail exactly what channels and services will be delivered over different periods to different locations. Pricing varies frequently. Lacking integration with Salesforce meant that staff had to manually re-enter every line item for each contract into QuickBooks. As the company grew, order reentry likewise grew to become a full time job for one staff member. The process was cumbersome, error-prone, and orders were occasionally misplaced and never entered into the system. and Intacct, significantly shortening the company s leadto-cash process. Intacct s ability to integrate with Salesforce offered us tremendous value, claims Bulk TV and Internet s Controller, Brian Madigan. We didn t have to spend a lot of time and money up front to create the integration and, once the applications were linked, we gained better control of our contract management and billing processes. Getting the invoices out the door faster means we get paid faster. We can now analyze data in ways we were never able to do before, Madigan adds. We ve even created reports and dashboards for non-financial statistical accounts, so we can monitor our contract and installation turnover rates and ensure we are continually operating at optimal levels. As a result, Intacct not only helps us perform with more agility, but also enables us to be more strategic in our decision-making. Billing was where Bulk TV felt the most pain. Each month, bills were prepared manually, one line item at a time. Every time prices changed, all the prices in QuickBooks had to be adjusted manually. There was no way to push price changes through the system automatically. Bulk TV selected Intacct to replace QuickBooks and saw immediate improvements. Work orders stored in Salesforce could now automatically create orders in Intacct and generate monthly bills. Price changes could now be pushed through front and back office systems. Orders no longer fell through the cracks all were converted to revenue. Because Intacct provided the financial functionality Bulk TV required, the company was able to eliminate the twenty external spreadsheets they previously relied on. Deferred revenue, important to contract-based businesses, was now managed automatically. Bulk TV now enjoys fully synchronized front and backoffice applications and data. Customer and contract information is automatically shared between Salesforce 7

10 Conclusion Integration that Empowers These are just a few examples of the many benefits achieved in an integrated Salesforce/Intacct environment. Sales teams can view a complete picture of their customers accounts, order status, and upcoming renewals, and can focus their energy on strengthening and extending their sales relationships with their customers. Finance teams are freed from data entry, data reconciliation, and the challenges of deferred revenue recognition and can instead focus on financial analysis and planning. Rogue spreadsheets are no longer required to support missing financial application functionality. Regulatory compliance and reporting is streamlined and transparent. through to invoicing and fulfillment is visible anywhere, anytime in customizable reports and dashboards that give employees exactly the information they need to succeed. That s the true power of integration. The integration of two such best-of-breed platforms as Salesforce and Intacct, at such a deep level with transparent data shared in real time, and embedded functionality from one to the other and back again finally enables a fully integrated front and back office. It creates a synergy where the power of Salesforce, combined with the power of Intacct is much more than simply the sum of the parts. It provides a business advantage of exponential force. But perhaps the greatest single benefit is that throughout the organization, from board member to bookkeeper, the entire business process from a sales lead all the way Intacct is a market leader in on-demand financial management and accounting applications. Thousands of businesses, from startups to public companies, use Intacct s award-winning solutions to manage and share financial, supply chain and professional services information. Intacct automates key business processes from order entry through cash collection and from procurement through vendor payment. The Intacct system includes financials and accounting, contracts and revenue management, order management, project management, financial consolidation, real-time dashboards and financial reporting applications, all delivered via Software-asa-Service. Intacct s open on-demand system is extended by hundreds of partners, like salesforce.com and is FASB, Sarbanes-Oxley and GAAP compliant Intacct Corporation. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. The Intacct logo is a trademark of Intacct Corporation in the United States. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners. 8