CRM synergy
An integrated approach to customer and financial management
Your organization’s marketing, sales, support and finance departments all interact with your customers, every day. These individual teams have their own priorities and their own (usually separate) systems. That can put your business at a disadvantage and confuse or even alienate your customers.
It is vital to make all parts of the organization’s relationship with its customers as efficient, accurate and consistent as possible. It’s what your customers expect from you and it also makes excellent practical and financial sense to help your teams support each other’s day-to-day activities more effectively.
By integrating your CRM and financial management systems, you replace unreliable and cumbersome communication channels between teams with shared access to a total picture of your customers. For example:
- The finance team can use customer and order details from the CRM system to issue invoices more quickly and accurately.
- The marketing, sales and support teams can see up-to-the-minute payment and credit information for better customer account management.
FinancialForce applications deliver these benefits most effectively – thanks to their seamless, out-of-the-box, free-of-charge integration with Salesforce CRM.
Click on the links below to find out more about the advantages of this better integrated approach:
Quicker, more accurate billing
The details of the billable goods or services (including support fees) provided to an organization’s customers are often already captured within the CRM system – especially if you have a cross-discipline solution, such as Salesforce CRM, that already shares information between your customer-facing teams in marketing, sales and support.
Linking in your financial system enables your accounts team to use this ready-made customer and order information as a starting point for invoices, instead of rekeying it, so that invoices can be issued as promptly as possible.
Better accuracy, for swifter payment
Usually, your CRM users are in direct personal contact with your customers more frequently than your accounts team are. So, they are often the first to hear about any changes to core customer information such as contact details or address changes and the CRM system is the main place where these changes are recorded and updated. Giving the finance team access to this more accurate and current information not only ensures that invoices are issued as promptly as possible but also speeds up payment, by avoiding delays and queries caused by incorrect or out-of-date details.
Read more about the cost of invoicing mistakes in our white paper "The Margin of Error" 
[PDF]
Improved customer management
This integrated working offers two-way benefits. The finance team can also provide controlled access to key accounting information to add a whole new dimension to the information at the fingertips of your customer-facing staff.
For example, this can give a real-time view of a client’s account, including recent invoices and payments, payments still outstanding and accurate credit limits. This alerts the sales team to any issues, so that they can help with the collection process. It also means you can reduce the risk of further sales being made to bad payers.
FinancialForce 360° – give your sales teams the full picture »
More seamless customer service
Your customers aren’t really interested in how your teams work with each other. But they do expect efficient, accurate, consistent service from whichever part of your organization they are dealing with on a given day.
Integrating your CRM and financial systems enables your teams to share more complete, accurate and up-to-date information, so that your organization can present a more consistent “face” to its customers and deliver better customer management and service.
FinancialForce applications – pre-integrated with salesforce CRM »
Better efficiency and security
Integrating your accounting and CRM systems is a more reliable and secure way to enable data sharing and joint working across team boundaries. It avoids the wasted effort and inefficiency of maintaining duplicate data and it eliminates data security risks by replacing unsecure and unreliable paper or email updates (e.g. spreadsheets and order forms) between your teams. Naturally, the level of security will depend on how well the systems are integrated and their ability to specify individual user- or role-based security settings. The pre-integration of FinancialForce applications with Salesforce CRM, in a single, shared “cloud”, delivers this level of flexibility and ensures that maximum data security is maintained.
Looking for SaaS accounting to work with Salesforce CRM?
Some integration is more seamless than others…
Whilst other SaaS accounting systems can be integrated with Salesforce CRM, it will cost you more time, money and effort to achieve less than what you get with FinancialForce.com from Day One. Our applications are not just integrated with Salesforce CRM; they are designed, built and delivered on the same shared platform-as-a-service: Force.com. This gives you immediate, seamless, joined-up working across the two applications, including shared customer account details, extended process support and built-in reporting tools.