Intacct Cloud Ecosystem Part 2: Salesforce Integration
Salesforce and Intacct are the definition of a perfectly efficient interdependent relationship with seamless communication. A single company is comprised of many departments working together. So, what makes the difference between an efficient, cohesive company and one that is desperate departments? Communication. Whether that be individuals working together or in the case of Intacct and Salesforce systems working together.
Imagine you have the following situation:
A sales department on one side of your building (or on the road on the other side of the country) making sales, closing deals, negotiating terms with clients and on the other side of the building (or country) the accounting/finance department recording the sales revenue, collecting payments, etc. These two sides of the relationship are not mutually exclusive they need to communicate to present the best experience for a client. Imagine you make a sale and as part of the contract the customer is supposed to receive an add-on service for free but the accounting/finance department never gets that message and charges the client? Or a sales person sells add on products to a client in collections who hasn’t paid in 120+ days? Communication is extremely important between these two departments and Intacct’s Salesforce integration facilitates this communication.
How do they work together? (A sample process)
Imagine this manual workflow:
Step 1: A sales representative creates an account in Salesforce (after many back and forths with the client on contract terms) finally gets them to sign! The contract grants a free add-on service as part of their contract. They create an opportunity (or convert the opportunity from a lead) and close it as won and send the client the contract to sign as well as return the payment information.
Step 2: The client returns the signed contract with payment information. The sales rep prints the contract and payment info and walks over or emails it to the accounting department.
Step 3: The accounting department sets the customer up in their accounting software.
Step 4: Accounting records the invoice and contract terms, charge the client, record the payment, and then set up a monthly recurring invoice.
Notice the duplication of efforts by both teams? A customer (account) was already created in Salesforce with all contact information stored. It then needs to also be created in the accounting software. The opportunity and invoice are double-entered (once in each system). Wouldn’t it be nice if the client and sale originated in one system and then flowed through to the other, thereby eliminating duplicate entry? Queue the Intacct/Salesforce integration.
Imagine this Intacct/Salesforce improved efficiency workflow:
Step 1: The sales representative creates an account in Salesforce and the corresponding opportunity with all items and pricing negotiated. The client signs the contract and returns payment information at which point the sales rep closes the opportunity as won!
Step 2: The sales representative syncs the account from Salesforce to Intacct (which brings over the contact information).
Step 3: The sales representative syncs the closed won opportunity from Salesforce to Intacct (which includes all items, pricing, terms negotiated).
Step 4: The accounting team checks the Sales Order in Intacct that came over from sales to make sure everything is correct. If correct, they convert this to a Sales Invoice or Recurring Sales Invoice and attach payment information. You could even have the Opportunity sync straight to an invoice provided you have some type of approvals set up in Salesforce.
This just completely eliminated the need to duplicate data entry in each system. Why should you need to enter the same information twice, risking error, and creating inefficiencies when you can have a single button click (or two in this case) and know that not only is the information 100% correct, but also takes a fraction of the time?
Have questions on Salesforce/Intacct integration? Feel free to reach out to your CLA Intacct team! (Even if it’s as simple as a custom field you’d like to sync we might just have the solution.)
Kathy Jastrzebski is a manager with CLA’s Intacct team. CLA is an Intacct Premier Partner with a partnership that spans over 20 years and more than 1,000 successful implementations. Kathy brings five years of accounting experience along with seven years of Sage Intacct implementation experience. Along with her accounting experience, she has a passion for leveraging technology to lead finance teams worldwide through system implementations with a mission of increasing department efficiency through business process improvements.
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