Salesforce and Intacct Customization – Contacts and Emails

• January 27, 2017
• Kathy Jastrzebski

Today’s post will cover a neat customization tip for all the Salesforce/Intacct users out there.

In some cases, the person who should be on the receiving end of an invoice varies from opportunity to opportunity in Salesforce. Maybe there are multiple parties that purchase from you under the same account/customer and the invoice needs to go to a different person depending on the opportunity. You don’t want to risk sending the invoice to the incorrect person – that would put you at risk of delayed payment. However, you don’t necessarily need a hierarchical account/customer structure to accommodate this because payment is always received from that single customer. (And to be quite honest you don’t want to complicate your setup in order to accomplish simply having the flexibility to choose who an invoice should be emailed to).

(Note: You also cannot include custom fields in an email template in Order Entry – if this ever changes in the future, the API portion of this customization would not be needed because you could then set up an email template that points to the custom email field on the transaction).

The current standard integration with Intacct would require you to:

• Navigate to the Salesforce Account
• Update the billing contact field
• Sync to the Customer in Intacct
• Navigate back to the Opportunity
• Sync the Sales Transaction to Intacct

Well there’s an easier way to do this with a little bit of customization in the integration field mapping and a smart event API call. With a little thinking we can get this 5-step workflow down to the standard 2 steps!

Here’s how!

Step 1:

Add a Custom Field on the Sales Order to hold the billing contact email from Salesforce: {!SODOCUMENT.BILLING_CONTACT_EMAIL!}.

 

Step 2:

Under Platform Services, in the Integration Field mapping sync the email contact field on the opportunity to the new field you created.

(Quick Tip: Don’t see the integration field mapping option in your menu? It needs to be enabled under Company > Subscriptions > SalesForce > Configure).

The setup on the Salesforce side would be:

1. Add a custom field of the type: Lookup Relationship that looks to the contacts on the account.
2. Add a custom field of the type: Formula that looks to the email on the contact that is chosen on the opportunity from the field above (name it Intacct Billing Contact Email).

Step 3:

Create a Smart Event API that updates the customer’s display contact email.

 

(*Note – You may add a condition to check if the email on the transaction is the same already as the email on the customer so that the API calls only run when necessary and not every single time).

Set this API Body:

<update_customer customerid=”{!SODOCUMENT.CUSTVENDID!}”>
<displaycontact>
<email1>
{!SODOCUMENT.BILLING_CONTACT_EMAIL!}
</email1>
</displaycontact>
</update_customer>

Why it works:

• Clicking the Create Sales Order button in Salesforce pushes the email field over to the Intacct Sales Order.
• The Smart Event API call fires to update the email on the customer display contact.
• Then, using a custom email template which uses the Customer’s Display Contact Email in the recipient field, you can email to the correct party.

Helpful Tip! I would also recommend sending the contact name as well so that in the email you may address the correct person (or even print on invoices if you need).

Do you have an unusual business case? Something that might make your life easier if it was possible? Not every business’s processes fit a specific box, and we understand that. We’re not here to fit your business into a box, we’re here to create the best possible, creative solution for you to make your business more efficient. So reach out to your CLA Intacct team and try to stump us!

Tags: Custom Field, Email, Email Template, Invoice, Opportunity, SalesForce, Smart Event, Accounts Receivable, Automation and Customizations, Integrations, Platform Applications and Add-Ons, Sales and Order Entry | No Comments »