For decades, Salesforce has been a leading customer relationship management (CRM) tool. It helps businesses track every step of their sales process, identifies customer insights and trends, and helps decision makers use data when creating sales strategies. The platform helps small and large businesses close deals, improve productivity and generate insightful analytical reports – it’s an essential business tool.
As powerful as Salesforce can be when it comes to customer relationship management, no one tool can provide every solution for businesses. When business leaders look at Salesforce accounting software, they’ll quickly notice that the platform isn’t as powerful in this area as it is for their sales teams.
So, how can you conduct successfully accounting in Salesforce even though it’s not designed specifically for this kind of work? Embeddings. By integrating the right third-party accounting solutions with Salesforce, businesses of all sizes can experience the true power of all the tools they use in their organization.
Accounting in Salesforce
Accounting in Salesforce is very limited, but the platform has some advanced features that can be used by accounting and finance teams. Because of the connection to sales, things like invoices, sales orders, and purchase requisitions can be handled directly in Salesforce, but beyond that, accounting in Salesforce is pretty limited. Some key elements that are missing from an accounting perspective are:
- AP functionality: Although Salesforce provides some invoicing capabilities, AP teams cannot process payments, track AP aging and other key reports, and analyze customer payment trends over time.
- Control and compliance features: In the accounting world, ensuring compliance with GAAP and detailed audit features are non-negotiable. As a primarily CRM tool, Salesforce does not provide this support.
- Detailed expense tracking: Managing – and often reducing – costs is the responsibility of every accounting professional around the world. With Salesforce, tracking expenses at the transaction level is impossible.
- Budget options: Salesforce does not provide robust budgeting capabilities, such as budgeting, variance analysis, and forecasting, that are critical to maintaining overall business financial health.
There are a few additional modules such as Billing and Revenue Cloud that can be used to track incoming funds, but any accountant knows that these capabilities only support a small fraction of accounting teams’ work day in and day out. Fortunately, due to the platform’s prominence around the world, many SaaS accounting solutions integrate seamlessly with Salesforce, creating a complete technology environment that can track sales, manage expenses, pay bills and more – all in one space.
Software Integration with Salesforce
When integrating with Salesforce, accounting software solutions like QuickBooks and FreshBooks create a two-way integration. This type of integration means that tools can communicate with each other. For example, when changes are made to a customer account in Salesforce, those changes will also be reflected in the accounting software.
This two-way integration is vital because it means you can always rely on all your business tools to be updated and aligned with each other.
Instead of being required to make updates to both systems, the systems work together behind the scenes to connect mapping paths, numerical data, and more.
In isolation, accounting in Salesforce is limited to invoicing, payment tracking, and revenue recognition, but by integrating Salesforce with quality third-party applications, organizations can solve accounts payable, accounts receivable, financial reporteven data analysis in one fell swoop.
Top Accounting Software Integrations for Salesforce
There is a lot of accounting software that integrates with Salesforce, but some integrations are more powerful than others. If you’re ready to invest in integrating accounting software with Salesforce, we recommend learning more about FreshBooks Salesforce integration and Salesforce QuickBooks integration.
Salesforce FreshBooks Integration
As accounting software built specifically for freelancers and self-employed business owners, FreshBooks offers users a smooth and easy experience while making accounting a breeze. With comprehensive invoicing capabilities, FreshBooks integrates incredibly well with Salesforce, making it easy to create and manage invoices, track expenses, and track incoming and outgoing payments.
With the FreshBooks REST API, the FreshBooks/Salesforce integration enables the automatic use of Salesforce data for accounting purposes.
For example, when you mark an opportunity as “Closed Won” in Salesforce, the customer profile is automatically created in FreshBooks, an invoice is created based on the profile, and that invoice is sent directly to the customer.
This is just one example of how the Salesforce/FreshBooks integration makes collaboration between sales and finance processes easier than ever.
Salesforce QuickBooks Integration
Sales and accounting departments will both benefit from Salesforce/QuickBooks. If a sales representative needs to see a customer Payment history or excellent invoices, they can find all of this information in Salesforce, even though it’s taken from QuickBooks. On the other hand, if an accountant needs to look at sales orders or customer contracts – generally recorded in Salesforce – they can find that information directly in QuickBooks.
The unified data flow between the two systems enables your teams to gain a more holistic view of customer experience and business impact without having to learn a system they are unfamiliar with.
This helps in managing cash flow, creating better reports and solidifying customer relationships. With less time spent searching for data across multiple systems, both the sales and accounting teams can spend more time adding value to the organization in other ways.
In addition to traditional accounting software that integrates with Salesforce, you can look at integrations to complement Salesforce and cover some of its limitations.
One such integration is Nanonets.
Salesforce Nanonets Integration
When paired together, Nanonetworks and Salesforce will greatly improve any organization’s accounts payable functionality by automating data-heavy processes and streamlining record keeping. Nanonets uses revolutionary OCR (Visual character recognition) technology to accurately extract and record data from key documents such as invoices, receipts and even bank statements. Nanonets then takes the data it captures and updates Salesforce, significantly reducing the time it takes to enter data and reducing the number of data-related errors along the way.
This integration not only automates AP tasks but also ensures consistency across your organization’s technology stack. With Nanonets in the picture, your AP operation will work in a more optimized way. Real-time data processing and validation, better operational efficiency and fewer data errors to track down will change the way your organization operates. Even further, Nanonets works well with other business tools, saving time and advancing data insights across business functions.
Choosing the right integration
When it comes to Salesforce accounting, you’ll need a complementary tool that integrates well with Salesforce to really manage all of your accounting priorities. We listed three options above, but in reality, there are a number of tools that can solve your accounting needs. When choosing the right integration for your business, be sure to consider the following:
- Budget
- Organization Size
- Future Development Goals
- Accounting Priorities
- The most important features
- Customer support structure
- Current customer reviews
Some of these considerations are internal conversations with sales and accounting leaders, but some will require you to seek outside perspectives as well. Are there organizations in your industry that have experience using Salesforce/QuickBooks integration or prefer Nanonets functionality? Asking around can help you get real user insights that are incredibly valuable when deciding which integration will best support accounting in Salesforce for your business.
Better together
Is Salesforce a standalone SaaS solution that can be used for accounting purposes? Not really. Does Salesforce bring a lot of value to accounting teams? When integrated with the right accounting software, absolutely. We operate in a world where companies are only as good as the people they have and the tools they use – now is the time to invest in the right Salesforce accounting software integrations to help your organization stand out
Either you prioritize AP automation with Nanonets or rely on the self-employment capabilities of FreshBooks, pairing your accounting software with Salesforce is truly a no-brainer – and in business, not many things are a no-brainer.