Financialforce for Salesforce Review

Salesforce has carved out a serious name for itself in recent times. It’s become, pretty unanimously, the best CRM solution out there. This isn’t hard to understand, given its extensive app exchange making features boundless, its custom forms, records and reports being the most flexible ever, and the intuitive API making design of custom functionality a breeze, if you can deal with JavaScript and the like. So, when they announced Financialforce for Salesforce, well, everyone was at least curious if not excited. Financialforce, if it’s not obvious by its name, is an accounting solution developed by the same intrepid designers who created Salesforce to begin with. Like Salesforce, it offers intuitive API, some pretty in-depth app compatibility and the same kind of flexible modification and structuring that’s made Salesforce popular. I guess the question then becomes, how well does Financialforce for Salesforce work? Well, considering they’re both frameworks from the same developer, it’s to be expected that of course it works well, and mapping is darn near one hundred percent between the records and form elements of the two systems. Well, there’s not much to say about that beyond this. So, let me explain why this is so useful by taking a minute to look back on how CRM and accounting used to have to get along and communicate before these solutions were capable of being coupled in this manner. CRM is one of the central backbones of business these days, handling data that applies to marketing, product or service management, research and development, financial departments and customer service. So, a good deal of the data a company handles is placed into CRM and retrieved from it anymore. There’s no problem with this, until you bring in another core data processing structure, and accounting kind of needs one. CRM systems can, of course, handle some simple accounting functions, but nothing to the level of a dedicated system. So, to make these two systems stay accurate to one another, and for projections, expenses and real metrics across them to establish, it took so many man hours for some poor cubicle-dwelling data entry person, constantly importing and exporting this data between the systems. It was slow, accident prone and costly, and just all around not a practical state of things. Well, with the integration of accounting and CRM together, not as a single solution but as closely-linked ones with automated data exchange mappings and push button import/export between them for various records, this is no longer the case. Now, this sort of data, for average cases, can, as I said, be automated to a fair degree, thus keeping both data sets contemporary, and able to borrow from one another for more in-depth, cross-department reports and inquiries. On the offhand chance a human being needs to make massive data transitions between the two in special ways, or with odd report designs or references, the integration makes this a very simple affair with almost no technical skill being required. Financialforce for Salesforce is a really big break through. It’s just very difficult to see why it took so long for this singular developer to integrate their two hit solutions like this. I’d think they’d have done it long ago. Related information regarding hanling data is available on importing data into salesforce page.
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Amanda is the Lead Author & Editor of Rainforce Blog. Amanda established the Rainforce blog to create a source for news and discussion about some of the issues, challenges, news, and ideas relating to Salesforce usage.