What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is rated the number one CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool in the WORLD.

Since sales are based on a foundation of relationships, we chose the strongest relationship management tool for our customers. This tool helps manage contacts, sales, and products and is designed to keep organizations focused on the most crucial aspect of their business, client relationships.

How Do We Leverage Salesforce With Our Clients?

We use Salesforce primarily with our software company clients. In this industry, it is typical for the sales team to put together all the deals. From a proposal perspective, the sales team send the invoice to get paid.

The Salesforce and Sage Intacct integration converts that information into the accounting system. The salespeople send out invoices from the accounting system. Then, accounting can audit, edit, and post the invoices so the salespeople can send the bill to the client.

An example we might have with our clients is on the integration side with Sage Intacct. The advance setup is for a customized environment. For instance, our client may have two different sales teams. Those two teams, related to the financials, may need to come into two separate entities. That specific type of setup for multi-entity is the advanced type.

In this case, a parent company acquired one of our customers. The parent company wanted their sales team to have the opportunity to sell. We were able to combine their Salesforce environment and do an advanced integration into Sage Intacct for our customer entity. Now, when the salespeople use Salesforce for the parent company, and the subsidiary, they create invoices out of one accounting system instead of having it all merged. This advanced syncing is built for a sophisticated sales department.

Let’s say you have different entities in Sage Intacct. Each of those entities can sync with a separate SalesForce account. It’s multi-layered. We layer it and map it so that five entities on each side will work properly.

Who Does Salesforce Best Serve?

We see that most companies have the lower level Salesforce (CRM) using it for up to four different salespeople and users. Salesforce and Sage Intacct sync well, so, when companies experience an increase in growth, larger customers usually transition to the Enterprise version. We typically find more sophisticated salespeople or those who want to do more things faster for their customers choose the Enterprise system.

Also, the salespeople typically handle all the contract negotiations, especially in a software company. Issues can exist such as having the customer at a subscription rate this year with the need to transition them the following year to an annual subscription. Subscription billing must happen every year, and many times the accounting departments or systems are unable to make that connection. The option to reset a recurring schedule for subscription billing on the sales side is potent. Salesforce is an excellent tool for the salespeople that keeps them from missing renewable contracts.

The accounting team can audit all of that information and maintain control. Plus they can make sure customers and revenue are set up with the exact contract terms. When setting up sales contracts and creating quotes, our customers use all the items from the master structure of Sage Intacct and not experience lag time. It’s easily converted into a sales invoice. They sync it back to the salesperson who gets the invoice to send to the customer.

Moreover, the salesperson has visibility of when a customer pays the invoice. One of the significant things salespeople want to know is when they get their commission. Commissions usually get allocated after funds get collected. The salesperson can see the information of whether the bill or contract gets paid when they are set up as a View user on the Salesforce side, and it flows directly out of Sage Intacct. As the system updates, records update.

When the Salesforce tool is not in use, notifications of payments get addressed through email. Then, there is the task of manually keying all the information. The salesperson duplicates that same information in Excel. In our experience, 85-95% of our customers use Excel to create their invoices, especially if they do splits, discounts, or develop assumptions to make the most profit. There are some formulas in Excel that help. However, when they finalize it, they have to send it to the accounting department. Accounting has to process it, and the Salespeople have no way to know if the invoice gets handled by accounting or returned. That creates a back and forth nightmare.

Using Salesforce with Sage Intacct provides an automated and seamless process. Going from a manual submission to accounting converting information at the push of a button makes it a smooth transaction. Plus, our clients have visibility to all the reports on rates, approved discounts, and the approval process. That is a win-win for the customer and whole team.

What About Sage Intacct Compatible Systems, Other Than Salesforce?

If someone uses a Sage Intacct compatible system other than Salesforce, we might recommend that the customer transition to Salesforce. If Salesforce offers our customer a return on investment for their sales team to have a back and forth, two-way sync, it makes sense.

Other systems say they have a Sage Intacct integration, but they may not include a back and forth 2-way sync that provides the information about an invoice payment. Moreover, usually, subscription prices for Salesforce versus other CRM systems are not so far apart that a customer can’t make up the difference with an efficiency gain elsewhere.

Also, it’s crucial to weigh in customer service. It is a tremendous time-saver to have your sales team no longer have to wait to get back to a customer. Whether working on a contract, invoice, sales order or quote, a minimal wait time is essential. That kind of quick service almost always justifies and warrants going to an enterprise application such as Salesforce when using Sage Intacct.

There is a specific reason that Sage Intacct syncs with Salesforce. Sage Intacct is on the web built on force.com. Force.com is a sales product with languages that go to the cloud. Salesforce is also on force.com resulting in two systems that talk to each other beautifully.

There may be other CRM systems not built on force.com that can build-on other different types of languages. However, it isn’t as easy to have that sophisticated two-way sync that we see between Salesforce and Sage Intacct.

If we have a customer who is on Salesforce and they are using a Sage Intacct alternative, it is a smooth transition to Sage Intacct. We would make that easy and do a new integration between Sage Intacct and Salesforce. Our first step, in that case, is to get to the general ledger system of Sage Intacct and then sync it into their existing Salesforce environment.

These two systems work so well together that one might think Salesforce has some ownership in Sage Intacct. Since 2017, Intacct was purchased by the public company, Sage, so any Salesforce ownership depends on if they own shares in Sage.