Salesforce ERP Integration to Complement Accounting Systems

Salesforce ERP integration can help organizations drive more RoI from their investments. Salesforce CRM alone can automate various everyday sales tasks. Integrating an ERP system into the equation allows you to automate more and your employees to focus on core tasks while the integrated system takes care of routine and repetitive tasks.

Salesforce is a powerful cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform primarily used by businesses to empower their sales teams and provide them with all the tools and information needed to work more efficiently and close more deals. The ERP is the king of all things finance including invoices, payment, and revenue information. 

With the evolution of technology and software development, we’re witnessing a dedicated focus from organizations to integrate various systems to build a connected ecosystem that facilitates the seamless flow of data across the organization. As Sales become more data-driven and personalized, your reps would need all the information on a customer to be agile and proactive in their work. Salesforce ERP integration is one such way to integrate two of your most essential systems to achieve greater collaboration and workflow efficiencies.

Why Integrate Salesforce With ERP?

Salesforce complements the ERP systems by converting Salesforce CPQ lead-to-order data into transactional data. This allows ERP systems to take over matching data and use it for accounting functions including general ledger and financial reporting. Salesforce ERP integration facilitates data synchronization between the systems. 

What does this mean for your business?

Let’s start with when a new customer is entered into Salesforce. The customer’s data need to show up in financials, invoicing, and other reports. ERP automatically manages these functions. By integrating your Salesforce CRM with ERP, you don’t have to re-enter the customer data into the ERP system for any of these reports. Once a sale is recorded in your Salesforce CRM, the integrated system will automatically create an invoice in the integrated ERP. The manual process of entering new customer data and sending that information to the finance team is now automated. This is one of the reasons to integrate Salesforce with your ERP. 

• Lead to Invoice- You can create invoice data out of CPQ’s quote and order data. The customer account data matches with the single product catalog to streamline the invoicing process. The integration can then transfer this data to the ERP for managing accounts receivable, payments, and GL functions.
• Lead to Cash- You can add payments, adjustments, and revenue reporting to the Lead to Invoice process. When these functions are performed in Salesforce Billing, it allows you to send customer data to the ERP for general ledger logging and financial reporting.
• Revenue Recognition Reporting- With Salesforce Billing, you can configure different types of revenue recognition reporting scenarios to build a streamlined revenue calculation process.
• Third-party integrations-  You can connect to quotes to provide tax estimations,  invoice calculation process to generate tax line items, and eSignature with proposals for automatic signature conversions to contracts and orders. Similarly, you can integrate payment gateways for automatic recording of bulk recurring credit card payments data.

Salesforce ERP Integration Benefits

There are many benefits of Salesforce ERP integration including-

1. All-In-One Access- Your Sales team is more likely to master Salesforce, while the financial team is comfortable using the ERP system. The integration allows your employees to work within their preferred system and access all the information they need. 
2. Boost Customer Satisfaction- Integrating your CRM and ERP systems will provide you with a 360-degree view of your customers including their buying behavior, history, and preferences, etc. This information can help your organization to build effective customer service strategies and maintain strong relationships with your customers.
3. More Sales and Higher Payment Collection- With the CRM and the ERP working together, each one of your employees knows the status with every order and customer. The finance team stays on top of unpaid invoices and makes efforts to collect it on time. This positively affects the balance sheet and profit and loss statement. With finance data on their fingertips, your sales reps can focus more on high-value customers leading to more sales.
4. Drive Collaboration- Salesforce ERP integration drives communication and collaboration across teams. Your finance team will have access to the required Sales data and your sales reps can access required financial data when they need it. This removes barriers in collaboration like the information gap leading to more fruitful discussions.
5. Extract better insights- In a data-driven world, your business needs to transform data into actionable intelligence and insights. This requires the breaking of silos and a smooth flow of data across the organization. With the integration of your Salesforce CRM and ERP, your employees get access to all the data and information to understand patterns, and extract insights. It also helps the company leadership get 360-degree visibility of the operations.
6. Minimize Manual Errors & Costs- Manual data entry is prone to errors and data duplication which can at times be costly. The integration enables automated checks and balances to make sure all systems have the same data. Eliminating data duplication helps keep the data clean. 
7. Automate Workflows Without Coding- One of the key benefits of integration is the automation of tasks. This alone can deliver a business high value in the long-term. The Salesforce ERP integration allows you to automate workflows without coding. You can create workflow simple point-and-click, use business logic to move data, create processes, and automate data manipulation.

Salesforce ERP Integration-Where to start?

The integration of ERP and Salesforce CRM can bring a number of benefits to your business. To maximize these benefits, it is essential to identify the data needs of your various teams as well as chose an experienced Salesforce integration partner. An expert integration partner will help you rapidly integrate your systems specific to your business needs. We’re a Salesforce Gold Consulting & Product Development partner with experience working on 500+ projects across industries. Our team of certified Salesforce Consultants can help you build the ERP integration strategy and provide you with technical expertise to help you execute it perfectly. To know more about Salesforce ERP integration, get in touch and one of our consultants will contact you at the earliest.