FinancialForce Adds Accounting and Billing to Salesforce CRM
FinancialForce.com is adding billing and accounting to Salesforce.com's cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system.
The combined FinancialForce.com and Salesforce.com applications are “the first and only end-to-end CRM to accounting solution available on the Force.com platform,” FinancialForce.com claims.
Tom Brennan, FinancialForce's vice president of product marketing, said adding accounting features to CRM speeds billing, auditing and revenue collection and gives salespeople a view into customer financial data so they can better target prospects, avoid bad debt and help with collections. It can also avoid the need for separate databases for sales and accounting.
“Companies are operating so lean now,” Brennan told eCRM Guide. “You need to work as a team.”
The combination of CRM and accounting gives a “360 degree view to all the right people,” he said.
Improvements in the latest FinancialForce release include better reporting and a new Sales Order application that is embedded and initiated from within Salesforce CRM's Opportunity and Quote functions.
Sales orders can be created from an opportunity or quote in a single click, and high-volume organizations can produce orders automatically in the background with a “no touch” order processing environment. After a sales order is approved, users can instantly create an invoice from the order and produce accounting entries by using FinancialForce Billing.
Brennan said FinancialForce plans to add contract management to the service next year.
Brennan said FinancialForce gets a lot of its customers as small businesses move up from QuickBooks and Sage, but he said the company is also getting some business from enterprises and remote offices.
Pricing for the service is $65 per user a month. It is available from the Salesforce.com AppExchange, and can be implemented in 30 minutes or less with a QuickStart wizard.
Aria Offers Billing and Subscription Management for Salesforce
Salesforce.com will also be getting more financial support at next week's Dreamforce event from Aria Systems, which will announce the next phase of the integration of its Aria Billing and Subscription Management Platform with Salesforce.com. Aria's service automates the entire subscriber lifecycle from initial customer acquisition through service activation, usage tracking, billing and invoicing, collections and customer service.
Current integration already provides synchronization of account and product information and integration with Salesforce Quotes, among other features.
Paul Ferrill has been writing for over 15 years about computers and network technology. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering as well as a MS in Electrical Engineering. He is a regular contributor to the computer trade press. He has a specialization in complex data analysis and storage. He has written hundreds of articles and two books for various outlets over the years. His articles have appeared in Enterprise Apps Today and InfoWorld, Network World, PC Magazine, Forbes, and many other publications.
