Salesforce for Accounting: Can the Leading CRM Tool Handle Accounting Functions?

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 building sales strategies. The platform assists small and large businesses alike in closing deals, improving productivity, and building insightful analytical reports – it’s a key business tool.

Despite how powerful Salesforce can be when it comes to customer relationship management, no tool can offer every solution for businesses. When business leaders consider Salesforce accounting software, they’ll quickly notice that the platform isn’t nearly as robust in that area as it is for their sales teams. 

So, how can you successfully conduct accounting in Salesforce despite it not being specifically designed for those types of tasks? Integrations. 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 does have a few out-of-the-box features that can be used by accounting and finance teams. Because of the linkage to sales, things like invoices, sales orders, and purchase requisitions can be managed directly in Salesforce, but beyond that, accounting in Salesforce is fairly limited. A few key items that are missing from an accounting perspective are:

• AP Functionality: Although Salesforce provides a few invoicing features, AP teams are unable to process payments, track AP aging and other key reports, and analyze customer payment trends over time. 
• Audit and Compliance Features: In the accounting world, ensuring GAAP compliance and detailed audit features are non-negotiable. As a CRM tool primarily, Salesforce does not provide that support. 
• Detailed Expense Tracking: Managing – and often cutting – costs is the responsibility of every accounting professional around the world. With Salesforce, transaction-level expense tracking is impossible.
• Budgeting Capabilities: Salesforce does not provide robust budgeting capabilities such as budget creation, variance analysis, and forecasting, which are crucial for maintaining the financial health of businesses overall.

There are a few add-on modules such as Billing and Revenue Cloud that can be used to track incoming funds, but any accountant knows that those features only support a small fraction of what accounting teams work on day-in and day-out. Luckily, because of the platform’s prominence around the world, many accounting SaaS solutions integrate seamlessly with Salesforce, creating a well-rounded technology environment that can track sales, manage expenses, pay bills, and more – all in the same place.

Accounting Software Integration With Salesforce

When integrating with Salesforce, accounting software solutions like Accounting Seed, QuickBooks, and FreshBooks establish a two-way integration. This type of integration means that the tools can communicate with one another. For instance, when changes to a customer account are made within Salesforce, those changes will be reflected within the accounting software, too.

This two-way integration is crucial because it means that you can always rely on all of your business tools to be updated and aligned with one another.

Instead of being required to make updates in both systems, the systems work together in the background to tie out mapping pathways, numerical data, and so much 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 for accounts payable, accounts receivable, financial reporting, and even data analytics 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 accounting software integration with Salesforce, we recommend learning more about the AccountingSeed Salesforce Integration, FreshBooks Salesforce integration, and, the Salesforce QuickBooks integration.

Salesforce Accounting Seed Integration

Because Accounting Seed was built to natively integrate with Salesforce, the integration between these two platforms isn’t just easy – it’s powerful. By ensuring that any changes to customer data are directly updated in the Accounting Seed platform as well, this integration helps eliminate manual data entry work and any system-based data discrepancies. This feature alone will prevent both your sales team and accounting team from having to spend unnecessary time hunting down data in either system.

What’s really impressive about this integration, though, is the accounting automation capabilities that it enables. Automated billing features make it easy to invoice a customer in Salesforce and track all the financial implications related to that invoice within Accounting Seed. Designed to provide a “single source of truth,” Accounting Seed gives Salesforce – and your other business systems – a reliable data set to turn to when conducting any business analysis. 

Salesforce FreshBooks Integration

As an 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 pairs incredibly well with Salesforce, making it easy to create and manage invoices, track expenses, and monitor incoming and outgoing payments. 

With FreshBooks’ REST API, the FreshBooks/Salesforce integration enables automatic usage of Salesforce data for accounting purposes.

For example, when you mark an opportunity as “Closed Won” in Salesforce, the client profile is automatically created in FreshBooks, an invoice is generated based on the profile, and that invoice is sent directly to the client.

This is just one example of how the Salesforce/FreshBooks integration makes the collaboration between sales and finance processes easier than ever.

Salesforce QuickBooks Integration

Sales and accounting departments will both benefit from the Salesforce/QuickBooks. If a sales representative needs to see a customer’s payment history or outstanding invoices, they can find all that information within Salesforce even though it’s pulled from QuickBooks. On the flip side, if an accountant needs to look at sales orders or customer contracts – which are generally recorded in Salesforce – they can find that information directly within QuickBooks.

The unified data flow between the two systems makes it possible for your teams to get a more holistic view of the customer experience and the business impact without having to learn a system they’re not familiar with.

This helps with managing cash flow, building better reports, and solidifying customer relationships. With less time spent on searching through data in multiple systems, both your sales team and accounting team can spend more time adding value to the organization in other ways. 

In addition to traditional accounting software integrating with Salesforce, you can look at integrations to supplement Salesforce and cover some of its limitations.

One such integration is Nanonets.

Salesforce Nanonets Integration

When paired together, Nanonets and Salesforce will significantly enhance the accounts payable functionality of any organization by automating data-heavy processes and streamlining record-keeping. Nanonets uses revolutionary OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to accurately extract and record data from key documents like invoices, receipts, and even bank statements. Then, Nanonets takes the data it captures and updates Salesforce, significantly cutting back the time required for data entry and reducing the number of data-related errors along the way.

This integration not only automates AP tasks but also ensures consistency within your organization’s technology stack. With Nanonets in the picture, your AP function will operate in a more optimized fashion. Real-time data processing and validation, better operational efficiency, and fewer data errors to chase down will change how your organization does business. Even further, Nanonets works well with other business tools, saving time and advancing data insights throughout all business functions. 

Choosing the Right Integration

When it comes to Salesforce accounting, you’ll need a supplemental tool that integrates well with Salesforce to truly manage all accounting priorities. We’ve listed three options above, but in reality, there are a number of tools that can solve your accounting needs. When selecting the right integration for your business, be sure to consider the following:

• Budget
• Organization Size
• Future Growth Goals
• Accounting Priorities
• Most Important Features
• Customer Support Structure
• Current Customer Reviews

Some of these considerations are internal conversations with your sales and accounting leaders, but some will require you to seek external perspectives, too. Are there organizations in your industry that have experience using the Salesforce/QuickBooks integration or do they prefer Nanonets’ functionality? Asking around can help you get true user insights which 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 offer a lot of value to accounting teams? When integrated with the right accounting software, absolutely. We are doing business 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

Whether you’re prioritizing AP automation with Nanonets or rely on the self-employment features of FreshBooks, pairing your accounting software with Salesforce is truly a no-brainer – and in business, not many things are a no-brainer.