Last month, FinancialForce asked me to video a couple of customers. The other week I showcased White Springs. This week it is the turn of WiFi Alliance.
So far, professionals have seen little value in tying CRM to accounting. In this case, Susan Randel, controller WiFi Alliance points up several key benefits her business has achieved.
- The ability to redesign business processes to remove manual processing steps between the point of sale and the creation of an invoice. This may seem like a tiny thing but it is increasingly becoming obvious that not only is efficiency improved but you can change the way sales people look at the customer relationship. Having ownership of the whole process from order to invoice allows sales people to better understand the role of financial transactions.
- Errors are reduced. Instead of rekeying, data passes seamlessly between sales activities and into the financial transaction. As an aside, how many remember when WIP was passed direct to billing in professional systems and the benefits that revealed? It is the same idea only applied to external sales managed by others.
- It naturally follows that you get real time reporting and a reduction in the time to getting management reports out. Time saved here means time spent on value added functions.
- One benefit I’d not thought of but which Susan articulates well – improved audit compliance. Not only is her company better able to demonstrate how duties are segregated but she was also able to talk about the reduced need for testing.
Add it all together and you start to see that there are plenty of benefits to be had from cloud computing. You can argue that this would be possible with any integrated system. What makes this different is that FinancialForce is developed on the Force.com platform. That means even though there are distinctly separate companies involved (Salesforce.com and Financialforce), FF benefits from the direct integrations that the Force.com platform makes possible. That is not usually possible in an on premise system unless the vendor has made an open API available. Even then, that usually only allows limited integrations because the add-on developer isn’t accessing a platform for deployment but hooks to system functions.
There is a broader implication. Since cloud applications only require browser access, it means that in the longer term, companies can readily extend access to partners in their value chain. That might for example mean allowing access to check balances or view transactions as a simple way for partners to validate their own transaction records.
