Salesforce CRM Customers Long for Link into the Finance Department
Last week, we announced the results of a survey we conducted among Salesforce CRM users into the problems they experience with their existing finance apps. It was really a prospecting exercise, but the results were telling. Of the 200 SMBs who completed the survey, those that used Quickbooks or Sage and Salesforce CRM (67%) cited lack of CRM integration as their biggest headache. We in no way prompted that response and left the space blank for respondents to complete their answer, so it clearly is bugging people.
Of course Salesforce users are typically very reliant on their CRM which heightens the problem. Survey participants went one step further to provide color on how the lack of integration impacts their work and their companies, including:
- “We have a double entry problem between Salesforce CRM opportunities and QuickBooks purchase order records and we don’t have our finances in the cloud.”
- “Our accounting app leaves finance very disconnected from business, as opposed to being in the thick of it.”
- “Does not integrate with Salesforce CRM, which we are increasingly adopting across the organization. We are faced with a large integration challenge or a change of financial application.”
- “Invoicing needs to be integrated into salesforce.com.”
- “We had to build our own A/P and A/R in salesforce.com, and it isn’t connected with our accounting app.”
- “Our accounting app cannot track sending and receipt of invoices without manual entry in salesforce.com.” Other frustrations cited by respondents included a lack of multi-company functionality, an unwieldy amount of manual data entry, incompatibility with Macs and an inability to scale: • “[QuickBooks] doesn’t do multi-user gracefully.”
- “I have a multi-product, multi- sector, i.e., multi-revenue stream business. Quickbooks cannot handle it without excessive data input.”
- “We use Macs and PCs and even the online version does not work on both.”
- “[The program] generally feels like 1999.”
