When was the last time you spoke to your finance team? To chase up late payment of an expense claim perhaps, or to confirm your budget for the year? Maybe you had problems finding details of a customer payment or a customer order? And I bet email was your choice of communication tool every time.

Finance has historically been seen as a back office function where accountants are the people you talk to as a last resort to help you solve a problem. In turn, accountants have typically found that they spend all day problem solving, answering queries and putting out fires.

When you think about it, this makes no sense. Everything in business has some sort of financial impact, and will ultimately end in a debit or credit. So finance professionals can bring a particular, highly useful perspective to most business activities going on. If sales and finance collaborated earlier on putting together sales bids, or customer services brought finance in as soon as there was a client issue, then the business benefits could be massive.

If the wall between front office interaction with customers and back office finance was torn down, the potential for improved responsiveness, better customer service and more efficient business processes is considerable. Accountants need to be put front and centre to drive activity and process in the business, yet despite numerous attempts this hasn’t really happened.

As alluded to in a previous blog post, FinancialForce.com will soon be announcing some work around collaborative accounting and Salesforce Chatter which will do just that; transforming the accounting function and its role within business. Whilst we are passionate about finance and financial processes, by extending this thinking, we can see huge benefits for the rest of the business too.�

QuickStart is a set-up wizard designed to help SMBs without in-house accounting expertise switch to FinancialForce Accounting faster. It is designed to help small and medium size organizations with limited in-house accounting resources or standard accounting requirements to set up their chart of accounts, the vital coded listing of all the accounts used by an organization. It also benefits larger organizations that want to take an industry ‘best practice’ approach to accounting.

QuickStart has been developed in response to customer feedback. FinancialForce.com is more comprehensive than other online cloud accounting solutions and therefore we have found that some businesses with limited accounting resources need assistance setting up their chart of accounts. That is hardly surprising, since even experienced accountants do not change their accounting system every day. Yet the design of your chart of accounts is critical to how you structure financial information. Get it wrong, and you may struggle to report on the most important financial and operational trends in your business.

The 10-step QuickStart application provides straight-forward, pre-defined steps for setting-up FinancialForce Accounting. A default chart of accounts will provide users with a starting point based on five sector templates:
- IT/high tech
- professional services
- media
- medical services
- generic
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The professional services template, for example, enables users to account for consulting revenue, while the media template accounts for items such as advertising sales. This new wizard-driven approach to setup can reduce the time it takes users to create and refine their accounts structure by up to 75%, even if they have never designed a chart of accounts before.

For more information visit the QuickStart page on our website.

Silicon.com ran a great article this week following an interview with the Telegraph’s CIO, Paul Cheesbrough. As highlighted in a recent FinancialForce.com webinar, The Telegraph Group is a customer that has been working to move a number of back-office applications into the cloud, while keeping some of its more specialist applications on-premises and linking the two.

Telegraph Media Group already runs an Agresso in-house financial package which is used for general ledger and company accounting, but Cheesbrough said he wants to make this in-house technology “more connected to the cloud” by using FinancialForce.

Paul says: “We’ve taken part of our financial workflow and we’ve lifted it into the cloud. So we use [FinancialForce] to maximise the power of the cloud but also to bridge back into the on-premise finance application that we’ve got which we’re not ready to replace yet.”

As the company keeps much of its advertising sales-related financial data in the cloud with Salesforce.com’s CRM, it made sense to use FinancialForce, which runs on the same platform, to manage invoices and billing for customers, he said.

This is a growing trend we are seeing (on Tuesday we announced a new SAP integration we have developed). Many companies want to quickly and easily generate financial transactions from their salesforce.com applications and present them for posting to their on-premises ERP. This approach enables larger organizations to close the finance loop and benefit from the best cloud technology without compromising their existing ERP. Because our online cloud accounting solution is built on the Force.com platform and ‘speaks salesforce’, we are the obvious choice for accounting middleware.   

We have announced today a new out of the box SAP integration for sharing of financial data. In partnership with SKYVVA, a German specialist in SAP and salesforce.com integration, we have developed an out of the box solution for delivering FinancialForce Accounting data into SAP Financials.

The integration will be demonstrated for the first time at Cloudforce Frankfurt today and will offer significant benefits to a number of organizations including:
• Those using FinancialForce.com to account for the salesforce.com Service Cloud to pass data into SAP.
• Those wanting to move subsidiaries into the cloud while maintaining use of SAP Financials at head office.
• Dispersed organizations wanting to integrate franchises into the organization using SAP at head office.

The full announcement is available here http://www.financialforce.com/sap-integration

We are being approached by a number of large organizations that are using ERP systems such as SAP, that want to quickly and easily generate financial transactions from their salesforce.com applications and present them for posting to their on-premises ERP applications. This is an example of creating a hybrid solution between cloud based and on-premises applications, where the benefits of deploying in the cloud can help to quickly deliver a solution and complement existing technology infrastructures. This approach simplifies integration, and ensures that all business processes are completed and accounted for and that there are no lost transactions such as unbilled customers.

It was quietly announced last week that MYOB will launch a SaaS offering. Not a lot of detail has been given at this stage, but it will be interesting to see how they approach this. For a small business accounting package, MYOB is touted as relatively complex to set-up and use and the company is known for tight licensing and software update practices. It will be interesting to see how they approach SaaS and how they evolve their business model for this market.

We have spent some time updating http://developer.financialforce.com to make it even easier to use and even more helpful.

This is where users and developers both on and off the Force.com platform can access the FinancialForce.com business API for its core features. Useful for those with Apex, Java or C# backgrounds and those sporting the recent Salesforce Developer certifications, we have created this site to help those wanting to get more from the FinancialForce online accounting application. 

It includes:

• A series of sample integrations and mash-ups we have created to give inspiration to others including Facebook and Google Apps integrations.
• FinancialForce Accounting customisations
• Best practice guidelines and specific API examples

We have also added a code scheduler feature using new features of the Spring ’10 Force.com platform release. It allows us to schedule any Batch Apex enable functionality. Batch Apex can easily wrap the FinancialForce Bulk API’s.

Just a short post at this stage with further details to be announced soon.

Following the launch of Chatter from salesforce.com , the FinancialForce.com team is excited to announce it has been busy building social networking capability into FinancialForce Accounting . We’re close to unveiling it to the public and as the only online accounting vendor that truly ‘speaks Salesforce’ we expect to be the first that ‘Chatters’ too. We are not developing this on a whim, this is part of a long term push by FinancialForce to help finance and business professionals collaborate better within their organization, bringing clear benefits to accountants and the wider business. They include:

• Faster, more automated finance processes; fewer bottlenecks
• The ability to quickly identify and communicate with colleagues who have the information and expertise they need to get their questions answered
• Convenient updates when relevant documents are changed or added

These are just some of the advantages of close communication between finance and sales. We expect to have more to say about exactly what we’re doing in the coming weeks. The sociable accountant – whatever next?!

FinancialForce.com users can now easily manage business and customer accounts anytime, anywhere

FinancialForce.com has launched iPhone and BlackBerry clients for FinancialForce Accounting, the first and only enterprise-class online accounting application on the Force.com cloud computing platform.

Features of the mobile client include:
• dashboards for accounting information, such as bank balances, overdue customer invoices and amounts owed to suppliers.
• query access to invoices and credit notes.
• logging of calls, notes and conversations with customers and suppliers.
• the ability for both sales and accounting teams to assign, collaborate and complete tasks related to both CRM and accounting data.

The FinancialForce.com design team are working hard to take advantage of some of the new features in Salesforce.com’s Spring ’10 release of the Force.com platform. Our own Spring ’10 release is due out in April. Below is one small example of how we are making best use of some of the new features. More to come…

FinancialForce.com Email Templates

Salesforce.com’s Spring ’10 platform release brings with it a new feature calledGlobal Email Templates. Using this feature Salesforce.com provides the email template author the means to tailor the labels and layout according to a specific language. This is a great example of platform enhancement that immediately benefits existing FinancialForce.com application users. Customers of FinancialForce Accounting can make the most of email templates for sending invoices, reminder letters and remittance advice.