We also reported that global headcount has doubled year-on-year and we’ve grown from 150 employees at the end of FY 2012 to more than 200 today. And we don’t have plans to slow down anytime soon!  In fact, we are currently expanding our downtown San Francisco and U.K. offices to accommodate the rapid growth. Move-ins will likely take place in Q2 2013!

Recently, our fast growth and collaborative culture have been noticed by the industry! First, San Francisco Business Times names FinancialForce.com one of the Best Places to Work in San Francisco.  Additionally, FinancialForce.com was listed by AlwaysOn as a 2013 OnDemand 100 Top Private Company.

As Jeremy said in the press release: “Our explosive growth year-over-year is a testament to the quality of our people and products.  We are not simply a company that builds cloud apps – our goal is to help customers realize their goals by delivering connected and trusted solutions that help differentiate their business.  Our presence is making an impact in the industry– people are talking about us and liking what they see.”

Exciting times here at FinancialForce.com!  Thanks to everyone who’ve been part of this ride so far.  Buckle up because it’s about to get even faster!

The post Tooting Our Own Horn? Maybe Just a Little Bit appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.

Q: Hi Cindy, what is your role at the company?
A: I am the Inside Sales Manager and I oversee the Inside and Outside Sales representatives. The Inside Sales team qualifies and works through any new leads that come through the website, trade shows, and other marketing efforts. As the entry point of the sales process, we want to make sure any prospect or customer, whatever the inquiry is, will be handled and managed effectively, to ensure that their needs and most pertinent questions are being answered. The outbound side of team is purely strategic and works alongside the mid-market and enterprise-level account executives to create opportunities.

Q: How has your team transformed in the last year?
A: Quite a bit!! When I first started less than a year ago, there were 2 Inside Sales representatives and 1 Business Development rep. We’ve now grown to 7 Inside Sales reps globally and 5 Business Develop reps. Opportunity size and conversion rates have greatly improved. Since then, with collaborative technologies like Chatter, we’ve been able to gather intelligence and insight more effectively as a team, and make greater impact while aligning more closely with sales goals, key messages and objectives. It’s been a wild ride!

Q: What do you believe are your team’s most critical goals?
A: As a team, we want to maintain and help exceed FinancialForce.com’s reputation for customer satisfaction and high customer success rate. We want customers and prospects to know and believe that we are a customer-centric organization from the start, and not only are we a “customer company”, we help them become one as well.

Q: Describe your team and the different personalities
A: Wow, where do I begin!? Our entire team is like a rainbow. We have some folks who are high energy and always on, and we have others who are more pensive and analytical. Everyone is collaborative and very focused. We work great as a team and every personality plays a role.

Q: What word comes to mind when you describe the FinancialForce.com SF Office?
A: Quite a few words come to mind!! Outgoing, fun, creative, inspiring, thoughtful, hardworking, but most importantly, team-oriented!

The post Q&A with Cindy Shibutani, Inside Sales Manager appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.

George Hu’s morning keynote was refreshing and upbeat and the crowds piled out deep in thought about how they could become more of a customer centric organization.

As usual the stand was packed with prospects and customers, with many interesting questions to keep the team on their toes! The quality of the delegates this year was exceptional. It’s amazing to hear what exciting and leading edge innovations are happening now in the Cloud.

At 5pm, in the final networking session, we handed out Nexus 7s to five lucky prize draw winners who were all delighted with their new toy to take home. And then it was ‘all aboard’ the Silver Sturgeon for a 4 hour cruise down the Thames on a magnificent yacht. With the food and wine flowing, 500 guests enjoyed live music, a flutter at the casino, plenty of networking and a few giggles. By the time we docked at the Savoy Pier, it had been a long, exciting, successful day. Some thought the night was young and we waved them off to yet another party…I went happily straight to bed!

The post It’s all about customers – Salesforce Customer Company Tour recap appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.

The term “silo” has new meaning for me now that I work for FinancialForce.com. Skipping the general description and moving right to the technical part, we are a company that creates managed packages that are installed into customer orgs. These managed packages have huge benefits for us and for our customers, and they have some drawbacks. The biggest is that it has been impossible for customers to control data moving between different managed packages – or even to design the data flow with 100% certainty of how that flow would execute. If one were to write Apex triggers, one cannot know if the new trigger would fire before or after existing triggers included in each managed package. But more than the order of execution, it has been impossible to move data between different applications reliably while accommodating custom fields that might have been created on objects in those packages. (***) Let’s look at an example:

A company uses our Accounting (FFA) product for all its finances, and uses our Professional Services Automation product to manage its consulting team. Though PSA handles expenses, they want to use Concur to log all the trips and expenses, and then to track paid expenses in FFA. Essentially, we would call that a Services Resource Planning (SRP) customer with a Concur add-on.

How would we connect Concur and FFA? We have created data silos – and they both exist within Salesforce! My first response to this situation is to say that we should connect Concur and PSA – the customer should have expenses in Concur synchronized to expenses in PSA so that built-in reports and dashboards can be used and so that if one application is removed, no data is lost. Let’s complicate things and say that the customer has custom fields on the PSA Expense Report object and on the Project object so that even if FinancialForce.com and Concur wrote a trigger to synchronize all packaged fields between the two applications, that trigger could never account for custom field mappings. What now?

The customer could write triggers to do the integration. This would include accommodating every data change: insert, update, delete, and undelete… on every object involved in the mapping. This code would need to have test code written for it, and would not only be difficult to write and maintain, but if the customer were large enough, it could even take over a half-hour just to deploy the code inserts and updates from a sandbox to the production environment. And that is for each tweak. Thirty minutes is too long!

I have described what is, in effect, data siloing within the Salesforce Platform. Because companies – for good reason – choose to protect intellectual property, customers are facing situations in which they want to connect two managed applications… and the cost is simply too great.

This is why one of FinancialForce.com’s newest creations is so important. ClickLink is a declarative tool that runs “integrations” between two objects in Salesforce – any objects in any application. We have designed a tool internally to automate Sales Invoice creation from an Opportunity – one integration rule fires to make the header of the invoice, and then a second rule fires to create the line items. Rules can be set to copy from an object, and pull data from related records, to fire when a button is clicked, to email every time the rule executes, to log errors, and more. (My favorite is that an Apex scheduled job can run to use a List View of an object as a filter so that, say, each open Opportunity with Close Date < Today creates a Wall of Shame record for the Opportunity owner.) And, yes, a short block of trigger code – we provide a template to each customer – can fire it as well.

If I may speak technically here:

As applications written on the Force.com platform grow in complexity, and as companies release packages that build on their own packages, multiple “after” triggers on a given object, including one that a customer writes to move data to an object in another package, could fire out of order. ClickLink is the perfect integration tool for administrators. Because it is fully declarative, you don’t need to worry about writing code, testing code, deploying code, or any code at all. Just map your configurations and let it do its thing.

My only complaint about ClickLink is that I can’t find a better word to use than “integration.” But I don’t like integrations! Things are so much more simple when they all exist on the Force.com platform, but as we can see, silos are possible even within the platform. So whenever we see silos, what do we say? “HULK SMASH!”

This is just one of the tools that we are developing here at FinancialForce.com. There are others in the works, all created to make our customers more successful. Stay tuned for future posts, some about current products and some about our roadmap items. Great things are happening here!

(***) More code-experienced readers might design a trigger that uses Field Sets to allow for custom fields, but that is a workaround hack that is unsupported by salesforce.com, so we don’t use it.

Related Posts:

Declarative Thinking: Apps to build Apps

Back Office Ecosystem Emerging on Force.com

The post Breaking Down Internal Silos appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.

After a few words from Jeremy Roche, our CEO, a Research and Development update with Debbie Ashton, VP Product and Customer Success and our ROW Customer Success Manager, Addy Clark, customers attended sessions on Reporting and ClickLink, and on optimizing their applications. Some customers gave us some same day, lunch break feedback, including:

“Thank you very much for a useful day. I really learned a lot. It’s great to see that FinancialForce.com is so driven and dedicated to being the best they can. This is filtered from the top down.” Clicktools

“Thank you FinancialForce.com. I feel excited about all the improvements that we can make for 2013 and beyond.” Revo Media

“Great day. Very Informative on FinancialForce PSA and FinancialForce Accounting.” The Risk Advisory Group

During lunch, customers were given the chance to share experiences and swap tips on how they are using our applications. We hope to encourage more of this interaction in the future and look forward to our next FinancialForce.Community event being held in San Francisco on November 18^th 2013.

As a parting gift, customers were given a small taste of Yorkshire with a Betty’s gift box containing some of their famous tea and some sweet treats. It’s amazing that customers based in London and even further afield were heard exclaiming ‘ooh Betty’s’ as the lift doors closed, no further explanation required.

The post FinancialForce.Community London 2013, Bacon Butties, and Betty’s appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.

Before moving their systems to the cloud, Lynne was having issues such as:

- Inability to run reports on financial data
- Data inaccuracy causing too many issues across organization
- No way to process data between ops system and accounting system
- Data errors were a regular occurrence

Watch this short video to learn how cloud accounting and the Force.com revolutionized the backoffice at RSI Relo.

The post User Story with Lynne Taylor of RSI Relo appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.

Now here is a short example to explain the differences:
You are a user with a Profile that allows you to double check the expenses that are created before being approved by someone else above you in the hierarchy. However, for a period of time the person who approved them is not in the office and you are responsible for performing this action as well. In this case, we have multiple options.

1. Modify the Profile in order to allow you to update the expenses and give you more than just read access to this object. This would not be a good idea as it would give update access to everybody who has this Profile assigned.
2. Assign the manager Profile to you temporarily. This is not ideal, as you would have access to all processes that your manager has.
3. Create a new Profile for this action. From an admin perspective, this is not the best idea. How many profiles would we have in our platform if we do something like this every time that we need it?

If in our system we had Permission Sets instead of only Profiles, we could temporarily assign the Expense Update access Permission Set that the manager has for you, so you would also have access to edit the Expenses. No one else would have rights to do it and at the end you are reusing something that is already created.

I was ready to dive into our product and try to find a good way to leave Profiles with minimum information and create Permission Sets. My first thought was “try to make them as simple as possible so that I can reuse them easily” And I started creating 4 permission sets for the Account object.

1. Account Read access
2. Account Create access
3. Account Update access
4. Account Delete access

But after a couple of hours doing this I wondered how many Permission Sets I could create if I take into account that our product has around 50 processes, each one with at least 1 accion and for most of them at least 2 objects take part of these actions. How many permission sets should I create?

“When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.” Augusto Monterroso.

This is the shortest tale written in Spanish and I can use it to explain how I felt after realizing that our product would need hundreds of Permission Sets. Something completely unmanageable for the administrator and he could really see the dinosaur after clicking on the Permission Sets link. So actually I was doing something wrong.

I would recommend that you follow this advice in order to create a good design.

1. Granularity is good, as long as you don’t create a monster.
2. Try to create them in a way that you can reuse these permission sets so you don’t need to increase this number without any sense.
3. If you follow points 1 and 2, you might create a large number of permission sets. Think about if you really need all of them. Maybe all your users have CRUD access to Account, so you don’t really need to create four Permission Sets for each Account action, one would be enough.
4. Permission sets are upgradable so what you do today can be modified in the future and easily installed into our customers orgs.
5. Permission sets are not editable. So unfortunately, if we have some Permission Sets installed in our org but we really need something different, we would not be able to modify them. On the other hand we would be able to clone them and put in the new Permission Sets the rights that we really need.
6. And the most important advice for me is try to find a good balance. Maybe your system needs 150 Permission Sets and that’s fine if there is no other way to make everybody happy.

Here you will find some packaging problems, so take them into account during your design.

My teacher once told me that maybe the dinosaur had a different meaning. Maybe it’s something good. The dinosaur represents all good things that we could find at that time, nature, no pollution, everybody in peace …. so when he woke up, he was still happy, everything was great.

And actually this is my current feeling. We found a great design for our product and everything is good with Permission Sets. Permission Sets are a good friend.

The post Understanding Permission Sets – A new Salesforce friend appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.

The post Apex Enterprise Patterns – Domain Layer appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.

With a 90% increase in revenue run rate in 2012, almost achieving our goal of doubling in size year on year, it wasn’t going to be long before customer conferences became a regular feature on our calendar. Over 100 registrations for the US event shows how much our customers want to network with FinancialForce.com experts and other customers in order to maximize their investment. These customers summed up their experiences of the day.

‘I really enjoyed your event in San Francisco. It was a very productive day and I was glad I was in attendance.’ Michael Hart, RealPage

‘I loved the customer day at Dreamforce! It was extremely helpful’ Bev Hessefort, Arts Council of Greater Kansas City

Packed with networking opportunities and valuable sessions covering strategy, training and best practices for using our applications, FinancialForce.Community London 2013 looks set to be a similarly great event. I can’t wait to put faces to names and to meet some of the newer FinancialForce.Community members!

The post FinancialForce.Community London 2013 appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.

Q: Hi Dave!  Tell us a bit about your role and team.
A: My primary role is to ensure a blockbuster customer experience at every turn with our customers!  From the moment they sign on to FinancialForce, we want to make sure every touchpoint they have with us is a positive one and  that our products are adding value to the business.  Whether it’s through my Consulting Team, converting their requirements into real system functionalities, my Customer Success team helping customers achieve their goals, our “Customer For Life” team can attend to them at any point in the relationship with us.

Q: What would you say are your team’s most critical goals?
A: Referenceability is goal one. Nothing demonstrates your success than having customers who are willing to speak kindly on your behalf.  It drives almost all the other goals we have.  Speed to adoption is another critical goal.  We want customers to realize their return on investment as soon as possible.  Finally, we like to make the renewal process as seamless and painless as possible for our customers.

Q: What does a successful day look like for you?
A: Go lives are the best!  They are like a shot of adrenaline in the arm every time you announce one!  Customer contacts and connections are a huge part of my role here– truly understanding their challenges and determining how we can best address them.  So, spending time with customer really makes it a great day for me!

Q: What keeps you happy working here at FinancialForce.com?
A: I work with the smartest people on the planet and I love that.  I’m not making this up for this, I promise.  I do work with incredibly smart people.  My team is so extraordinary in terms of the breadth of what they do and their commitment to doing it correctly. The great feeling of esprit de corp brings me so much professional and personal joy.  At FinancialForce.com, we actually deliver products that makes a huge difference in the lives of people that we touch— people feel passionate about what we do because they need it, and they need it to work right.  That gives me a great sense of purpose for working at FFDC.  Oh, and the coffee in the break room is pretty good to!

Q: Last question, Dave, and you are off the hook!  What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of the SF office?
A: Not one word but three: COLLABORATION ON STEROIDS!

The post Q&A with Dave Hendrickson, Director of Customer Success & Consulting appeared first on FinancialForce.com Blog.