In a blog post , Damian Saunders, CEO, Cogent Online, gives an excellent real-life account of migrating to the cloud and setting-up FinancialForce Accounting. Six months in, and he quotes a message he received from the General Manager which is poignant – “Imagine if we never had SalesForce and FinancialForce. Arghh!”

Other companies who have travelled this road are equally enthused and certain that their decision was the right one. With the benefits starting to rack up, there is an increasingly compelling argument for cloud accounting.

Susan Randal, Controller at WiFi Alliance, is keen to point out several key frontline benefits in tying CRM to accounting working with FinancialForce.com. The net result? Empowered frontline employees. In a recent interview with Dennis Howlett she talked about the empowerment the move to FinancialForce Accounting had given their employees along with the massive time savings when generating invoices and reports.

“It naturally follows that you get real time reporting and a reduction in the time to getting management reports out,” she says. “Time saved here means time spent on value added functions.”

Gary White, CEO, White Springs was also interviewed recently and again highlights the significant benefits of cloud accounting to his organization, not only relating to cost and time savings. FinancialForce Accounting has given them complete confidence in the numbers they are reporting. 

It’s relatively early days for cloud accounting, and market data shows it will be another five years before we come close to the adoption levels of CRM. What those considering the move cannot ignore is the compelling case being made by early adopters - from migration and set-up to the visible frontline benefits being delivered.

Gary White, CEO of White Springs was recently interviewed by Dennis Howlett talking about the benefits of cloud accounting and FinancialForce Accounting. You can watch the video here. White Springs is reliant on Salesforce CRM as its central business system. It helps them manage lead capture, opportunities, customer relationships, contracts, customer support, business development and timesheets, and according to Gary, has surpassed all expectations in terms of what it could deliver.

The fact that FinancialForce Accounting was built with the same attention to detail and extended functionality compared to a lot of the cloud accounting solutions on the market was attractive.

The combination of cloud CRM and cloud accounting is providing some significant benefits. White Springs has one single view of every customer account so everyone across the business is working from the same information. Sales and finance can see which customers have been billed, what they have been billed for and what has been collected. Previously, those responsible for debt collection had been running in isolation from the rest of the business. Now they can see opportunities in the pipeline and support cases that might influence a customer’s willingness to settle up.

Gary explained where they are seeing some significant time savings. “Now that we don’t have to manage a deferred revenue spreadsheet, we can rely on the information in the monthly management reports, they are quick and easy to produce, and we have no spreadsheets to worry about outside of the system. Our accounting team has saved at least 20% of the time that was spent posting invoices manually. It’s all automated from an opportunity being closed in the CRM to an invoice going out from FinancialForce. Preparation of the monthly management accounts takes only one day now instead of two. These savings are significant for a business like ours.”

The Spring ’09 release of CODA 2go will – for the first time – deliver the full suite of ledgers needed to support your core accounting function. It extends the current ‘Opportunity to Cash’ release to provide full Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and General Ledger, and will be the first – and only – accounting system built on the Force.com platform, as well as one of very few genuine ‘enterprise strength’ cloud accounting systems on the market.

The release is set for 7th April 2009 at Cloudforce in London. This will be a fantastic event, and the release of CODA 2go Spring ‘09 will mark a great step forward for Salesforce.com users.

Watch out for more details and do come and join us. If you can’t be there, watch the blog and website for details on signing up for the Free 30-day Trial.