It is mid-month, your accounting department sends out past due notices and you realize that some of the notices come back because the address is bad. A quick check reveals that the address information has been correctly updated in your CRM system but your financial application is still showing old address or typos. This is just one small reason why CRM Integration to your back-office financial/ERP application can make a HUGE difference if they “talked.”
Welcome to the world of CRM Integration. I have often advocated that it is a must for a 360 degree view of the customer because it completes the picture of the customer when information is not located in your CRM application.
What are some of the most common reasons for having CRM integration to back-office financial applications?
Here is just a sample of what can be integrated:
- Seamless and updated Customer, Vendor Contact Information
- Ability to View Back Office Information in your CRM such as:
Purchase Orders
Invoice History
Credit Status
Account Balance - Automatically Convert Quotes from your CRM into Orders in your Financial System
- Keep updated Inventory Information between your CRM and Financial System
In addition to viewing the above information, automated data updates to and from financial applications greatly reduce unnecessary duplicate data entry and facilitate data consistency throughout your business. The tight integration and real-time access to information has many benefits, from reducing user account management and end-user training on multiple applications to increasing data integrity and improving efficiency, plus decreased usage licensing costs for integrated applications like QuickBooks, PeachTree, Macola, MAS, Great Plains and so on.
Just how does integration benefit your organization?
Well… here is just a sample of the benefits:
- Get a true 360-degree view of your customer on one screen
- Quickly identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
- Easily access account balance information
- Identify additional purchasing power — or lack thereof
- Identify availability of products for sales
- Quickly assist customers with order status
- Generate more accurate quotes and proposals
- Avoid redundant data entry
- Maintain data integrity through automatic updates between systems
- Reduce the need to login and learn financial application interface by accessing information directly from your CRM Solution.
Buyer Beware?
Hopefully, I have been able to wet your appetite with relations to CRM integration to Financial applications. There are many solutions out there, just make sure that it is the right kind of integration. So, often the word “seamless” is well intended but because of the various variables, it may not be. What works for one company may not work for yours. At the end of the day, integration must improve efficiencies to your organization.
Most vendors provide a good solution that works…
QUICKBOOKS?