Planning for Your Salesforce to Intacct Integration – Questions for SMBs & Nonprofits

 

If you’re reading this post you are most likely already aware of the myriad benefits integration has for small to medium sized businesses and non-profits. If you are not, here’s a quick refresher: no more manual data entry, a 360 degree view of your customers/donors, real time data syncing, and little to no upkeep. In the first post of the series, we discussed the many integration solutions on the market and the challenges that each of them face with Workato coming out on top. However, choosing your integration service is just the first important decision in a series of many. Setting up your integration can be labor intensive, but the benefits once completed are vast. Here are 5 Questions you should ask yourself when connecting Intacct and Salesforce to make sure your integration is working for you and not the other way around!

1. How is your data coming into Salesforce?

Think about your process and the flow of your data from start to finish. The first question you need to ask yourself is how does your data get into your CRM? The method will help determine the way you integrate Salesforce and Intacct as well as present the opportunity to integrate other parts of your business.

Most businesses send data into Salesforce in one of the following ways:

 

– Manual Entry

–  Upload

– Web Inserts – ex. Web to Lead , third party forms tools such as FormStack, Wufoo, SurveyMonkey, or Google Forms.  Specific to non-profits and donations this might include apps such as Pure Charity, Classy, RallyBound, or others.

– Batch Entry usually with a 3rd party app like Apsona that sends your data in batches on an easier interface

 

However your data is getting into Salesforce keep in mind the old principal of “garbage in, garbage out.”  Make sure that you have checks in place to ensure that the data coming into Salesforce is quality.  If not you will only complicate things further when you push the data to Intacct.  For some organizations this may mean conducting an overhaul of your existing data before starting work on an integration.

 

Every company and non-profit has a different coding system. Often some of your donations are allocated to a specific cause and need to be coded differently than those just going in the general fund. Will you code transactions directly on the Opportunity object or will you pull coding from a related Campaign? Make sure that your Salesforce data is coded in a way that matches your accounting system.  This may be as simple as adding picklist fields with options that match your GL Accounts and other Dimensions or more complex logic driven coding.  Be sure to update the coding mechanism in CRM if you add new GL Accounts, dimensions, etc. in Intacct.

 

When integrating donations or other financial information between Salesforce and Intacct it is important to note that this can be done in two ways – rollup or detail.  A daily roll up will mean fewer records in Intacct, while a detail integration will make your bank reconciliation easier and may potentially provide for more granular reporting from within Intacct. If you do a daily roll up then Workato is instrumental in doing this for you. Should you choose to individually send transactions, Workato can do this with one less step than the daily rollup.

 

If you are tracking pledges in Salesforce, you don’t want money you haven’t been given yet to be logged in your accounting records. A quick fix for this issue is to only push the information to accounting when it is marked as ‘closed won’ in Salesforce.

A hazard of implementing a new integration is duplicates. You don’t want to duplicate your historical transactions that still exist in Salesforce into accounting. You will need a way to denote what is already in the system.  Take time to reconcile your data across systems before enabling an integration.

 

Keeping your system running smoothly while making improvements for your future workflow is important for smaller companies and nonprofits that can’t afford an operation lull. Taking these 5 questions into account will ensure a smooth integration process for your organization.