When dealing with clients, it’s important to have all of the information you have gathered on them in one place along with their payment information. Manually switching between your accounting app and your CRM to get a full picture of a client whilst on the phone or mistaking paying customers with leads or can poorly reflect on your company. Even compiling this data beforehand is a huge drain of time and resources.
With this workhack, you can connect your CRM to your accounting app so that they can share data and generate meaningful reports. When Salesforce and Quickbooks can communicate, you can easily generate the correct calling list for leads vs. paying customers straight from your CRM which means your accounts receivable can view invoice status, update payment information and takes notes without ever leaving Salesforce. The full view of your data unlocks other information, such as which type of customer is the most profitable and can help you narrow your focus and meet higher revenue goals.
Get This WorkHack
What You Need
To apply this workhack to your business, you need a powerful connector like Workato to allow your Salesforce and Quickbooks accounts to send information to one another. Workato calls its integrations “recipes,” which are robust connections between your apps that don’t require coding or an IT staff. If you don’t have a Workato account you can create a free Community account.
How It Works
After you create or sign into your account, you can activate a Salesforce to Quickbooks recipe with one click. No really, it’s that easy!
I've just discovered @Workato and I'm in LOVE!! Within 20 minutes I had Quickbooks integrated with @salesforce. Can't wait to learn more!
— Jen wrote a YA book about mermaids. #amsubmitting (@JBurt823) October 21, 2015
For example, this recipe automatically adds new leads from Salesforce straight into Quickbooks, and then stores the QuickBooks invoice ID in Salesforce Next Step. This Workato recipe even checks to make sure the account doesn’t already exist before creating a new account, which means that when you update an existing Salesforce account, that information will seamlessly flow through Salesforce and Quickbooks without any fear of duplicates or bad data.
Workato is flexible, which means you can install the existing Salesforce to Quickbooks recipe described above or you can easily customize it to fit your specific parameters like the company Verified First did in the next section below. Workato easily works with your Salesforce customizations, meaning you can change the condition from “Closed Won” to something that matches your business practice. You can check for the customer in QBO, and if they are not present you can give and error and stop or create a customer on the fly. You can also automate emails to yourself at different points in the flow.
What It Means For Your Business
Closing the loop between your CRM and your accounting is a huge insights upgrade! By automating your client information workflow you save time and money — no more logging into two applications to manually pull spreadsheets and compile them or waiting for the long process of double data entry. Having real time information on your clients and their accounting status flow through all departments is a game changer not only for customer service, but also for growing your business. Now you can find out what type of customer is the most profitable with the click of a button, something that the company Verified First does with Workato.
Workhack In Action: The Verified First Case study
To demonstrate the full power of connecting your CRM and accounting apps, we’ll explore how and why Verified First, the United States’ premiere background screening company, uses this workhack.
The Challenge
Verified First needed to be able to quickly build calling lists that contained the client information from Salesforce with the payment information in Quickbooks in order to contact specific clients based on payment status, or other factors. They were wasting time logging into both Quickbooks as Salesforce to see customers of a certain payment status which in turn made hand dialing the only method of contact. They were also having trouble finding an integration solution that was affordable but powerful enough to handle their vast amount of historical data that needed to be synced.
The Solution
The company deployed three Workato recipes that create a completely seamless communication channel between their Salesforce and Quickbooks accounts. The three recipes complete the following tasks:
- When a new client signs up, Workato automatically creates an account in both Salesforce and Quickbooks.
- When client information is updated in one app, that information automatically mirrors it in the other app.
- Finally, when Verified First creates an invoice in Quickbooks, it automatically updates in Salesforce with the invoice number.
“We couldn’t manually add 1000 clients to Salesforce a month – it would have taken us 1000 hours,” explained Verified First’s Director of Marketing, Ryan Hart. “Workato is streamlining the process for our accounts receivable and giving me better insights. Within the first week, I could see this was going to be a success.”
The Benefits
With these three recipes, Verified First can see when a client pays or partially pays in Quickbook without leaving Salesforce and without having to enter the information separately into both apps, which often leads to data errors. Because the information is real time, it saves them manpower and increases productivity through more thorough and compelling data insights.
“Previously, we worked with another company, but their systems just couldn’t do it. We were handling over 20,000 invoices and needed to sync up thousands of clients in the beginning as part of the integration. It was imperative that our integration tool could handle that volume. Workato was my last hope.”
– Ryan Hart, Director of Marketing at Verified First
Verified First now has complete flexibility over their client data, whether it is from Salesforce or Quickbooks, giving them the ability to instantly identify the most profitable type of client and ridding them of manual hand dialing. Verified First reports that this workhack saves them 10 hours of data entry a month!
The Value Is Endless
Connecting your CRM with your accounting app is an incredibly important integration that shouldn’t be overlooked by any type of business. Letting these two key entities freely share information means no more manual data entry, reduces errors, and unlocks valuable business insights. Every level of your business, from your accounts receivable to business development, will benefit from the eradication of tedious work and the free time they have to focus on higher level goals. Knowing which type of customer is the most profitable based on cold hard data could lead your sales and marketing team in a completely new direction and substantially grow your business.
Not using Salesforce or Quickbooks?
This workhack can be applied to Infusionsoft, Xero, and more. Workato has hundreds of recipes to connect the apps you use daily and automate the processes you dread. Explore Workato’s capabilities >
