When you are a small to mid-sized business or nonprofit with a growing customer, client, or donor base the importance of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool becomes abundantly clear – how else can you keep close track of each client? However, a lot of valuable information can be aggregated through your Intacct Digital Dashboard when your customer information comes together with your financial data. KPIs are one of these imperative insights – KPIs are a set of quantifiable measures that your company or industry can use to gauge or compare performance in terms of meeting their strategic and operational goals. Are you offering the best product while still hitting a certain profit margin?
Unfortunately, generating these data insights in Intacct requires manually entering the data you’ve collected in your CRM into a statistical journal entry so that Intacct can process the information. This process takes time, costs money, and is error-prone. Using the right integration tool can automate this process and make KPIs and reports available for you at the click of a button.
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What You Need
Integrating Salesforce (or your CRM of choice) with Intacct to gather KPI’s requires a robust integration tool that allows for customization. To apply this work hack to your business, you need a powerful connector like Workato to allow your Salesforce and Intacct 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 account.
How It Works
You can explore hundreds of Workato recipes once you log into your account. For example, this recipe will automate the creation of a new statistical journal entry in Intacct by uploading a CSV from Dropbox to Intacct when there is a new/updated file in Dropbox. You can install this recipe with the click of a button and start automating your journal entries immediately.
However, though a huge step above manual data entry, this recipe still requires you to download the CSV file from Salesforce and into Dropbox. Luckily, Workato is flexible and you can customize a recipe to fit your parameters and business needs by clicking “Install” and then adding any custom items. Workato easily works with your Salesforce customizations and you can completely automate a data sync between Salesforce and Intacct with a couple more recipes that we’ll explain in our Case Study.
What It Means For Your Business
Imagine a world where you never have to log into both Intacct and Salesforce in order to manually transfer data from one source to another. That means that endless data insights are at your fingertips. If you wanted to see expenses by any custom info you track in Salesforce it could be configured in minutes – no filling out a Statistical Journal Entry in Intacct.
Workhack In Action: The Intacct Digital Dashboard for Nonprofits
Nonprofits face a huge challenge to be upfront with KPIs to donors and trustees while also keeping track of a large number of donors. This Workato workflow completely automates the creation of a statistical journal entry complete with custom fields! It is so powerful, that Intacct chose these Workato recipes as the driver between its new Intacct Digital Dashboard for Fundraising.
The Challenge
Nonprofits operate on donations and often need to cut down administrative costs as much as possible. At the same time, they need to show trustees and donors their progress by sharing KPIs and reports. Generating these reports can take hours of manual data entry and waste valuable time and money that could be going towards their cause.
The Solution
Three recipes complete the cycle for an automated work process and access to great statistics. The three recipes complete the following tasks:
- Rolling Up Active Donors in Salesforce
Once a day Workato will check Salesforce for the custom field, “Active Donor.” If the donor is marked as an “Active Donor” Workato will update that day’s Tracking Stat total (ie: for each donor indicated as active add to the total for the day’s balance) in Salesforce.
. - Writing Active Donors in Salesforce to Intacct Journal Entry Object
Once a day Workato will check the Tracking Stat total in Salesforce and it will create a new entry in Intacct Stat Daily Journal in Salesforce, noting if the number of active donors increased or decreased from the prior day.
. - Upload Statistics Journal Entry to Intacct
Finally, Workato will move this information from Salesforce to Intacct, creating a Statistical Journal Entry with details from the entries in Salesforce, noting if the transaction type is an increase or decrease transaction type.
Essentially, Recipes one and two work within Salesforce to make the data correctly formatted and up to date for Intacct. The third moves the ready data to Intacct and creates the journal entry. This loop happens every day that the recipe is active.
The Benefits
Without integration the nonprofit can access KPIs but has to create a report in Salesforce to get the data for the metric in question (ie: how many major donors), then go into Intacct and manually create a Statistical Journal Entry for that metric. With the data loop open and running, the nonprofit doesn’t have to waste time manually creating a new report for every metric they want to compare. This means your data insights are essentially limitless!
The nonprofit can now quickly and easily do Donor counts and split them by the metric of “donor” (gave anything in last 10 years), “active donor” (gave last 2 years), and “major donor” (gave > 50K last 2 years). They can take any of their financial metrics from Intacct and instantly compare them against these numbers. Trending reports, KPIs, and donor insights all with the click of a button instead of a drawn out data swapping session.
Everything Can Be Customized
This workhack can work for any business even though the metrics for your business’ KPIs are unique to your field. By correctly labeling metrics in Salesforce and plugging in those metrics to the Workato recipe, you can open the information gateway between Salesforce and Intacct. No spreadsheets, no coding, just glorious KPIs!
Not using Salesforce with Intacct?
This workhack can be applied to Infusionsoft and more. Workato has hundreds of recipes to connect the apps you use daily and automate the processes you dread. Explore Workato’s capabilities >
