Customer Accounts

Introduction

Customer account management is a key component of any Finance and CRM system, yet is often overlooked with outdated, non-connected systems that lead to account duplication, misalignment, and conflicting data views across internal teams and departments.

However, cloud-based solutions can seamlessly integrate separate finance and sales systems, reducing risk and errors, whilst giving multiple teams across the business, and the end customer, real-time information, and an accurate single view of customer account data.

Typical problems

Customer account management can be incredibly challenging with disparate finance and sales systems, often administered by different teams, this can result in account duplication, and inaccurate and outdated account information stored across multiple systems, causing conflict and confusion when dealing with end customers.

Maintaining separate systems to ensure alignment requires complex workarounds, technical support, and manual checking throughout the process, all taking up valuable time with no guarantee of the accuracy of the final data.

End customers do not have visibility of their account status and must resort to time-consuming calls and emails with sales and finance teams to update their basic information.

Solutions

A true cloud-based solution will result in seamless integration between Finance and Sales systems across multiple entities and departments, ensuring both Finance and Sales teams are always viewing the same data, reducing duplication, errors, and outdated information.

With cloud accounting solutions, quality gate controls, workflows, and limit approvals can be easily set up to ensure accuracy and internal process adherence before the invoice lands in the customer’s inbox.

Cloud-based solutions can offer online self-serve portals to allow end customers to access, restricted views, of their accounts; view outstanding invoices, submit payments, and update key information; reducing administration time and potential errors.

Benefits/ROI

A fully integrated cloud-based Finance and Sales system can provide 360 visibility of the customer lifecycle across all areas of the business. The whole organisation can be connected and communicate via one platform which provides a real-time view and singular source of the truth for all teams, also allowing end customer self-service, creating greater efficiencies, and decreasing duplication of efforts.

Additional platform components can be securely integrated with most cloud solutions, allowing for additional value-added functionality, without the technical headaches, including identity verification and credit checking ahead of any sales activity.

References

Example integrations could be

• Sage Intacct <> Salesforce CRM
• FinancialForce <> Salesforce CRM
• Chargebee <> Sage Intacct
• Salesforce / FinancialForce 360 view - - infographic