Your finance department may be understated or under-recognized (hopefully not undervalued!), but their role is — without question — crucial to running a business. For your finance team to do their best work, free from errors and the burden of tedious work like manual data entry, apps can lend a giant helping hand.

Read on for ways in which apps can help keep your business’ finances in order, and for three Salesforce AppExchange apps that will help you follow through.

Connect accounting and CRM

If you are tracking your customers across sales, customer service, and marketing in your CRM, why would you keep their accounting data in a completely separate place? Connecting your financial information with the rest of a customer’s record gives both your accounting team and your sales or customer success teams a 360-degree view of the customer.   

FinancialForce Accounting application provides company-wide financial insight, helping you better service your customers and stave off potential issues arising from billing or contracts. Plus you'll be able to eliminate errors, share workflows, and turn opportunities or orders into invoices with a single click.

Move away from multiple accounting tools and databases

If you work on an accounting or finance team, having to use multiple tools to accomplish a single task is maddening. In particular, moving data from one tool to another, or comparing entries for a single customer, provides a recipe for errors. Even more, trying to bring together reporting data from several tools is nearly impossible; it can be like comparing apples to worms. While the reasons for initially using multiple tools were likely noble (legacy software housed important data, each tool did different things well), there are apps that now let you run your accounting, operations, and CRM processes in one place.

Accounting Seed is a full accrual accounting and ERP application that tracks financial data through the entire business lifecycle, whether in marketing, project implementation, product sales, back office accounting, or your own financial statements. Accounting Seed is a 100% native Salesforce app that lets you run your whole business from Salesforce.  

Automate as much as you can

The upside of automating many of your accounting tasks (such as more time to focus on larger projects, and less chance of error) is far greater than the possible downside (mainly, the fear that robots are coming to take everyone’s jobs). Automation can increase efficiency, whether tasks are large or small. Using apps that help automate recurring invoices, one-time items, or services based on transactional data, helps you save a great deal of time while eliminating mistakes that could result in delayed payments or disputes. Plus, automation also makes it easier to integrate invoices with the rest of your customer data.

One app that assists with this is Just.On, which helps create thousands of invoices automatically. The app is built natively on Salesforce, and provides what’s needed to work efficiently with subscriptions, no matter how complex the pricing models may be.