H1: Integrating Your CRM with Accounting Software

How to sync contacts, invoices and transactions to keep your finances in sync

Depending on the ERP features needed by your business, integrating your customer relationship management (CRM) system with your accounting software provides a reliable financial workflow by automating data entry across multiple systems. When these two systems talk to each other, teams get faster invoicing, cleaner bookkeeping and far fewer reconciliation headaches. This guide covers each available method of integrating accounting software with a CRM, and the actionable steps required to get from planning, mapping your field changes, testing the system, and ongoing maintenance.

Define Your Integration Objectives

First, consider what you want from the linkage. Common goals may include: automatically generating invoices from completed sales, syncing customer contact information, sending payment receipts to the accounting ledger and keeping product or service pricelists up-to-date. Planned objectives define what objects to sync (contacts, companies, invoices, payments, products) and in which direction should data flow (one-way or two way).

Audit your data before integration

Getting to a successful connection relies on clean source data. Scrutinize both systems to eliminate duplicates, reconcile inconsistent naming and harmonize fields like tax IDs, currency codes and payment terms. Develop a checklist of accounting entry fields and confirm that: they exist or can be derived in the CRM. Back up existing accounting records and CRM data before reconfiguring structure.

Choose the right integration approach

Three commonly employed approaches are direct sync through embedded connectors, middleware for mapping and transforming data (similar to those facilitated by ETL tools), or custom API integration. Assess your requirements: if you need complex field transformations or conditional flows, middleware or custom APIs may be needed. In simple cases, a connector with customizable mappings should do the trick. Think about scalability and security, as well as logging and error handling.

Data Mapping and Transformation Rules

Mapping is the soul of any crm accounting integration. Each field of the CRM and corresponding accounting fields in a matrix. Define how to transform data, such as whether to split the total of a deal into invoice line items or if it’s necessary to combine first name and last name into one customer name. Determine the action for that needs to be taken on unmatched items, whether the system should generate new accounting customers or log them for manual examination.

November 30, 2018 — Plan for unique IDs and record linking

We should use stable unique identifiers for customers and transactions, in order to prevent duplicate records and to ensure that we recap a pair of transaction. If your CRM and accounting system don’t share a primary key, decide a consistent cross-reference to store (i.e., save the accounting customer ID in a designated field in your CRM and vice versa). This simplifies tracking of records between systems and allows invoices to be updated or voided when appropriate.

Configure error handling and notification workflows

No integration runs perfectly forever. Log error; implement logging of failed sync with required fields as missing, or mismatches in validation. Create notifications that grab the finance team’s attention with context to facilitate remediation. Build retry logic where feasible for transient problems such as network timeouts.

Test in a sandbox environment

Make sure to test those integrations end−to−end on a staging environment with dummy books before touching any live ones. The usual suspects: new customer creation, invoice generation, partial payments, refunds and account updates. Ensure taxes, discounts and multi-currency values are properly transferred. Create documentation for the test cases and expected results.

Roll out incrementally

Start with non-critical data or a subset of customers. Follow up for a week or two, then broaden scope incrementally. This reduces risk and allows for refinement of mappings, rules and notifications incrementally instead of impacting all records.

Ensure tight security and access control

Think of the integration as an extension of your financial controls. Prevent excessive permissions: API keys and integration credentials should be the least possible. Encrypt data in transit and at rest where it is supported. Keep an audit log of synchronized actions for the purpose of internal controls and external auditing.

Establish reconciliation and monitoring routines

If you are using automation, routine reconciliation will help keep things accurate. Establish regular reconciliations that match accounts receivable invoices, payments and customer balances across the two systems. Publish dashboards or reports that call out discrepancies, new sync errors or unlinked records so finance and ops can act quickly.

Train teams and document workflows

Help sales, finance and operations teams understand how their day-to-day will change due to the integration. Determine the mapping rules, exception handling, and details on how to contact for support. Training decreases human mistakes that may propagate through automated flows.

Prepare for change management

Business processes evolve. Revisit integration mappings and transformation rules whenever you update pricing, tax rules, or chart of accounts. This includes versioning of integration configurations, thorough testing of changes to ensure no unintended side-effects occur.

Common pitfalls to avoid

• Skipping Data Cleanup: Dirty data can cause duplicate customers and mismatched invoices.
• If unique IDs are not used, linking records is a nightmare
• Over-automating without checks and balances: Fully automated processes can silently create incorrect accounting entries, if exception handling is not built in.
• Overlook permissions and security: Broad integration permissions also increase risk.

Final checklist before going live

• Database backups for both CRM and accounting
• Run a full round of sandbox test
• Validate mappings between database fields and transformation rules
• Implement monitoring, alerts and reconciliation report.
• Train impacted teams + documentation

Conclusion

By integrating your accounting software with other tools, you can help eliminate manual tasks and increase the accuracy of financial information, but only if the integrations are done thoughtfully. Defining goals, cleaning data, mapping fields with intention, and testing thoroughly can go a long way to set your organization up for automating invoicing, shortening collections horizon and maintaining accurate books. Follow these actionable recommendations to establish a solid, secure crm accounting integration that grows fast and maintains your finance books reliable.