Accounting in Salesforce: Automating Your Key Processes

Drive greater efficiency on the Salesforce platform with a comprehensive and Salesforce-native accounting solution designed to streamline and enhance your accounting processes.

Highlights

• Fully Salesforce-native accounting solution: Being natively built on Salesforce ensures that accounting is embedded in the CRM – enhancing data consistency, streamlining processes, and giving a unified view of business operations.
• Comprehensive Accounting Technology Suite: The complete accounting suite covers every aspect of accounting, allowing businesses to manage their finances effectively and accurately.
• Automated Accounting Processes and Payments: Automate key accounting tasks (such as accounts receivable, accounts payable, and bank reconciliation) with pre-built workflows, reducing manual errors, and improving overall efficiency in accounting operations.
• Multi-Dimensional Financial Analysis: In-depth, multi-dimensional financial analysis, enables businesses to dissect their accounting data across various dimensions, which is essential for businesses seeking insights and trends through advanced dashboards.

As an all-encompassing accounting solution within the Salesforce ecosystem, Accounting Seed offers a comprehensive perspective on an organization’s accounting operations. Built natively on Salesforce, it presents a real-time, holistic view of various financial aspects, aligning well with a range of business processes.

The platform’s extensive suite, encompassing everything from general ledger management to cash flow tracking, is designed to streamline complex accounting tasks. This not only simplifies day-to-day accounting operations but also equips businesses with the tools for strategic financial analysis and decision-making.

Accounting Seed is a robust solution for companies seeking to run their business on Salesforce and achieve a true 360-degree view of their business performance.

Features

Full Accounting Package

Accounting Seed covers all essential aspects of accounting, including General Ledger, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Financial Reporting, and more – offering a comprehensive solution for businesses of all sizes looking to bring their data into the Salesforce platform.

General Ledger (GL) Management

At the heart of Accounting Seed’s Full Accounting Package is a robust General Ledger system. It serves as the foundation for all accounting data, ensuring accurate tracking and reporting of transactions. The GL is designed for flexibility, allowing customization to meet specific accounting requirements. This includes support for multiple ledgers, complex charts of accounts structures, and detailed tracking of financial transactions across different business units or projects.

Accounts Receivable and Payable

The package includes comprehensive tools for managing and automating both Accounts Receivable (AR) and Accounts Payable (AP).

For AR, it automates the invoicing process and tracks customer payments, improving cash flow management. In AP, it streamlines vendor payments and tracks expenses, ensuring timely payments and efficient management of company expenditures. Both AR and AP are seamlessly integrated with the GL, ensuring real-time updates of accounting data.

Cash Management and Bank Reconciliation

Accounting Seed facilitates efficient cash management by offering tools for tracking cash inflows and outflows. The bank reconciliation features are particularly noteworthy, simplifying the reconciliation process by automatically matching bank transactions with accounting records. This not only saves time but also enhances the accuracy of financial statements.

Advanced Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable Automation

Automate the entire AR and AP process, from customer payments to reconciliation, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.

Automated Accounts Receivable Management

Accounting Seed’s AR Automation feature automates the entire process from billing creation to payment collection, significantly reducing the manual workload.

It supports the generation of customer invoices directly from the sales Opportunity, ensuring accuracy and improving cash flow management. This feature is particularly beneficial for businesses with a high volume of invoices, as it helps to reduce errors and streamline the collection process.

Efficient Payment Processing and Reconciliation

The platform simplifies payment processing by allowing customers to pay their invoices online, directly through secure payment gateways. Once payments are made, the software automatically updates the AR records and reconciles payments, reducing the need for manual entry and ensuring real-time accuracy in accounting reporting. This seamless process not only saves time but also enhances the customer payment experience.

Comprehensive Accounts Payable Automation

On the AP side, Accounting Seed automates the entire vendor payment process. This includes automatic generation of payment records, vendor invoice creation and processing, and payment scheduling. The system’s ability to handle bulk payment processing makes it easier to manage large volumes of payables, ensuring timely payments and maintaining good vendor relationships.

Custom Reporting and Analytics

With the reporting tools included in Accounting Seed alongside Salesforce’s reporting capabilities, businesses can generate traditional financial statements and custom reports, providing deep insights into financial performance.

Extensive Standard Reporting Capabilities

Accounting Seed provides a comprehensive set of standard reports, designed to cover the common accounting reporting needs of most businesses. These reports include detailed views of general ledger activities, profit and loss statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and trial balances.

These out-of-the-box reports ensure businesses can immediately start analyzing their accounting data without the need for extensive customization.

Custom Report Generation for Tailored Insights

By understanding each business has unique reporting needs, Accounting Seed allows users to create custom reports. This functionality enables businesses to tailor their accounting reporting to specific requirements, such as departmental budgets, project-specific financials, or key business metrics.

The custom report builder is user-friendly, allowing non-technical users to design and generate reports that align with their specific business processes and objectives.

Project Accounting

If you need to track project expenses, manage billing, and report on project performance within the Salesforce platform, Accounting Seed’s Project Accounting functionality is an ideal solution for service-based businesses.

Detailed Project Financial Tracking

Accounting Seed enables detailed tracking of all financial aspects of a project, including revenues, expenses, and budget allocations.

This feature is crucial for maintaining a clear view of a project’s financial health and profitability. It allows businesses to monitor actual spending against the given budget, ensuring projects stay on track financially and identifying areas where efficiencies can be gained.

Integration with Core Accounting Functions

The Project Accounting features are fully integrated with Accounting Seed’s core accounting functions. This means that data from project-related activities, such as billing and expenses, flow seamlessly into the general ledger, as well as accounts payable and receivable.

This holistic approach ensures consistency in accounting data across the organization and eliminates the need for duplicate data entry.

Time and Expense Management

With functionalities for managing time and expenses, Accounting Seed caters to businesses that bill by time or need to allocate employee time to specific projects. This feature includes the ability to track time spent on project tasks and directly links these hours to billing.

Expense management capabilities ensure that all costs associated with a project are captured and associated correctly, providing a complete picture of project costs.

Seamless Bank Integration

The Bank Direct Connect (BDC) tool by Accounting Seed offers seamless integration with thousands of financial institutions across the globe, allowing for the direct import of transaction history from these bank and credit card accounts into your Salesforce environment.

Related tools such as Bank Settings, Transactions and Rules, as well as Financial File Import (for banks not supported), are centralized in one location for ease of access. Transactions downloaded through BDC are automatically created within Salesforce, eliminating the need for repeated bank reconnections.

The Bank Rules feature enables user-defined rules to auto-populate fields on source records, enhancing automation and accuracy. Additionally, BDC facilitates the automatic addition or matching of bank transactions to source records.

Its Financial File import wizard supports importing bank transactions, and when those transactions are foreign, ensures that source records match the transaction’s currency while converting General Ledger transactions into the ledger’s currency. BDC also streamlines data entry by allowing the creation of various financial records linked to customers, vendors, accounts, and projects directly from electronic transactions.

Financial Analytics App (With CRM Analytics)

Financial Analytics is a set of pre-built dashboards and components built on top of CRM Analytics. It is geared to providing contextual insights into a company’s business health to help them visually understand, not only what happened for a particular period, but also why for better decision-making.

1. Comprehensive Financial Reporting and Dashboards

Accounting Seed’s Financial Analytics app offers a comprehensive suite of financial dashboards, including specialized views for P&L, Revenue, Expenses, Balance Sheet, and Ledger Inquiry.

These dashboards provide a visual snapshot of a company’s financial health, enabling users to quickly grasp key financial metrics. The dashboards are interactive, allowing for detailed examination of accounting data and trends – a pivotal feature for businesses needing a clear, concise display of their financial standing.

2. Customization and Interactive Data Exploration

A standout feature of the app is the high degree of customization. Users can tailor existing data sets to their specific business requirements or create entirely new ones. This flexibility ensures that the analytics are perfectly aligned with the unique aspects of their operations.

Additionally, the app supports interactive data exploration. Users can delve into their financial data by applying filters, sorting, and drilling down into specific areas for a deeper understanding. This interactive approach empowers users to uncover trends and patterns essential for strategic planning and analysis.

3. Advanced Analytical Capabilities

The Financial Analytics app enables multi-dimensional analysis, allowing users to dissect financial data across various business dimensions such as product lines, regions, or departments. This feature is essential for businesses operating on multiple fronts or those requiring detailed segment-wise financial analysis.

Because the Financial Analytics app is built on Salesforce’s CRM Analytics, it means that financial data is not isolated but is part of a broader business context, offering a holistic view of the company’s operations and performance. User’s can take instant action from the point of insight – for example collaborating in Chatter, updating records, or sharing dashboards.

Use Cases

Streamlining Financial Processes Across Diverse Business Models

Accounting Seed showcases its versatility across various business models, effectively catering to the unique accounting needs of each. For growing businesses, especially in the small to mid-market segment, the software excels in handling complex accounting workflows that evolve with the business. Its ability to automate accounts receivable and payable processes, from billing or payable to reconciliation, significantly reduces manual effort and potential errors. This automation is particularly beneficial for businesses dealing with a high volume of transactions.

Furthermore, companies transitioning from spreadsheets or legacy systems, will find Accounting Seed to be a transformative solution that connects their accounting operations seamlessly within the Salesforce platform.

Enhancing Project Accounting and Management

Service-based businesses, including consulting firms and agencies, benefit greatly from Accounting Seed’s project accounting capabilities. The software enables precise tracking of project expenses and revenues, offering clear insights into each project’s financial health. Users can easily manage project-related billing, monitor budgeted versus actual expenses, and report on project performance.

This functionality is crucial for businesses where project profitability and timely billing are key to success. The core function of having been built natively on Salesforce ensures that project data is not siloed, and instead is interconnected with other business processes, providing a 360-degree view of client engagements and financial outcomes.

Detailed examples can be found in Accounting Seed’s success stories.

Impact

By providing a comprehensive, integrated accounting solution natively within the Salesforce platform, Accounting Seed empowers organizations with enhanced accounting insight and efficiency. Users report significant time savings due to the automation of repetitive tasks like billing, payments, and bank reconciliation, allowing them to focus more on strategic financial planning and less on administrative work.

The software’s robust analytics and reporting tools enable businesses to gain a deeper understanding of their financial health, facilitating data-driven decision-making. Companies using Accounting Seed have observed improved accuracy in accounting data, streamlined operations, and a better alignment of their accounting practices with overall business goals.

This holistic improvement in financial operations has a ripple effect across the organization, leading to increased productivity, better resource allocation, and ultimately, a stronger bottom line.

Setup

Getting started with Accounting Seed involves a few straightforward steps to ensure that your team is ready to maximize its comprehensive accounting capabilities. The first step is completing the installation of the Accounting Seed managed package.

Licensing

Once the app has been installed, you will need to enable users in your Salesforce environment to access Accounting Seed by assigning Accounting Seed licenses. Navigate to Setup → Apps → Packaging → Installed Packages in Salesforce. Here, under Package Name, locate Accounting Seed Financial Suite and click on Manage Licenses to assign or remove licenses as needed.

Permission Assignment

Users also require an Accounting Seed permission set to access the application. There are a number of permission sets based on each user’s job function.

Once the licenses have been assigned to users, Navigate to Setup → Users > Choose Specific User → Permission Set Assignments. Here, click Edit Assignments, allocate the appropriate Accounting Seed permissions sets, and click on Save.

Edit Page Layouts via User Profiles

Once the licenses and permission sets have been assigned to users, you will also need to either edit existing page layouts or assign the Accounting Seed page layouts to user profiles.

You can do this by Navigating to Setup → Object Manager → Choose Specific Object → Page Layouts → Page Layout Assignment → Edit Assignment, then assign the appropriate layouts to the profiles and click on Save.

These initial setup steps lay the groundwork for Accounting Seed to become an integral part of your business operations strategy. After it has been installed, you can also check the Knowledge Base for more details on how to configure and use Accounting Seed.

Implementation

It is important to understand that, generally speaking, customer self-implementation is not recommended because there are a number of different ways in which Accounting Seed can be configured. The ideal setup would include a full review of business requirements to ensure you are making full use of all the capabilities an accounting solution like Accounting Seed provides.

Accounting Seed has advised that, on average, implementation takes 6-12 weeks depending on customizations, data clean-up, and migration requirements. In some cases, when migrating over from Quickbooks, a super simple set up can take approximately 10 hours with Accounting Seed Product Consultants (for customers that have an internal or contracted Salesforce team already) using the Simplified Start service. In addition, either the customer or Accounting Seed may also bring in a consulting partner who is certified in Salesforce and Accounting Seed.

Support

Accounting Seed offers the Accounting Seed Customer Support portal for immediate support and expert assistance. This is a one-stop resource for users, providing easy access to essential information, written documentation and user guides, the latest software updates, and direct expert communication with the Accounting Seed Community.

New Accounting Seed Community customers receive an activation link via email, providing individual login credentials for secure, collaborative access.

The portal is user-friendly, with options like My Cases, My Organization, My Contacts, Knowledge Base, Accounting Seed Copilot, and Release Info. Raising a case is straightforward: simply log in, click My Cases, followed by New. Then simply provide your issue details and click Save.

Pricing

Accounting Seed offers different pricing structures based on your requirements and which add-ons/extensions you include in your package. There are also different license types depending on your users’ access needs, such as a Full License, View Only License, Limited License, and Community License.

All products include access to the Accounting Seed Customer Support portal, Accounting Seed Copilot, the knowledge base, FAQs, Accounting Seed Blueprints, and many more features.

Further details can be found on the Accounting Seed website.

Summary

In summary, Accounting Seed emerges as a powerful tool for businesses seeking to master their accounting processes within the Salesforce ecosystem. Its comprehensive suite of features – from seamless accounting capabilities and pre-built customizable workflows to advanced reporting and analytics – addresses the diverse needs of various business models.

The software’s ability to automate key accounting tasks, coupled with its robust project accounting and global accounting capabilities, makes it an invaluable asset for businesses aiming to enhance efficiency and make informed decisions. As a result, Accounting Seed not only simplifies accounting but also serves as a strategic tool for business growth and accounting success.

To fully appreciate its capabilities, consider a demo to see how the intelligent features in Accounting Seed can simplify and enhance your own Salesforce-native business operation.