A controller’s primary tool is an ERP system since all of the financial information is stored there, but that does not mean that they are not invested or interested in the details from other departments across the organization.
The finance department is typically solicited to pull financial data because other groups may not have access to this information and they require these details to analyze their operations or client activities. By integrating your Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP systems, other key members within the organization can pull their own reports to analyze their data in real time whenever they need it and without relying on the finance team to create these reports for them. Reports that are typically requested by other departments to the finance group are the following:
- Sales & Marketing: Customer sales and margins
- Sales & Marketing: History on customer payment patterns and current outstanding balances
- Operations: Key performance metrics regarding products and backlogs
- Human Resources: Employee salary details and other benefits
By integrating your financial system to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, it makes it easier to share this information with other departments so that everyone is reviewing and analyzing the same data.
There is also information that is generated within the organization’s customer relationship management (CRM) tool that may be important for the finance team to be aware of. This information can include:
- Sales pipeline: Having access to this information at all times can help the finance department build budgets and forecasts for the upcoming periods more efficiently.
- Support plans and calls: If there are any issues that arise at the time of billing or collections, the finance team can start by reviewing the customer’s history so that they will know who to address internally as well at the customer site.
- Order entries: Even if this information can be found within the ERP system, integrating the order entries from the CRM application can help decrease the amount of work required by the order-entry team and reduce the number of potential errors when re-entering data.
What is important to remember is that you don’t have to limit yourself to only storing customer information within a CRM. By integrating your CRM to your financial system, this opens the door to use this application as a platform to gather all of your various peripheral custom applications and databases into one environment. This creates a single portal for your users to access information, which allows you to reduce the number of potential integrations and potential errors.
An example where your finance team can more easily share information with another department is with the human resources group. This information affects your finance team in regards to payroll and other benefits, but there is a lot of additional information that is required by the HR department that can be centralized within a CRM application. This will make it easier to maintain and alleviate the requirement to purchase ERP licenses for the entire HR team and will also allow them to have a greater flexibility for storing pertinent data in regards to all employees.
By having an integration between your financial system and your CRM, even members of your organization who may not be customer-facing can benefit from such a tool since information can more easily flow between your different departments allowing, for a greater visibility and understanding of key operations across your entire organization.
Read our other blogs in this series to learn more about why your organization should integrate their financial system to Dynamics CRM, and have a look at our infographic on “Why Companies Should Take Advantage of an Integration Between Their ERP and CRM Systems”.
By JOVACO Solutions, a specialist in Microsoft Dynamics CRM integrations in Quebec
The post Why You Should Integrate Your Financial System to Microsoft Dynamics CRM: From a Controller’s Perspective appeared first on CRM Software Blog.