Connecting your front office and back office data is vital for businesses of all sizes, as this single integration can have a huge impact on the efficiency and accuracy of business operations. For Simpler Media Group, Inc. (SMG), integrating CRM and accounting applications became a priority when Brice Dunwoodie, SMG’s founder and CEO, realized the company had an important reporting gap from the lack of two-way communication between Salesforce and QuickBooks. SMG hired a consultant to help close the loop between the systems.
SMG is San Francisco-based B2B media and events company, and the force behind the CMSWire.com publication and the DX Summit and Digital Workplace Experience conferences. The company employs a powerful stack of apps to help it execute its digital media products and conference operations using Salesforce as its CRM, QuickBooks for accounting, Marketo for marketing automation and email marketing, Cvent for event management, and Sitecore with Coveo as the digital customer experience front-end.
SMG’s business operations consultant recommended Workato as a robust middleware channel to connect Salesforce and Quickbooks. And as SMG grew familiar with Workato’s capabilities, they also began to use Workato to marshal information from Marketo to Google Sheets for reporting and data quality operations. These integrations gave SMG better sales intelligence, improved cash flow management and, in general, helped the company streamline a number of common operations.
“The Workato integration between Salesforce and QuickBooks is critical for the sales intelligence and helpful for cash flow management as well. Before we had this automation, we had to perform regular, manual audits of the two systems. This was time consuming, error prone and it was only happening on a monthly or quarterly basis. Thanks to the automated integration we put in place, we can now run auditing reports at any time and in a matter of seconds,” said Brice.
Connecting Salesforce and QuickBooks for Automatic Invoicing and Better Reporting
SMG’s Workato recipes connecting Salesforce and QuickBooks not only provide faster, more accurate reporting for the company, but have also enabled one-click invoicing of clients from Salesforce, eliminating under-billing, which was was impacting approximately 5 percent of the company’s booked revenue. “We’re using Workato as a bridge between Salesforce and QuickBooks. It’s allowing us to create QuickBooks invoices directly from closed opportunities in Salesforce. The integration further allows us to report revenue recognized by opportunity, which has significantly tightened up our sales compensation practices and associated cash flows,” said Brice.
*Note: These are sample recipes not customized for Simpler Media Group 
Connecting Salesforce and QuickBooks also leads to better sales insights and allows Brice to compensate sales representatives based on actual revenue received instead of projected revenue. “The integration provides insight and management of cash flow. Because we can compensate sales reps on actual revenue received instead of projected, our sales reps are more motivated to help with project execution, timely payments and potentially collections,” said Brice. “We can work off of actuals and we can easily spot errors, where we might have previously missed an invoice. Implementing the Workato integration has been high ROI for us and it really cut back on the amount of labor involved in reconciliations.”
A Granular Control of Marketo Data
After SMG began using Workato to connect Salesforce and QuickBooks, they started exploring other ways to leverage Workato integration and automation. SMG also has an office in the Philippines and needed to share sensitive information from Marketo while maintaining strict access controls. The company turned to Workato to address this challenge. Workato is used to export the specific data sets from Marketo and transfer them into a secured Google Sheet for processing.
“We built a Marketo to Google Sheets integration for reporting and data management for our offshore marketing operations team. Workato is in charge of shipping specific batches of work out to our Philippines office, then returning the data once that workflow is complete,” explained Brice. “By having Workato take specific items in and out of our systems in an automated, controlled manner, we are able restrict access to sensitive data and powerful systems, while still enabling key workflows to interact with the data and systems.”
*Note: This is a sample recipe, not customized for Simpler Media Group
Seamless Cash Flow Management
Brice and his team at SMG now have faster and more accurate reporting, can motivate sales reps based on their actual revenue received, automatically invoice clients and have granular control of data.
“We saw results very quickly and we’ve gained broader visibility into cash flow management and connected business operations,” said Brice. “Additionally, my team really appreciates the real time email alerts from Workato that notify them of a problem, the ease of use of the platform, and the ability to test and audit our integrations.”
“When your systems aren’t connected, the biggest challenge is being able to quickly get a full picture of your business operations,” said Brice. “Workato’s integrations saves us around eight hours a month. They have also helped us enable our remote team and improve our cash flow operations significantly.”
Want to put these same processes in place at your company or non-profit? Here are recipes that are similar to Simpler Media Group’s:
