Supernova Award Category

The Problem

Venture Technologies was experiencing integration problems between its Salesforce CRM system and its aging legacy accounting solution. The company had originally deployed Salesforce CRM ten years ago, making it one of the earliest adopters of cloud-based CRM. However, there was a disconnect between its SaaS CRM system and its outdated finance system. The lack of integration between the two systems required employees to manually re-key vital financial and supply chain information, a costly, error-prone process. Furthermore, Venture Technologies’ archaic finance system led to a serious lack of financial data visibility. This was especially problematic for customer-facing roles as it created the risk of suboptimal account management. These problems were further compounded by Venture Technologies’ rapid expansion over the past few years. Recognizing that its finance system could not keep pace with its growth initiatives, Venture Technologies decided to find a modern cloud-based solution that could complement its Salesforce CRM system and eliminate its outdated human-powered finance system.

The Solution

After identifying the need for an updated, cloud-based finance system, Venture Technologies began looking for vendors that provided software on the same platform as Salesforce. Venture Technologies’ reliance on Salesforce CRM narrowed the search for a finance system by precluding solutions that weren’t built natively on the Salesforce platform. This eventually led the company’s IT team to select FinancialForce Accounting. Over the course of a few months, Venture Technologies implemented FinancialForce Accounting as well as FinancialForce SCM. After transferring its accounts to FinancialForce Accounting, Venture Technologies put its employees through a lightweight training process that ensured a smooth transition. Overall, the implementation was a fast, painless process that left Venture Technologies with a modern finance system that operated seamlessly on the same platform as their CRM.

The results

Thanks to FinancialForce.com, Venture Technologies was able to do away with its outdated legacy system and elevate its’ financial management into the cloud. The implementation of FinancialForce.com’s accounting and SCM applications also proved to be the perfect complement to Venture Technologies’ Salesforce CRM and unified the company’s operations onto a single cloud platform. After adopting FinancialForce.com, Venture Technologies’ finance department was able to instantly convert sales orders into purchase orders, saving valuable time and eliminating the risk of human error. The implementation also armed Venture Technologies’ sales team with access to live financial data within their CRM system. This allows the company’s sales teams to develop a complete view of their customers and respond to customer requests in a fast, accurate manner. Additionally, the connected CRM and finance systems equipped Venture Technologies’ management team with better visibility into sales and finance data, which dramatically improved their ability to make business decisions and forecasts. Overall, FinancialForce.com’s solution has streamlined Venture Technologies’ business functions and allowed the company to keep pace, even in the midst of the tremendous business growth.

Metrics

FinancialForce.com’s cloud-based finance software has enabled Venture Technologies to elevate its finance system onto the same cloud platform that hosts the company’s CRM. Integrating FinancialForce.com’s solutions with CRM from Salesforce has streamlined Venture Technologies’ business and resulted in:

 A Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) reduction by 10 days; from 45 to 35.

 A reduction in finance department headcount by 40 percent during a period when Venture Technologies doubled its revenue and experienced unprecedented growth.

 An increase in quality of reporting, which subsequently cut down the period when Venture Technologies doubled its revenue and amount of time that Venture Technologies’ management spends on month end reporting by 25 percent.

The Technology

FinancialForce.com develops business apps on the Salesforce1 Platform, including financial management, PSA, SCM and HCM. FinancialForce Accounting equips customer-centric businesses with a powerful cloud accounting application that can accommodate any enterprise requirement. This accounting solution works seamlessly with FinancialForce.com’s other solutions and Salesforce CRM, thus elevating entire companies onto one cloud platform.

Disruptive Factor

The biggest hurdle that Venture Technologies had to overcome was that its finance department needed to upgrade their skills in order to capitalize on the benefits of the company’s new, modern finance system. In order to get its employees up to speed, Venture Technologies put its finance department through a two week training program which was not strenuous but provided the trainees with hands on experience that maximized the impact of the FinancialForce.com implementation.

The game changing aspect of Venture Technologies’ adoption of FinancialForce.com was that by replacing the company’s outdated accounting and finance system, Venture Technologies was able to deploy a solution that could support its expansion goals and make moves to dramatically grow its business footprint. As mentioned above, Venture Technologies’ merger with ISC and acquisition of SAT allowed the IT solution provider to greatly expand its territory and turned it into a $150 million a year company with over 200 employees. The problems associated with the company’s outdated finance system would have been seriously compounded had the company undergone this transformative period without FinancialForce.com’s solutions. Overall, Venture Technologies’ growth has been fully supported by the company’s new, cloud-based finance system.

Shining Moment

What stands out the most about Venture Technologies’ adoption of FinancialForce.com was the overall simplicity of the operation. Venture Technologies has a very small IT team so the ease of implementation was vital. Furthermore, the seamless and simple integration convinced Venture Technologies to also take advantage of FinancialForce.com’s SCM application and, more recently, to implement FinancialForce PSA.