FinancialForce.com takes accounting back to the future

Jeremy Roche’s new company, FinancialForce.com, is inventing the future of financial accounting by revisiting its past. Roche—formerly CEO of CODA, a leading on-premises accounting software company—is passionate about improving the accounting experience. A key challenge is streamlining disparate financial systems so it’s faster and easier to share information. With help from the Force.com platform, FinancialForce.com is bringing back the simplicity of the past while making real-time accounting a reality.
 

The cloud opportunity

FinancialForce.com traces its beginnings to when CODA first started using Salesforce CRM. The CODA development team had been following the emerging market for cloud-computing applications for some time. Although cloud computing was gaining traction, there were not yet any enterprise-level cloud accounting solutions available. The team decided to address the opportunity by integrating CODA’s accounting applications with salesforce.com. After the integration project was complete, the CODA team began thinking about the larger challenge: building its own applications in the cloud.
 

Roche saw a chance to bring the unique CODA design to a much wider audience. He explains: “Accounting in its earliest form was a book—or ledger—with double-entry bookkeeping on each side. As companies grew, and the profession matured, the ‘books’ were split up. Technology accelerated that fragmentation with different systems for accounts payable, accounts receivable, and general legers. At CODA, we had developed a unified ledger which takes accounting back to its purest form—with a single ‘book’ of data at the heart—and debits, credits, and other functionality on top. By taking that design and building the application in the cloud accounting data can be easily accessed by any department within a company, at any time.”
 

Entry into the cloud at first seemed daunting. “We knew that developing our own cloud-computing platform in-house would be a lengthy and expensive project and that it would be at least 2 years before we could start building the solution on the platform,” continues Roche. “We talked to salesforce.com and saw the Force.com platform’s strength. We eliminated that 2 years by using Force.com.”
 

Capitalizing on the cloud

Roche and his developers quickly saw the advantages of using Force.com. He says, “The benefit is that there’s so much in Force.com that we can use—multitenancy and security as well as infrastructure. We also get to leverage any new functionality salesforce.com invests in. That means we can spend more time on building accounting function and less time doing heavy lifting on infrastructure.”
 

Two standard Force.com features were particularly beneficial for the new solution: reporting and workflow. For example, developers created a set of standard reports to accompany the application in just days—efficiency that was made possible through the rich reporting capabilities of Force.com. By comparison, it can take up to 3 months just to test reporting functionality at the end of each major release of an on-premises accounting application.
 

By building a solution that is 100 percent Force.com native, the team ensured complete integration with Salesforce CRM. “If a customer is using Salesforce CRM and adds our accounting applications, he’ll automatically have access to all his existing data,” Roche explains. “The CRM and accounting exist as if they were one application. It couldn’t be easier. Clearly, companies want to turn their hard-won orders into cash as efficiently as possible. Once CRM is tightly linked to the finance system, users can analyze sales and finance trends based on reliable, meaningful numbers. That’s a powerful proposition.”
 

Tangible assets

The application debuted with sales invoicing and accounts receivable functionality, addressing a clear demand for a seamless, cloud-computing solution to manage the process of converting orders into cash. The second major release launched the general ledger and accounts payable functionality. Response was so enthusiastic that FinancialForce.com was spun off as a standalone cloud-computing company. Since its re-brand to FinancialForce.com, additional capabilities have been added, including enhanced general ledger functionality, debt management, and launchpads together with a point and click integration facility and electronic payments.
 

The team also developed a plug-in for non-accountant users of the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, which makes it easy to access financial information on an account-by-account basis. Roche explains, “When a rep looks at an account in the Sales Cloud, he might see information on leads, won business, etc. But he can also see whether that same customer is paying invoices on time. Would you want your sales guy to sell to someone who hasn’t paid you in 6 months? For the first time, reps can now see the full customer relationship.”
 

The FinancialForce.com team has also launched an integration rules builder. This innovation lets users create accounting entries from any salesforce.com object or custom Force.com-based application with just a click. “With these tools, we’re enabling true real-time accounting,” explains Roche. “At the heart of our solution is one accounting book. The data can be accessed by multiple groups, and presented in multiple ways. Cloud accounting has never been this easy.”
 

Building momentum

FinancialForce.com unveiled its new release at Dreamforce ’09 to enthusiastic response. “The momentum we built at Dreamforce was fantastic,” says Roche. “There was some terrific press. And we had a booth on the Expo floor where potential customers were literally lining up 5 deep to take a look at our new solutions.”
 

The new company’s customers range from startups with single users to enterprises with more than 70 users. Customers also span a range of industries, including media, health care, e-commerce, software, and consulting. FinancialForce.com has extended its reach via the AppExchange marketplace. According to Roche, “Our marketing is primarily in the U.S. and U.K. Salesforce.com customers in other countries are finding us on the AppExchange, however, and we’re getting quite a few leads that way. I’d estimate 20 percent of our customers have found us there.”
 

Roche expects cloud-computing financial accounting to explode in the next few years. He explains, “CRM advanced quickly in the cloud, and companies are now realizing that they’ve used salesforce.com for CRM for many years and they haven’t lost data or had issues with performance or downtime. At the same time, it’s becoming increasingly important to have accurate, up-to-date financial information. Cloud computing has matured to the level that people are examining it for accounting systems of record and seeing the benefits of true ‘real-time’ accounting.”
 

How do I get started?

The best way to get started is to sign up for the Force.com Free Edition.