Welcome to Accounting Subledger: From CRM to Finance

Financial Insights Are More Important Than Ever Before

When you capture financial information within Salesforce, you want to be able to share it with accountants, leadership teams, and others who can act on accurate, up-to-date information that complies with financial reporting standards. You want a complete view of your company or institution's financial situation, so you know where it stands and make informed decisions.

This task is already a tall order when you have only a few sources of revenue and expense. It becomes exponentially harder when you have to monitor many incoming and outgoing streams. Various departments typically have their own processes and timelines for entering and tracking funds. Allocations to different fund accounts in the back office can be a mystery to a Salesforce admin who's far removed from finance management. And accounting teams often have to reconcile the differences whenever they receive disparate or incomplete data, making it harder to close the books each month. In short, your finance and accounting teams must efficiently forecast and project revenue, but limited business visibility and siloed processes make it difficult.

Accounting Subledger bridges this ever-growing gap between accounting and other departments, with features that enable your teams to:

• Improve communication and partnership with finance and accounting.
• Access and act on insights from your financial data.
• Hone strategy to maximize resources and drive financial impact while maintaining compliance.
• Discover and address financial challenges with accurate, up-to-date financial projections.
• Generate debits and credits from Salesforce records—automatically formatted for export to your accounting systems.

Accounting Subledger supports cash and accrual accounting. Cash accounting tracks funds only when they’re received or disbursed. Accrual accounting tracks funds after they’re committed, meaning there's a binding legal promise that the funds will be paid or disbursed. In both cases, we track the initial information for accounting and make adjustments whenever changes occur.

Set fund account allocations as granularly as you need them—even down to the payment. No need to create separate records for one payment with a different allocation split! And track expense data as well.

Let's peek into a couple of institutions to see Accounting Subledger in action.

A Higher Ed Perspective

Use Accounting Subledger to scale your university's accounting processes.

As the Salesforce admin for Astro University, Maria works with many different teams across campus who track incoming revenue and outgoing expense transactions in Salesforce such as for:

• Application fees
• Advancement efforts
• Licensing revenue
• Scholarship funds
• Student services

These teams generate data in Salesforce and then manually export it to third-party systems that collect, organize, and format the information. The export is done via dozens of spreadsheets and requires multiple steps and rework to get accurate data before it’s ready to be shared with accounting.

Maria knows that the accounting department relies on all of this information to recognize and allocate funds appropriately. But as her institution’s use of Salesforce grows, this manual process has become disjointed and frustrating. Teams spend a long time perfecting how financial data is entered into various systems.

Maria knows that her colleagues already have a lot on their plate and wants to do all that she can to help. Over spring break, she happens to tune into Trailhead Live. The webinar is all about Accounting Subledger and highlights solutions for how the university can scale its accounting processes. At the webinar, Maria learned that:

• Teams can generate debits and credits within Salesforce! No more manual export and data reconciliation in separate spreadsheets before forwarding the data to accounting.
• Accounting sets map CRM financial information, stored in any standard or custom object, to an accounting-friendly format.
• Accounting field mappings help admins format data one time and then map it to as many accounting systems as needed.

Maria can't wait to use her Salesforce smarts to bring Accounting Subledger to campus and help so many of the university's functions collaborate better.

A Fundraising Perspective

Use Accounting Subledger to manage the fundraising tasks for your nonprofit organization.

As the Senior Accountant for Learning Empowerment, an educational support nonprofit, Sam is the resident authority on all things finance. On a typical day, she answers accounting-related questions, gathers necessary documents for payments and invoices, and most of all, manages the institution's ledgers.

As Learning Empowerment grows, those tasks have gotten bigger and more complicated. The institution now provides support services for individuals with disabilities at 20 locations across three states. Practically overnight, Sam's world has gone from a reasonably manageable workload of manual accounting to an overwhelming avalanche of work that she can barely handle.

She's now juggling the requirements and regulations of three different states, as well as a vastly larger donation amounts and funds. She also spends a much longer time asking questions to the fundraising team, especially during each month's reconciliation. Knowing how busy they are, she wishes that she could be more autonomous but there's no other way for her to get around it.

But then Learning Empowerment's Salesforce admin enables Accounting Subledger, and things begin to brighten. The fundraising team continues to enter gifts without any disruption, and Salesforce automatically generates accounting records overnight. And even better, those records are in the format of standard journal entries, with support for double entry journals! Sam no longer needs to manually reenter gifts in a separate accounting system. Accounting records are designed to be sent to third-party accounting software with minimal data manipulation.

Previously, Sam spent over a third of her time reconciling the books monthly, and that was on the slow months. Now, two months later, Sam focuses on helping co-workers and volunteers instead. She regularly exports accounting records from Salesforce and imports them to her accounting software. But she's also working with the IT department to set up an automatic integration that would free her up even more. Learning Empowerment just announced plans to expand to more locations in another state, but this time, not only is Sam ready; she's excited to take it on!