What apps does the top accounting platform for Salesforce use?

Kevin Roberts was one of the first team members inside FinancialForce and has seen first hand the impressive growth of the company. Listen to him explain what FinancialForce is all about and the apps they use to keep things running smooth.

Visit our guest at…

• FinancialForce.com
• Follow Kevin Roberts on Twitter

In this show you’ll learn why FinancialForce uses…

• Salesforce as their crm tool.
• Google apps for productivity.
• Marketo to do landing pages.

Kevin also recommends…

• Samsung Gear Live smart watch.
• Tile for keeping track of things.

*this is a machine generated transcription please excuse any typos*

Jimmy: Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of How Apps Help Me Grow My Business. This is the GetApp podcast and before we get started, like always, I have a little bit of mentioning of GetApp to get out of the way here.

For anybody who doesn’t know what GetApp is, let me introduce you to it. Basically, what GetApp is, is a very large directory marketplace of business applications. What does this mean in even simpler terms? Well, let’s say you have a small business or large business or enterprise and your team is growing. All of sudden you have some communication issues because some people are in one side of the planet, other people are on the other side of the planet and everybody is kind of all over the place. So you need some collaboration software.

You have the option of going over to Google and typing in what you think is the tool that you need and going around in circles until you finally, maybe a couple of hours later, find a tool that you think fits your need. You don’t have to do that anymore.

You get to GetApp and when you come to GetApp, you’ll find a category which is collaboration tools and once you click on that link, you’ll find displayed dozens and dozens, I’m seeing about three hundred and sixty two collaboration applications. Some of these are Wrike and Podio and Atlassian Confluence, Zoho, Mavenlink and so on and so on and so on.
A bunch of amazing apps and the thing you can do here is you’ll discover them, you can compare them and probably the most amazing feature is a lot of them have some really really good reviews that will help you make that final purchase decision. Once you’ve learned a bunch on GetApp, you can jump over to the vendor’s page and sign up.

Basically GetApp makes your life easy in helping you find the most appropriate business application to solve a bunch of problems. I think a lot of people also when they land on GetApp, they discover a whole bunch of new tools that might even help them solve problems they didn’t even know they have. I’m sorry if we lead you down the path of signing up to more than one service but we’re that awesome so that is GetApp.

With that out of the way, let me introduce you to Kevin Roberts from FinancialForce. How are you doing Kevin?

Kevin: Very good Jimmy, pleasure to be here.

Jimmy: Well, I have a lot of questions. One of the first questions is about you. From what I see you’ve been with FinancialForce for several years now, how did you end up going from business development over into the director of platform technology?

How did you end up going from business development over into the director of platform technology?

Kevin: Yes, I’ve been with FinancialForce since day one. I was fortunate to be part of the team that worked on a Skunkworks project really exploring how we could use the salesforce.com platform to build applications that we worked within the past. Good old traditional LP applications like ordering, and billing, and accounting of those sort of things.

How did I get into it? I run a sales organization. Unlike many sales organizations we skilfully went off both salesforce.com without telling the IT department because we’re having also trouble wrestling with getting our reporting done. So it was really my first exposure to that platform which has now become a sales leader.

I was fascinated by what a powerful platform that was build-up of all kinds. So really, what we did back in about 2007 we started playing around with, “Hey wouldn’t be cool if you can do more than sales marketing on Salesforce.” My background is a technical one so I was sort of DPA programmer sort of background.

I sort of came to the platform strangely maybe but basically using, understanding Salesforce to do sales and thinking wouldn’t be cool if we could do run your back office just like you can run your front office.

Jimmy: Right. You mentioned you were in there when FinancialForce basically started from the idea?

How was it being at FinancialForce from its inception?

Kevin: Yes. FinancialForce is a joint venture between European ERP vendor called Unit4 and Salesforce themselves. And I was working for Unit4. We built basically an integration between Salesforce and on premise ERP.

Jimmy: I understand, okay.

Kevin: Really, the story it was really okay you close an opportunity in Salesforce, what happens next? Typically, you have swivel chair integrate and you go into another system and punch in the data to another system and we join the two together. We then started to think about why I don’t just stay on the platform and do it all end to end.
So yes I was one of the original team, there was many smart people involved getting FinancialForce into being but I was one of the originals.

Jimmy: I think you are in a rather privileged position to answer this next question. From the beginning until now, how has the evolution of what the initial idea was into what it’s become? How have things evolved?

Are there things that have surprised you? Did you run into things that were completely unexpected? What are some things that pop into mind right now over this evolution?

Are there things that have surprised you in the evolution of FinancialForce?

Kevin: I think the scope of what we provide is a range of applications. We came from a finance background so I think we were initially focused on okay, we close an opportunity how do we get paid? With a view to that could be broader ERP how they handle the quoting, the ordering, the delivering, and the inventory.

I think the thing that surprised me in really in such a short time how the breadth of functions that we covered has grown. We were very much a pioneer building application on the platform that were not focused just on sales. I think we’re taking a leap of faith. We bet the house on Salesforce but I think we’ve, it surprised me in a good way how broad we are.

So we really do end to end ERP function and now all the way from managing our own employees with HR functions. I think the ecosystem that’s grown around Salesforce has been the most exciting thing for me to see and how quickly it has evolved.

Jimmy: Yes I think that’s a testament to how good of a job they’re doing at Salesforce because I think that across the board, probably all of our guest so far have been using Salesforce in their own company.

Kevin: Why wouldn’t you?

Jimmy: Let me take a bit of a step back because I know there’s going to be a lot of people listening, it will be their first time getting to know what FinancialForce is. It might even be their first time here in the name Salesforce as hard as that can be to believe. How would you explain, first to start off, what an ERP is to somebody who might not be familiar with it?

How would you explain what an ERP is to somebody who might not be familiar with it?

Kevin: Sure. So ERP is really all about those functions that happen in a business really that happens once a sale has been made. Salesforce is a wonderful tool as you say widely adopted generating that leading query in the first place. Managing the sales cycle and closing the deal.

Now depending on your business, what happens next could be a very quick transaction or it could be very prolonged transactions depending on the product and service you’re providing. Really downstream, once you close the deal, is there some sort ordering process, is there some provisioning, is there some sort of inventory. It’s all in downstream that really happen in the back office.

Jimmy: Let’s do two kinds of examples here, one, how can an ecommerce site understand an ERP in their situation and how would let’s say a manufacturer with an actual assembly line of some kind putting things together understand an ERP?

What are two examples of companies using an ERP?

Kevin: For the ecommerce environment, once you’ve clicked on there you checked out, you’ve provided the service, same with a B2B environment you probably don’t immediately take the cash. You might be able to send an invoice.

For ERP what happens is it handles the invoice in process. Once you provide the product or service you get paid sometimes you don’t, sometimes there’s a conversation. There might be issues you resolve those sort of things. But ultimately, how do you then track down that transaction, get paid, account for that in your accounting system that’s part of the ERP function. There might be downstream things in terms of servicing that customer, there might be warranty and services agreements. So that’s quite short transactions.

In a manufacturing environment, you’re probably taking an order and going out and sourcing the inventory. You’re either gathering that information, packing or delivering it to your customer the actual delivery of the process will be much more over a long period of time. You’re actually getting the raw materials in building what it is you’re selling to the customer.

Jimmy: So the ERP is taking care of everything after a sale has been made.

Kevin: Yes, if you think of what happens to actually to provision either the product or the service. That could be delivering some sort of services project. You might have consultants or technicians going on, that might be the service you provide. Yes, ERP manages all that. It flows all the way through the accounting system so you produce your accounts at the end of each month.

So FinancialForce in as the ERP and an accounting platform?

Kevin: Yes. That’s right. We have FinancialForce now I think FinancialForce maybe the case is where we came from we did start in the debits and the credits on the accounting system. But yes, that flows all the way through. Now, I think we’re talking with you, what’s interesting nowadays with ERP, you used to buy the entire systems and you sort of having to consume the whole thing before it starts to get value.

Nowadays, enterprise applications are available in many ways. Like you buy apps on your phone, you can take it a bit of a time. You might buy quoting app, you might buy ordering app, you might buy billing app, and you might buy an accounting app. If you get a right, it will be nice to get on the same platform and that’s a different way now with people consuming ERP.

Does FinancialForce have an app marketplace?

Kevin: Exactly. And I think that’s sort of following on what Salesforce have done. Salesforce have created a platform in an ecosystem so that they can create apps but they also provide platforms for other people to build apps. And that’s where we come in, we build those ERP apps.

And crucially, our customers and Salesforce customers also build their own apps themselves. It’s something that’s unique to their business. But because the key thing amongst all of that we’ re all running in the same infrastructure, the same platform so they all play with each other in a nice way.

To use FinancialForce, are you tied to also be using Salesforce at the same time?

Kevin: You’re absolutely using the Salesforce platform. You don’t have to be using CRM. Obviously, many people are. There’s great value by having those two applications running side by side coexisting, sharing things like the customer record, sharing things like users, because that greatly simplifies things.

You don’t have to worry about syncing data, moving data around but it also makes both of those applications more valuable because from the sales perspective I now understand everything that’s happening with the customer not just the sales side. I can see whether they’re paying their bill. I can see if they got delivery or serving problems.

And similarly, the back office isn’t blind sided because they can see what’s happening on the sales side of the house. I mean in olden days those functions tend to have walls between them that have been very hard to break through.

Jimmy: What type of business would be kind of the most appropriate to thinking about basically onboarding FinancialForce? Because I imagine FinancialForce would be an alternative to maybe some other accounting software that they might be using. How can we help someone that’s listening better understand that okay this is my scale of business. I’m more or less a good fit for FinancialForce.

What type of business would be kind of the most appropriate to thinking about basically onboarding FinancialForce?

Kevin: I’m thinking that in two ways. I think we can do that from a vertical perspective. I think what we’ve seen in the early days with FinancialForce, all those verticals have actually gone to the cloud the quickest. They’ve adopted that technology sooner.

Professional services organizations immediately springs to mind is vertical way. It makes perfect sense. They are typically using Salesforce to do the lead generation of money in sales process. They are typically virtual businesses. They are spread across the country or spread across the world. And the cloud allows them to work together as a single team.

So we have certainly, organizations who have professional services or any organizations as many are now who are providing embedded services with whatever is they sell that makes sense. Business tools.

Jimmy: Give me some examples of these types of business like actually going a little bit more granular into the person who does XYZ, just a few examples because what I really like is for us to give examples that listener could more or less really say oh yes, that’s me.

Kevin:

Just to put the other side to that I think also growth is a big part of why you would look at FinancialForce. The Salesforce platform gives you that agility to grow and add new lines of business and solve problems in a different way. So what types of businesses have we seen? An awful lot of new generation consulting organizations typically an IT, or business services that have sprung up initially around the Salesforce ecosystem but cloud in general.

Organizations providing professional services, and IT services, or reorganizing business processes. That’s been a great vertical for us. But really any business that is providing maybe a combination of products and services that are growing fast. We are doing exceedingly well with the organization’s like value added resellers. We’re selling Cisco boxes, IBM equipment. Businesses who are looking to be more agile are now adding disparate lines of business, all the systems tend to struggle to adapt to that.

Jimmy: Within all these different businesses and products and services that someone might be selling and also on boarding FinancialForce, you deal a lot with, and correct me if I’m wrong, with training and helping people understand how they can adapt FinancialForce correct?

Kevin: Yes, and we have a network of partners to do that both for us as well.

Jimmy: Okay. From your experience being one of the first people within FinancialForce, what are some very positive stories that have come your way from users adapting FinancialForce and leaving behind all their ways of doing things?

Kevin: Yes. I think number one is the ability to serve the customer better and better. Understand their customers. Organizations are really organizing themselves as teams rather than departments. So I think if we take professional services, one of the great values I hear frequently from our customers is now that the delivery teams and the sales teams are working side by side.

That’s great for the sales process because the delivery teams are now upstream on the sales side. They are bidding what they think they can deliver. And they’re not being set up to fail by the sales person quoting what they think is appropriate when there’s two organizations that are not talking together.

Jimmy: It’s funny because I think it seems a little bit simplistic but basically teams within a company are understanding better what’s going on within each other’s work?

Kevin: Correct and that’s good. That’s because they share data, you can look upstream and you can look downstream. You get things better, you get better forecasting. You can plan further out. But if you’re allowing that as well, you’ll then better able to serve the customer.

Because when the customer rings an open house a query, it doesn’t matter whether its am order, a delivery prompt, a billing problem, is it a service call, anybody who’s talking to that customer can answer the questions. Customers expect that nowadays.

Jimmy: Yes, I think that’s one of these things that at least point on, I’m more of a content side. It’s really important that I really know what’s going on with sales because those are things that are crucial to better understand what everybody is doing. So that we’re all going to that same direction.

Kevin: Yes, I’ve worked in consulting for a long time and the phrase used a lot was something that’s thrown over the wall. It’s just thrown over the wall and right you’ve got a run with it. And I think, joining those two teams together and including the billing basically stops those shocks. And those shocks are not only internal, those shocks can lead to pay for the customers as well.

Jimmy: I imagine now that, what is it been, five or six years?

Kevin: Yes, 2009 we started.

Jimmy: Since 2009, having to build up something that is rather important to Salesforce users, what would you say are some to those things that you’ve learned as far as what type of team it takes to build something that actually serves that goal and that mission that FinancialForce has in mind.

What have you learned about building a team about the people that are within FinancialForce that allow you to do the work that you’re doing right now?

Kevin: Yes. Well, we need smart people. I think if you look from a business perspective, obviously we’re measuring ourselves and we’re measuring our revenue, and we’re measuring our effectiveness on our projects. But it’s increasingly important to measure our ability to attract and retain talent.

We are doing something new. We have been a pioneer in building those new applications on Salesforce platform. It’s a wonderful platform but from time to time we’ve been at the bleeding edge of that. Hiring top talents has been a challenge and I think we’ve done a good job of that.

And I think one of the reasons why, to go back to a point back to the ecosystem. I think we done a lot of work in giving back to the community in terms of sharing best practices. Sharing codes. Supporting and developing user groups. There’s a really vibrant developer ecosystem in the Salesforce community today that’s unique in my experience. I’ve never seen such an excited bunch of developers building on a platform.

We’re pushing back into that and the whole new generation coming along. Attract smart people. Give them space to work in a way they want to work. We are well spread across San Francisco, East Coast, Canada, and UK. They have to work as virtual teams. Old ways working in departments don’t really work for those sorts of people.

Jimmy: Working within the FinancialForce and building something that affects hundreds and thousands if not million of people. Because if you look at it at a point of view of how many customers it ends up affecting, obviously, we’re going to transition that one to you guys are using.

What are some premium SaaS apps that you use to build, run and manage everything that you’re doing?

Kevin: Well I guess in a way it was an easy decision for us. I said earlier we bet the house on Salesforce. The business is built on Salesforce. Yes, absolutely we will use the sales tools, the marketing tools. We use the service cloud of Salesforce to manage our cases with customers.

The business is built on Salesforce.

But what we’ve also done, we’ve used FinancialForce to manage our projects and bill our customers, and manage our back office. But I think the key thing and I think this is the secret source of Salesforce and why I think winning the platform as an enterprise is then we built our own applications to manage our debt processes. To manage our sprints, to manage our reviews, to track books, to check new versions of the software coming along, to check those version.

So yes, we absolutely practice what we preach in that we’re a combination of Salesforce apps and FinancialForce apps and a whole bunch of things we built ourselves to manage our business. And then we take advantage of every platform feature that comes along, that’s part of my role. Salesforce has come on incredibly in the five years we’ve been building on it.

We’ll use tools such as the social and chatter lair that’s embedded throughout. That’s how we communicate as a business. And I think people look to it blankly when that was first announce but from that fundamental tool, to not only how we collaborate but also how we get things done.

Jimmy: Explain to me a little about that social and the chatter layer. Are these other applications that Salesforce provide that you guys are using? Honestly, these things are kind of hit missed. A lot of times the families will plan vacations and you’ll work on the thing for three months and then they’ll just ditch it last minute too.

Kevin: Yes, but rather than an outlet sits top of everything it’s a lair that’s embedded inside of everything if I can make that. We can have a conversation about a support case, we can have conversation about a bill, we can have a conversation about deal and we use social tool, you follow employees. You create groups. You can add mention people. You can invite people in the conversation and that’s great.

But I think because the social layer is actually embedded, the data that actually talks in that conversation as well. If the status of a case has changed, you’re following that in our feed so there’s a tight coupling between conversations and data that you don’t get if it was another social lair outside of the platform.

Jimmy: Are there any premium paid applications that FinancialForce is using internally to do other aspects of the business?

Google apps for productivity, collaboration on a document level.

Kevin: Oh sure. I mean we’re fundamentally running on Salesforce as our enterprise infrastructure, Google apps for productivity, collaboration on a document level. Our marketing folks are using Marketo to do landing pages for our website. Our dev teams will use tools to manage light source control and whatever. But I think it’s fair to say FinancialForce runs on Salesforce and Google.

Marketo to do landing pages for our website.

Jimmy: Salesforce and Google. Do you use on your day to day anything that would be some type of a premium app to help you do anything else in your day to day?

Kevin: I guess this is a combination of the, I’m going to take the Salesforce platform one step further. We used the Salesforce one mobile app. So that gives us a single app across phones, tablets, on the browser, but bearing in mind that all our processes are in there. That basically means I’ve got my entire business in my pocket. I’m a geek so I love the way that the Salesforce work nicely on my watch.

Samsung Gear Live to quickly see what’s going on.

Jimmy: Talk to me about your watch.

Kevin: It’s a Samsung Gear Live. It’s running android wear, the thing I’ve hooked on that I think we’re all about to get hooked on it more with the Apple release coming along. What it basically gives you is it moves your notifications on to your wrist so you’ve got your schedule with you, your notifications are with you. And for me that means if somebody wants to get my attention urgently I can be mentioned and I get a buzz on my wrist.

I’ll keep talking to you. I think it would be a height of rudeness if I cracked open my laptop. I think it would be rude if I cracked out in my phone but if I get a buzz in my wrist and say somebody needs talking so in twenty minutes I might go talk to them. But it also means I can keep in touch with things like work on processes and approvals, so escalations. I think this is where wearables in the enterprise is really going to actually drive wearable’s adoption.

Jimmy: That’s very interesting. The wearable’s in the enterprise because usually you hear about wearable’s more along the lines of consumer product that is out there just to show off more than actually be useful.

Kevin: I mean health has been played up a lot. I get that. But now I think the business is going to be, the enterprise the apps and the business are going to be a big driver of that. It’s a workforce that’s travelling a lot, is working in a coffee shop, or is trying to do this balance between work and the social life and I think wearables makes it more human.

Jimmy: Do you see Salesforce and or FinancialForce developing a Samsung Gear or an Apple watch. Do you see yourselves developing a standalone app specifically targeting these devices?

Kevin: Yes, in a way we’ve already done it. If you look at say a word process in ERP, let’s take out someone needs to get their expenses approved. Someone wants to go and spend some money at a trade show. That’s a classic process when somebody submits them or request and it gets routed to someone to sign off. You can do that process now. You can notify that. You can participate in your work flow. Because we use the Salesforce workforce engine and notifications surface on your watch.

Now rather than building a stand-alone app, what we are doing is we’ve already built the concepts of extension. These are call outs that are going to be running within those devises and running within the Salesforce environment so yes we showcased recently, you can see a video of let’s take professional services. We showed an example, there’s a consultant coming outside to do some training calls in sick, notifies he’s sick because he’s using HR App.

The system will not only notify the project manager he’s sick but also recommend a replacement based on availability and locations. So there’s a geolocation thing, service skills thing going on. The RP knows all that, that’s an interesting thing as well, watches are not just notification if they can give you a choice. This has happened and if you want to do a A, B, or C you can use the platform to do that. We’re already doing it but I’m sure we’ll be doing more of it.

Jimmy: I see that you’re into technology. Are you a big smartphone user?

Kevin: I am.

Jimmy: Can you tell me some of the apps that are just essential to you that might be right now on your home screen that they are that important?

Tile to keep track of things.

Kevin: I think in my advancing years, I think Tile. I think it is a nice example of the whole internet of things going on for me. The most common app that I rely on is find my phone or find my daughter’s phone. What really Tile says is why not just find your phone why not find your keys, why not find your wallets, why not find your car. If you’ve gone to the mall and parked it.

For me, I think that’s interesting, very affordable way of saying yes I can track when yet again I can’t find a keys when I’m heading out in the morning.

Jimmy: Do you have mostly a tile on your keychain or do you have any tiles on any other things that are really out of the box?

Kevin: I think I’m quite boring. There’s one in my key chain. There’s one in my wallet. There’s one in the glove box of my car.

Jimmy: That’s good. It’s good to see someone to actually pull out Tile. They were a kick started project weren’t they?

Kevin: Yes I think they’ve done a nice job. I think it’s interesting. They’ve worked hard, how they packaged, how it’s easy to set up. I think it’s a great first step and people will build on top of the idea.

Jimmy: Tile, Find my Phone, the Samsung Gear. How do you like the watch? Is it comfortable? Is it heavy? What are your feelings right now with this hardware?

Kevin: I think for the geek community. I think it’s fun. It’s comfortable. Some of my female colleagues would have problems wearing it as a device with it’s chunkiness. I’m less concerned with image. It’s fine. I think Apple is going to take it to the next level.

It would become a desirable fashionable item and provide the same functionality and probably do it in a nicer way. I’m guessing that track record tells that they tend to do that. I think for a geek or techy like myself. It’s fine. I think it’s early days for sure but I think the train has left the station now.

Jimmy: Let’s wrap up on two things. Two things that you’re excited about. One have it be something within the FinancialForce world and another outside that world related to apps and technology

Kevin: Right. I think in the FinancialForce world, I think that the platform we’re running on is getting into it’s stride. I think the message is now out there that what Salesforce have built to support their own CRM apps is actually a wonderful tool for enterprise apps in general.

And I think what you’re saying is what we’re seeing is a transition to really go back to what was promised but never really arrived was point and click development. So business analyst could make, design, and deploy new apps without having to write range of codes because of the wonderful tools that are coming now. I think that’s exciting. This ecosystem is going to get bigger. For the personal what was the second questions means the personal?

Jimmy: Outside of FinancialForce within apps or any technology that you’re excited about that might be coming up.

Kevin: I think the sole disappearance of the computer is interesting. I have recently gone through remodel of the kitchen, I think the way technology’s really becoming pervasive in social situations, in household situations, I think that it’s coming to the forward now. Computing is just available on any plug in without having to wrestle with which version and how to get the latest device and things like this. Just much more generally available.

Jimmy: Everything is going to end up on the cloud, probably.

Kevin: Yes. It’s happening.

Jimmy: Our brains are going to end up in the cloud too. That would be awesome. Any last bits of FinancialForce that you like to audience to know about before we sign off?

Kevin: Find and check out financialforce.com. There’s a bunch of materials out there, great videos for you to do your own research and I know people nowadays don’t like to be inundated with calls so they just want to do their own research, figure it out and see it in a bunch of videos. I think I’ve done it in an informative way that you’ll enjoy watching them as well. Check, check, check goes out. We look forward to adding to that as we go to 2015.

Jimmy: Well Kevin thank you so much for being on the show. Let me just tell everyone to go and visit FinancialForce.com and check them out and also if you still have more questions or doubts or whatever you can visit GetApp and read some reviews on FinancialForce that will help you just to go that step further along your research. I’m pretty sure you’ll be happy with what you see so go take a visit at financialforce.com.

Visit GetApp.com and if you’re a user of FinancialForce go to GetApp.com and leave a review of FinancialForce because it’s very very helpful to everyone. It’s helpful to FinancialForce because this is one of the indicators that helps FinancialForce show up much higher in the accounting category and that’s great. If you love FinancialForce, then you will want other people to use it as well. The more reviews, the higher up they’ll show.

Also these reviews help people really understand what real users have to say about the platform. Go make your voice heard, leave an opinion leave a review and again Kevin thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks a lot for bringing your watch out on the show. I thought it was cool. Thank you and I will ping you when this is ready to go live.

Kevin: Thanks.

Jimmy: Thank Kevin, I’ll talk to you later.

The post GetCast 7: FinancialForce, Accounting for Salesforce Customers appeared first on GetApp Learning Center.