The Odd Couple... QuickBooks Desktop and Salesforce

Never (perhaps a slight exaggeration) have there been two software packages that are more dissimilar AND that users commonly want to integrate than QuickBooks Desktop and Salesforce.

Salesforce with its dynamic new capabilities and steady flow on innovation that enables companies to rapidly innovate and reinvent their companies with new and exciting approaches. A company that puts out 3 releases a year where each release has several hundred pages of notes (690 total pages in the Winter 2024, but lets be honest, there is quite a bit of duplication and padding in the PDF)

Then there is QuickBooks Desktop. Here is the entirety of the release notes for QuickBook Desktop's most recent release... "Bill amount mismatch - Fixed issue where the amount doubles on bills as they are created." That's all of it.

But let's be honest, people keep paying for QB Desktop because it repeatedly and reliably does an important job for them. Those same people pay for Salesforce because it allows them to continually improve their businesses through better business processes, better analytics, better, better, better.

But you start to run into real obstacles if your business and financial systems aren't aligned and working well with one another. So, the bravest among us take on integration between these two systems. They pull together the best and brightest technology people in their org, engage the business owners and perform their due diligence on technical integration packages to determine how they will best move the data between these two critical pieces of their organizations technical infrastructure. Then weeks (or more often months) later, they are all standing around high-fiving one another because their Opportunities in Salesforce match their Sales Orders in QuickBooks.

At some point, they feel good about the transfer of information between these systems and everyone moves onto their next projects, not realizing how much they have left on the table.

There is another way to approach this type of work. It is to view each of the systems for the benefits that they provide and recognizing that you can create a win-win for your company with this odd couple of apps. What if, instead of looking at QuickBooks as the place WHERE your people enter orders, capture payments and many of the other monotonous tasks that accompany accounting for your business activities, you instead look at QuickBooks as a "back-end" processing system that is fed information (like orders) from the system that you use to run you business, Salesforce, and then QuickBooks returns important information (like inventory) back to Salesforce.

Reframing the problem from transferring information between systems to thinking about how you can transform your business opens up many possibilities. You can end up in a place unencumbered by the monotonous monolith that is QuickBooks and can weave the financial and business processes together on one system (Salesforce) that allows you tremendous flexibility as well as additional capabilities to improve your business processes.

As always, I appreciate any feedback and would love the chance to carry the conversation forward. Let me know.