FinancialForce.com, developer of the only cloud accounting application built natively on the Force.com platform from Salesforce.com (News - Alert) conducted a survey to identify the challenges in the current accounting solutions of SMBs.

The survey took place over a two week period in the second quarter of 2010, and the results were based on input from over 200 finance, accounting, sales and IT professionals from small-to-medium-sized businesses in the U.S. using Salesforce CRM. 

Even as a recent International Data Corporation study showed that the Software as a Service market had worldwide revenues of $13.1 billion in 2009 and was projected to soon overtake traditional packaged applications in total sales, the rather disconcerting factor of lack of integration provided by popular financial and accounting solutions, including Quickbooks and Sage surged ahead.

A majority of professionals from more than 200 small-to-medium-sized businesses in North America, who used QuickBooks or Sage and Salesforce CRM, cited lack of CRM integration as their biggest headache, and how its absence impacted their work and their companies.  

Survey participants indicated that there was a double entry problem between Salesforce CRM opportunities and QuickBooks purchase order records, the accounting app didn't integrate finance with business.

Elaborating further on the problems they encountered, the respondents said invoicing was not integrated into salesforce.com and individual apps for purchase and receipts had to be built. There was also no tracking facility to track the sending and receipt of invoices and manual entries had to be made.

Other frustrations cited by respondents included a lack of multicompany functionality, an unwieldy amount of manual data entry, incompatibility with Macs and an inability to scale:

QuickBooks was unable to handle multi-product, multi-sector and multi-revenue business without the input of large amounts of data. On the whole, the program seemed not to be in tune with current trends.

"Our sales team loves using Salesforce CRM, but we were frustrated by the lack of a direct link of what was quoted to customers and what they actually bought and were billed for. Managing invoices was a full time task," Tim Alsop, Technical Director of CyberSafe Limited, said..

Alsop further added that with FinancialForce Accounting, sales and accounts appear to be more compatible. Better customer service, faster turnaround on key cash flow reports and a complete view of all customer accounts were available for the first time.

Jeremy Roche, president and CEO, FinancialForce.com, said that there should be tight connection between sales and accounting as it reduced user error, and improved customer service. The recent integration with salesforce.com's Chatter platform makes collaboration around sales opportunities even more effective.

He also added that customers who used desktop accounting systems that didn't properly integrate with Salesforce CRM were missing out on very much.

More information about the FinancialForce Accounting solution, can be had by visiting the demo center at the website.

Based on 30 years of financial application development, FinancialForce.com allows finance teams of organizations using Salesforce CRM to truly 'Speak Salesforce,' dramatically simplifying processes like invoicing, cash collection and customer service. And, its real-time, international financial solution fully leverages the native integration with Salesforce CRM, providing up to the minute market knowledge and collaboration at the speed of social networking.