Integrated Finance and CRM Software: Improving business efficiency by combining finance and CRM solutions

It’s becoming less and less common to find organisations that still perform bookkeeping manually. Hand-written bookkeeping is time consuming, labour intensive, prone to error and tedious. So, most businesses use some form of software to record financial transactions, update ledgers, produce invoices and financial reports and generally manage their business. Similarly, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have moved from being ‘nice to have’ applications to essential components of many successful organisations. Properly implemented, modern CRM software delivers significant benefits to virtually all areas of a business, and in particular the ‘front-office’ functions including marketing, sales and customer service. Linking or integrating finance and CRM systems, and therefore linking the key software applications for the front and back-office, streamlines internal processes and enables accounts, senior management, sales, marketing and customer service staff to take a more comprehensive, informed and strategic view of the business and its customers. This in turn delivers significant benefits throughout the organisation.

This whitepaper discusses why businesses use finance and CRM software, the differences between front-office and back-office systems and some of the reasons for linking the software within them. It also looks at levels of linking and integration, provides an overview of the Sage 200 Business Management Suite, and gives some guidelines on Sage 200 implementation projects, including some of the pitfalls to watch out for during deployment.