Many companies rely on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales for their customer relationship management (CRM) needs, but they aren’t always thinking about accounting when they decide on a broader business software suite. When you use the Dynamics CRM without an accounting software, you lack visibility into how sales impacts overall business performance and the ability to take action faster. (This is a common concern with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and QuickBooks.)
Here’s a closer look at the challenges that can arise and how to overcome them.
Why integrating accounting software with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is crucial
Technologies such as AI and workflow automation are increasingly driving the accounting field away from repetitive tasks like data entry and calculations and toward a more analytical role. As a result, ensuring a close bond between CRM and finance — one in which data from one department is readily accessible to the other — becomes increasingly important for several reasons. Here are a few.
Deeper insights
With access to customer data, you can calculate metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV), which is integral in forecasting and scenario planning for your business. What would your company's game plan be if the cost to acquire each new customer increased by 20%, for example?
Better decision-making
CRM-related insights, such as your company's top-selling products, can help drive decision-making on both new and current offerings. Your company may be contemplating ending its relationship with a key supplier, for instance, but upon finding out they make your most popular product, you may decide to come back to the negotiation table.
More effective processes
When the finance department has access to customer feedback, they can find out which processes are working and which are not. Do customers find automated billing reminders helpful? Do they find the new online payment portal to be as user-friendly and convenient as you intended?
Benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
As important as it is to integrate your CRM with your accounting software, not just any CRM software will do. There are a few reasons why Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is an ideal CRM solution for a small- to medium-sized business.
Flexibility
Dynamics 365 consists of a number of modules that can be mixed and matched based on your needs. Maybe you want to know the effect your customer service is having on the bottom line, but as an ecommerce business, you don't employ field agents to fix customer issues. In that case, you could use the Customer Service module but forego Field Service.
Expandability
Dynamics 365 Sales integrates with a host of Microsoft and third-party applications so you can truly customize your CRM to your particular industry and way of working. One example is Adobe Acrobat Sign, which allows you to efficiently obtain signatures for contracts and other important documents.
Security
Keeping your own company's data secure is important enough, but when you're dealing with customer data, any security breach comes with reputational damage that can follow your business for years to come. Dynamics 365 comes with the Microsoft corporation's robust security protocols and protections.
Addressing integration issues with QuickBooks and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Now that it's been established that it's important to integrate your CRM with your accounting software and that Dynamics 365 Sales is likely the best CRM solution to serve your business, there's the matter of QuickBooks. QuickBooks, an Intuit product and one of the most popular small business accounting solutions on the market, doesn't integrate out of the box with Dynamics 365. So what are your choices? You can:
- Choose another CRM solution even though it might not serve all your needs.
- Continue using QuickBooks and Dynamics 365 Sales separately even if it means less transparency between departments.
- Purchase an integration platform such as DBSync to bridge a connection between QuickBooks and Dynamics 365 Sales, which will require a separate subscription. This will add an additional monthly cost, give you an additional vendor to deal with, and may not sync data as smoothly as a native integration.
- Choose another accounting software that integrates seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Sales
If you're a multi-entity business or have growth plans for the near future, the latter is an option to seriously consider, as QuickBooks is an entry-level solution more suited to single-entity businesses.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central: a viable match for Dynamics 365 CRM?
It only makes sense that the best integration for a Microsoft product would be another Microsoft product, and even the names suggest that an integration between Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central would be natural. And it is. But when using Business Central as an accounting solution, integration isn't really the issue.
Business Central was built on the backbone of Dynamics NAV, an enterprise resource planning solution that, by definition, was designed for larger enterprise organizations. There are still vestiges of Dynamics NAV present in Business Central, specifically a feature heaviness that could prove more obstacle than path smoother for middle-market businesses. "Learning curve" is noted as one of the product's cons – and that sentiment is echoed in several reviews of the product – on software site G2. One user called the solution "tricky" and another described it as "a complex tool" with a "big implementation process."
At the same time, Business Central lacks some of the features that actually would be beneficial to a small- to medium-sized multi-entity business, such as investment management capabilities, HIPAA-compliant protocols and a shared chart of accounts. Workflow restrictions also came up as negatives in a number of G2 reviews.
Gravity Software: the best accounting software for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
It may feel like using Dynamics 365 Sales in tandem with an accounting solution requires a sacrifice no matter what. Either you're saddled with the cumbersome process of purchasing and implementing additional applications in order to get your CRM to integrate with your accounting software, or you're forced to work with an ERP system goes above and beyond what your business requires – and not in a good way.
But what if there were another option? Fortunately, there is.
Gravity Software is a comprehensive accounting solution designed with small- to medium-sized multi-entity businesses in mind. We built it especially for organizations that have outgrown entry-level accounting software like QuickBooks but would find a full-fledged ERP system to be cumbersome, both in terms of expense and complexity. Gravity is natively built on the Microsoft Power Platform, so you'll have no problem integrating it with Dynamics 365 Sales tools.
Through the Power Platform, Gravity users have access to powerful tools that will increase productivity for any business, no matter your size or industry.
Power Automate and Power Apps
Power Automate allows users to create low-code automated workflows for frequently performed tasks. Because Gravity was built from the ground up on the Power Platform, these workflows can seamlessly weave Gravity processes together with processes from other applications. For example, you can set up a workflow so that a client is automatically sent a billing reminder via email when an invoice reaches a certain age in Gravity.
Thanks to advances in AI, designing automated workflows in Power Automate is poised to become more user-friendly than ever with workflow suggestions generated by Microsoft Copilot, which recently became available for enterprise users (companies with 300 or more licenses) and which we are actively working to incorporate into Gravity's already robust menu of integrations and capabilities.
Power Apps, another key component of the Power Platform, expands on the concepts of Power Automate. It allows users to create both intracompany and customer-facing apps for mobile devices or web browsers.
Power BI
It's well-documented that better data leads to better decision-making, and that's even more true when visualizations make that data easier to understand. Microsoft Power BI makes it easy for anyone to create colorful, engaging data visualizations that pull information from throughout the company, including your Dynamics 365 Sales applications – a bar graph of your top customers and their purchase amounts for the past quarter, for example. Gravity Software incorporates these visualizations – which update in real time – into individualized dashboards so that company leaders have access to the information most relevant to their position.
Microsoft Power BI has been recognized by both Gartner and the Forrester Wave™ as among the best business intelligence tools in the marketplace.
Want to know how Gravity Software and the Microsoft Power Platform can take your business to a whole new level? Schedule a demo today!
Gravity Software
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