Case Study
Housing First Minnesota’s Journey to Streamlined Financial Operations
CLA connected Salesforce to Sage Intacct, providing automatic invoicing and revenue recognition, reducing errors and saving time.
Organization
Housing First Minnesota, a nonprofit builders association.
Need
Better connected systems and streamlined financial processes.
Outcome
Automatic invoicing and revenue recognition, reducing errors and saving time.
Understanding the situation
Housing First Minnesota, a trade association for residential builders, remodelers, and industry suppliers, has worked with CLA for many years. As the association experienced growth, Housing First Minnesota needed to further enhance financial processes to integrate its customer relationship management (CRM) system and automate invoicing and revenue recognition processes.
Exploring the challenge
Housing First Minnesota chose to replace their CRM with Salesforce and a real-time integration with Sage Intacct. They reached out to CLA again to boost its use of Sage Intacct for accounting.
Challenges the nonprofit sought to resolve included:
- Its revenue recognition processes — especially those related to memberships and events —were manually tracked in Excel, which was both time-consuming and prone to errors.
- The monthly routine of manually importing invoices from their CRM to Intacct further compounded the inefficiencies.
- Additionally, Housing First Minnesota’s development team struggled with limited visibility into open invoices and payment statuses, necessitating frequent and often cumbersome communication with the finance team.
Collaborating with CLA has transformed our financial operations. CLA’s experience seamlessly integrating Salesforce with Sage Intacct streamlined our processes, eliminated manual tasks, and significantly enhanced visibility and efficiency.
Achieving results
Integrating Salesforce with Sage Intacct resulted in substantial enhancements to Housing First Minnesota’s operations, including:
- A closed won opportunity in Salesforce — fully integrated with DocuSign for contract signing — now automatically kicks off the finance process
- The integration with Intacct creates a non-posting order ready for review and invoicing
- Intacct automatically schedules invoices with revenue recognition schedules attached, effectively eradicating manual processes
Automatic invoicing and revenue recognition not only reduces errors but also significantly saves time. The new direct access to invoice and payment information within Salesforce markedly improves visibility and operational efficiency without adding additional workflow steps.
