Whether you’re a professional accountant or just a QuickBooks novice, your business processes will benefit from the integration of QuickBooks with a CRM software solution.
This article explains why you should have an integration of QuickBooks with CRM, the criteria for choosing the right CRM and some of the types of integration.
Developed and marketed by Intuit Inc., QuickBooks accounting software is targeted towards small to medium-sized businesses. From generating and sending invoices, accepting payments, keeping track of income and expenses, and managing inventory and payroll, to generating accounting reports, QuickBooks manages the entire financial aspect of an organization.
This accounting software offers both on-premises and cloud-based versions that cater to a wide array of clients’ needs. The cloud version of QuickBooks Online is compatible with any device and can be accessed from any location globally.
Though QuickBooks is an unmatched software for accounting, it can be made even more efficient by integrating it with a CRM system. The amalgamation of CRM and QuickBooks enables both systems to explore new horizons. For example, QuickBooks are great as an accounting software but managing and following up with leads is only possible when it is paired up with the CRM solution. Essential business activities such as tracking billable time or forecasting client profitability can also be done through this powerful combo.
CRM or Customer Relationship Management is the process followed by an organization to strategically manage its customer interactions to foster long-term relationships and boost sales. This is done by storing and analyzing customer data gathered during the purchase journey. The data is typically huge and needs a lot of human effort while trying to explore every customer touch point and extract important information on it.
CRM solutions are designed to minimize the efforts of sales and marketing teams by providing a centralized database for every customer entertained by a company and allowing various automation of tasks. The primary target of such solutions is to explore the untapped potential of generating sales and resales and boost revenue.
The approach for a modern-day business is customer-centric over company or product centric. A CRM platform’s job is to deliver a client service that is consistent, streamlined, and at the same time profitable to the business. This is done in a real-time scenario and thus is far more effective than a traditional system.
If your business is using only the QuickBooks software and not a CRM integration with it, then you might be sitting on invaluable data but not able to make any use of it. For example, if you have a lead with high a potential for conversion but are unattended by your teams, you may lose your business. Thus, a CRM solution along with QuickBooks that attends every such possibility and further helps in pushing sales is a must for all business types and sizes.
QuickBooks can be used for various accounting purposes such as sending invoices, receiving payments, and viewing customer’s transaction history, but this is in no way a replacement for CRM software. This accounting software cannot be used to build a long-term and profitable relationship with customers.
However, a QuickBooks integration with a CRM is a powerful solution that provides the best of both worlds.
QuickBooks integration with a CRM solution means that you can take advantage of both software features. This will give a single view of client data including invoices and payments carried out against each of them. The data can be used for future follow-ups, and offering personalized services. The integration helps in achieving enhanced marketing automation and better management of invoices along with time and effort.
Below are some of the things you ought to consider before deciding on a CRM integration with QuickBooks. Everyone has different business needs, so don’t skip these questions.
Let’s talk about the different reasons to get a CRM that integrates with QuickBooks.
If you are an accountant, QuickBooks alone cannot help you obtain new contacts and leads to them paying customers. That is what a CRM is for. It can help with marketing, lead generation and then bringing in that data to create new QuickBooks accounts.
CRM is great for saving your team members’ time and efforts by taking over a lot of manual typing and click work. This efficiency translates over into your QuickBooks activity by syncing everything once and in real-time.
As your QuickBooks data is so important to your customers, having a CRM integration may add a layer of data protection should you ever need to share any more customer information.
To ensure a prime customer experience all the way throughout the sales process, a CRM integration with QuickBooks is ideal. It may send automated follow-ups to stay on point and use workflows to update the sales pipeline status.
If different needs of your accounting business include offering customer support, there are many perfect CRM software that specialize in customer service. It may automate tickets from QuickBooks, create them in your CRM, and use workflows for faster resolutions.
There are two major types of CRM integration with QuickBooks, which are manual and sync-based.
With a manual integration, you’ll need to click on each row of data that you want to sync.
With a sync-based system, you run a program that reviews and syncs all data according to your parameters.
However, with syncing, there are two categories of data flow: unidirectional data flow vs bidirectional data flow.
This is where data flows one way, from one platform to another. For example, when you update a contact profile in your QuickBooks account, it will get automatically updated in your CRM, but updates of CRM won’t affect QuickBooks.
As obvious, bidirectional data flow is a two-way sync. Any changes or updates you make in either your QuickBooks or CRM systems will be automatically synced and updated in the other platform.
Now that you know about how important CRM is with QuickBooks, the next step is to integrate. If you are still not sure which CRM integration is most compatible with your business needs, visit the CRM website. Often free trials are provided for which sometimes you don’t need to enter a credit card.
