Many thought leaders tell us that the future of accounting lies in integrating bookkeeping tools with related applications that complement them. In fact, QuickBooks can already be connected to hundreds of apps.

One area where integration has worked particularly well is Customer Relationship Management (CRM). QuickBooks’ contact records and reports can tell you everything about your customers’ financial activities, but add CRM features, and that profile becomes even more comprehensive.

Numerous Benefits

CRM applications provide a central location for recording and tracking the communication and other interaction you have with customers and prospects. They’re typically used by salespeople who must know exactly where all of their contacts are in the sales process, but their usefulness extends to business managers and others who are responsible for building better customer relationships.

There are numerous CRM solutions available that integrate easily with QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online. When you combine the tools provided by these two types of applications, you’re likely to discover that this partnership can add depth to your relationships and convenience to your workday while enhancing your customer service overall. Benefits include:

• Faster access to critical data. When you have a customer on the phone or staring at you from across a desk, you need to be able to access elements of his or her financial profile quickly. If you’re looking at the screen of a CRM solution that’s been integrated with QuickBooks, you don’t have to exit it to answer a question about your customer’s sales history and waste your time and your customers. Being able to answer questions quickly and accurately instills confidence.
• Reduction of duplicate data entry. Imagine if you had to replicate a customer’s sales history in each record in your CRM solution. Creating that kind of documentation would take way too much time and would have to be updated frequently. When you use CRM software, that QuickBooks information is in both and is refreshed in real-time. In some applications, you can even import lead information from websites and elsewhere.
• Protect sensitive accounting information. When using a CRM, your sales staff has access to customer information without being able to see other sensitive accounting records within QuickBooks. Utilizing a CRM that integrates with QuickBooks allows your sales staff to enter customers and sales information that syncs over to QuickBooks, avoiding the need for duplicate entries.
• Clean records. Do you ever enter prospects in QuickBooks so that you have a record and then have to delete them when sales don’t pan out? No need to do that if you’re using a CRM system: It can document and track your leads until they become customers.
• Quick access to payment status. Nothing like closing a sale and then learning the customer is in arrears.

Enabling Integration

If you’ve never set up an integration between applications, you’re probably going to want our help setting it up and understanding how it works. QuickBooks Online is fairly easy to connect, but the desktop version may be a challenge. We can help you decide from among QuickBooks-friendly CRM software like Method: CRM, Insightly, and Zoho CRM. Get in touch with us, and we’ll get you on a path to better customer relationships.