How to Improve Sales and Finance Efficiency by Integrating Salesforce & NetSuite

Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Excited to present our webinar today on how to improve sales and finance efficiency by integrating Salesforce and NetSuite. So first of all, a couple of intros are in order. There’s two of us on our side that will be presenting to you today. I’m Mark Simon. I’m the VP of strategy here at Celigo. I’ve been working in the digital transformation space for almost 20 years now. Originally starting out actually as a software developer, before becoming a CTO and a founding team member of an e-commerce company. And then I led a consulting practice that was focused on mid-market digital transformation with a big focus on NetSuite ERP implementation and integration as well as custom software development around that. And through that experience, my team and I worked with about 500 different companies over about 8 years. And through that experience of which I was a Celigo partner, joined about four years and with Celigo, I am the VP of strategy and focus on our customers that are adopting and leveraging Celigo as their iPaas solution. And with that, I’ll hand it over to Chris McCarthy for an intro. Chris is going to be actually demoing our Salesforce to NetSuite integration application and our core platform for you today.

Yeah, thanks, Mark. Hi, everyone. My name is Chris McCarthy. Like Mark said, I’m a senior solution consultant here at Celigo. I’ve been at Celigo now a bit over three years and prior to actually joining Celigo, I worked over on the NetSuite side of things. I was a consultant on the services side of the NetSuite house. I also worked as a solution principal on the presale side of NetSuite, worked on the partner networks, also certified within Salesforce’s administrator. So really, I work really closely with a lot of our customers around automations in the web ops space, including Salesforce, NetSuite, a lot of our banking integration products, e-commerce integrations amongst many others. So happy to be here.

All right. Thanks, Chris. And then with that, a little bit about Celigo. So Celigo, if you’re not familiar with us, we are a SaaS software company based in Silicon Valley, California. We are in what’s called an integration platform as a service. So we are a cloud-based, multi-tenant integration solution that connects your applications together within your business, whether it’s applications, files, and really our reason for being is to automate your business processes. And we do that through integrating and not just moving data and integrating that, but actually applying embedded business logic as we’ll talk about, and giving you both a platform, but also pre-built business solutions on top of that platform to accomplish your goals, of which we’re going to talk about a very specific one today. At this point, we have about 5,000 customers and we’re processing over 15 billion records per month for our customers and that ends up automating 131,000 business processes for those customers across that base. And those are business processes that before they worked with us, were very typically manually done, or automating processes that were on a legacy or clunky solution and it’s that automation of process and increasing efficiency in organizations which we really strive to enable.

And we’ve got a very broad customer base. We have everything from companies in the Fortune 500 all the way down through mid-market and into SMB. And so we see a broad representation of customer needs out there and have a solution to meet that full set. And obviously, you don’t have to rely just on our word for it. We have many third parties, including G2 crowd, Gartner Peer Insights, that have provided that third-party validation of our ability to provide that value to our customers. And in particular, we’re excited about the G2 crowd and the Peer Insights because it represents feedback based on the users, the actual users that our customers of the platform, and their experience– on the platform, in one of the highest-rated iPaaS solutions out there in the mid-market. So when it comes to sales, sales, and finance efficiency and bringing those together for and working to that goal for a company, it really comes down to quote-to-cash automation.

And we work with companies across the board, like I said, from all sizes, but everywhere on their automation journey. And almost everyone starts or maybe they’ve already gone– if they’ve already gone down this journey, they revisit the quote-to-cash automation first and most often simply because, let’s face it, it’s one of the most important areas of the organization to be able to book your transactions successfully be able to move towards fulfillment of those as quickly as possible. And it’s really the beginning of that customer journey post-sale. And accuracy, efficiency, is critically important there. And when we often kind of can think about this in a way that it can be very, very simple in theory. Hey, we just need to move closed opportunities from the CRM into the ERP as sales orders. How hard can that be? And in theory, that is pretty simple. But the reality of that, there’s a lot of complexity. And you don’t just move those transactions over. You have dependent records. You need items. You need to have a plan for your accounts, how you’re going to synchronize those.

And then that quickly expands because that’s one, not just enough, but also automation typically, it grows because as an organization, you see value from that. And also, the applications in your organization grow. And that’s really a key thing. And we often think of this in terms of foundational SaaS applications. So Salesforce is a CRM, for example, as well as NetSuite as your ERP, both foundational SaaS apps. There’s systems of record in finance and in sales, but that’s not the limit by far of the applications that a sales or finance team would be using. And in a typical mid-market organization now, you see upwards of a hundred SaaS applications. And even just in the quote to cash process, what we very, very often see is often 20 applications being involved or more when you look at everything that’s involved on both that sales and that finance side through that quote to cash journey. And if you are purchasing your applications and, like a lot of people, if you find that you don’t quite get the value expected from those once you’ve implemented that.

So if you’ve got those, you know you have a need, there’s a fantastic plethora of applications out there to meet some very pointed and specific business needs. Whether that’s the foundational ones, that’s your CRM and your ERP, or some of the things that are further out and a little bit more removed, but solving some problems and often a best of breed point solution. They can do a great job of solving that point solution. But if you find in your organizations, like the majority that we talk to, that you don’t quite get the value you expected. And often, it’s maybe 80% there, but quite frequently, we hear that it’s like, “Oh, it’s only really helping us half as much as we thought.” And that core problem, what’s causing that gap, is a lack of automation and integration between those systems. That by adding those new SaaS applications as you grow as an organization, you’re creating new data silos and you’re actually creating fragmented business processes. So you’ve solved the problem at one hand with that SaaS app, but you’ve also usually created another if you haven’t had a good plan for integration.

And this is really helpful to understand because wherever you are in your journey, and whether you’re a newly funded startup or maybe just hitting revenue stage and now you’re implementing those foundational applications for the first time, if you keep growing and you hit your growth targets, those are going to be far from the only applications you have. And you’re going to keep adding those. And that’s going to grow. And that’s going to create the need for much more automation than just the basic CRM, ERP, movement of a few records. It will rapidly grow. And understanding the need for that and knowing that you’re going to need to get there is really going to help you pick the right solution. Because you need something to meet these needs that’ll be quick to implement and have a rapid time to value now, but also meet the needs long-term that will have flexibility because you can’t possibly predict what you’re going to do with your business in the future. You have an idea, but as we all know, certainly, I think there’s a lot of people in the space right now that have been– we know that change is ever rapidly increasing.

Just the events of the last week with Silicon Valley Bank prove out that the only constant is change right now and agility and being able to react quickly is critical to moving forward and better preparing your business. And that’s really what this is all about, a solution now, but also having the right foundation for a solution for the future to give you the agility you need. So that’s kind of the big view on the integration, but why is this integration between your CRM and your ERP so necessary right now? Well, what we generally see is that the big impacts to justify this project sooner than later, it comes from three areas. Sales in operations. Sales is typically needing to accelerate their closed process. And they also have a desire to gain visibility into customer financials and status of those customers. Finance is always accelerating. Your monthly quarterly closed process is critical. And very often from my ERP consulting background, one of the biggest things when we came in to work to improve a close initiative with a client, very often the root cause of the delays was data inaccuracies and a lot of manual effort involved, whether it’s from inaccuracies or just from the fact that they’re manually moving over, often moving way more data than they should be.

And then finally, on the operations side, operations, IT, you’re always looking for and needing secure, scalable, and low maintenance solutions, and home-built solutions. Teams manually moving data are anything but secure and scalable. So as you move forward, and you might start with just a quote-to-cash process here, and begin your journey there. But the reality is even beyond that expanded quote-to-cash process, there are many other lines of business within an organization that are going to require automation. And as you build out your order-to-cash processes, you start to automate more of those. You’ll have more touch points whether it’s in marketing or starting to tie in data to get more accurate and visibility and more timely visibility into the return on investment for your marketing campaigns. Whether they’re traditional in-person events or digital programs, always looking for that. But that’s going to require more automation. As you get those deals closed, you’re going to have a need to address customer success side, get visibility into that customer journey, monitor and manage those customers along the way.

Again, that requires more integration between those systems to really develop and create efficient processes. And then along with this, the data warehousing and analytics usually come as a big need. And now you’ve got a full set of SaaS applications, and you’ve often got a team trying to report across the SaaS applications. And anyone that’s been through that, pulling that data together, putting them into Google Sheets, or merging it into Excel, trying to generate reports, that’s just not scalable. And there’s a lot better methods in moving to consolidated data repositories and BI tools, and this is the natural progression beyond this orderly cash as well as other areas like human resources and their automation needs and IT management. And we see this automation need growing within a business, and starting literally with what Chris is going to show you today with automation between Salesforce and NetSuite, CRM, and the ERP, but that is just the beginning of this broader journey. And if you don’t have a plan for this and pick the right solution, you end up with a very fragmented experience. And you end up very often with multiple solutions if you don’t think about this and put together a purposeful plan from the beginning for your automation, and build essentially an automation road map.

And you do not want your internal experience or your customers’ experience to be fragmented in order to prevent that, good automation in a good plan. Picking the right platform will give you one system both from your customer’s perspective and from your internal employees’ perspective as well as from your partners. And that’s really the key thing. All of these systems and processes should come together into a single holistic system. And for that, you need an integration platform as a service to accomplish that as your business grows. So we’re going to look at specifically Salesforce to NetSuite, but very often in organizations, especially as they grow, we see needs beyond that. Needs for more to handle other CRMs, whether it’s through acquisition, through M&A, bringing another organization into the fold that has another CRM, not quite ready to emerge those in and you need to maybe leave that CRM in place for a while until you can transition, but you do have the need for automation. That’s something that we can handle. And while we have nearly 1,000 customers that we’re integrating Salesforce to NetSuite for, we can handle CRM needs in a much broader spectrum than just with Salesforce.

So when it comes to integration, what are some of the options that are out there? Kind of hinted at some of these already. And one of the ones that we see really commonly is manual data transfer. So that’s maybe downloading Excel file, uploading it. That’s keying from one system to another. So if we think of the brute force effort, that’s really where everybody starts out. And quickly, that has its limits. And then you often move to frequently native or point-to-point integration. So while some CRM systems will have some native integration capabilities to ERPs, they can often be very limited. Or these point-to-point solutions that are specifically solving– and often think of them as a black box to solve this problem. And while they might solve that problem, and if you do your diligence correctly, they’ll meet your business needs maybe at that point in time, if you did the proper diligence, neither of those have the flexibility to accommodate a growing and dynamic business. And that often presents limitations. Reimplementing, adding a different solution, breaking it apart. And that has a cost to it as well and particularly where we companies get constrained and they aren’t actually evolving their business processes because they integration tool that they pick doesn’t support it and they don’t want to go to manual and end up actually holding the business back because of automation. And that’s the opposite of what you want.

And then the third option that we see is companies embarking on doing direct API integration. This is typically more technical organizations. We often see a lot of times the software company will do that. And no one has developers just sitting around, but more technical organization will think, “Well, we’ll just code something up. We’ll apply some development here to wire the system together.” And very often, we see these coded solutions around integration. Well, it might work. It only works sort of. And again, it’s limited. You now have custom software and you don’t have the governance, you don’t have the scalability, you don’t really have the maintainability and especially the management around errors and the time that value is often poor, you might be able to get something cobbled together, but to really get it in an equivalent level feature-wise with a platform is going to take a huge investment. And in the long term, a TCO can just be crippling for organization. And so that’s what leads us to what we call business process automations. And those are pre-built solutions on top of our iPass that actually encapsulate business logic and pre-map fields and records with that logic built in with flexibility of the iPass with them.

And so you get really the best of both worlds. And this is the most modern option. We’re bringing you something that’s unique in the iPass space. And these are much more– the solution like this is much more beyond a basic template. And what Chris is going to show you here in another minute is specifically our Salesforce NetSuite integration app or business process application for this use case. And it contains the experience that we’ve derived from almost a thousand customers that we’ve been working with to solve this automation problem. And we’re taking the wisdom from that and rolling that into a managed application that is still on top of the iPass. And so if I manage means we can centrally manage that from a standpoint. If Salesforce makes a change. If NetSuite makes a change, and we see the need to update our application, we can make that update and we can roll that out across our customer base so you get the benefits from that. So you get all of those benefits and rapid time to value, as you’ll see very quick implementation, so we’re removing the technical barriers, but also you’re still on an integration platform.

So anything that may come up as your business gets more complex, whether it’s maybe moving to CPQ, maybe it’s getting more data moving upstream. Adding in say a reoccurring billing solution, we can handle all of those as your needs grow or change over time, but you still get the quick time to value. And that’s really a key differentiator for working with our Salesforce and NetSuite solution. And with that, I’m going to turn it over to Chris here.

All right. Thank you, Mark. Let me go ahead and share my screen and then hopefully everyone can see it. Should be here. So for example, when we log into integrator.io, is all these different tiles that we can see and really kind of manage from the glance as far as the different integrations that we are facilitating through our integrator.io platform are iPass. So again, these business process automation that we’re talking about for Salesforce. And that’s what it would be represented as one of these tiles. So these tiles are just a really quick and easy way for us to organize these different integrations. So as we have maybe different users, that might log in and maintain or monitor these integrations. They’re able to see those at a glance. And then from here, we can tell whether or not we’re having any issues within this integration, we can see that there’s no issues, no errors or anything like that. If a connection goes down, we’ll touch on exactly how we’ll notify that in a different options you would have in order to facilitate troubleshooting any errors or any connection issues, things along those lines. But really the idea here is to have that single pane of glass to be able to manage all of your different integrations. So within the no solution here. And you can kind of think of this as sort of a module that, again, as Mark alluded to, is built on top of our platform.

But when we drill into it, we’re essentially going to see all the different categories of data that we saw in that flow chart that will be syncing back and forth between Salesforce and NetSuite. So whether that’s related to account and customer information, contact details, opportunities, products, financials, the list goes on. But from here, you’re able to really see and define your different flows in a flow, in the context that we’re talking about here in Salesforce. NetSuite is usually something like, “Hey, take a Salesforce account and move that into NetSuite to create that corresponding NetSuite customer.” Or if we have that syncing in a bidirectional fashion, we can have any kind of updates that may come back from NetSuite and sync into Salesforce as well. So you’re able to control and maintain which data is pushed or pulled from where. And then ultimately, be able to enrich that data as it moves. So kind of to Mark’s point, with a lot of those point-to-point kind of integrations or those kind of native plugins, what you tend to find is they’re sort of a delicate garden. You can’t really go outside of their use case. And that’s where the benefit of having a platform like Celigo would come in.

So as an example, if we wanted to come in here and take a look more specifically at what these flows are– and this is a really good visual representation of a flow. Again, within the context of just Salesforce and NetSuite, where we can define how and when we pull our data from Salesforce, and then ultimately, where we’re going to park it inside of NetSuite. And again, where pre-built integration comes to your benefit is we’ve already defined the records that we know are going to sync between the two systems because again, we’ve done this over 1,000 times. We know what is typically syncing from Salesforce into NetSuite and vice versa. So really, when it comes to the implementation side of things, the lift is really around things like field mapping and ensuring that you have all the necessary fields mapped between the systems. Whether that’s to drive reporting details as it relates to your customer base, or if that’s driving transaction level details, maybe, as it relates to billing, for example. But within this integration– and a lot of these fields will actually come mapped for you. Things like Bill Tos and Ship Tos statuses, those sort of things, have already been mapped. But anytime you want to come in and add an additional field, standard or custom, you can add really as many as you like.

So as soon as we get our connection authenticated into your different applications, we’re going to get the rest to see all the different fields and all the different records we want to work with. So if we needed to map– we’ll just use Billing City as an example. You’re able to simply come in here and using that dropdown pick list menu sort of fashion, be able to define what fields should sync from Salesforce to NetSuite, map those to things like internal IDs and those values from each system. So really, when it comes to the maintenance or even the initial stand-up of the integration, it does not require that you are a developer or that you’re inherently a technical resource. It’s someone that can really be maybe a business analyst. It can be controllers. It can be more financial-based resources. It does not have to be someone that is comfortable in the weeds of actually building out these integrations, working with things like JavaScript or anything like that. So it gives you a lot of flexibility to even filter out the responsibility of the integration so that you’re not bogging down IT resources just to stand up and maintain these integrations. So the field mapping is really quite a powerful tool there. We can see how well the integrations are running for us, how well it’s run historically, monitor the health of our connections between the two, and then we also have an audit log throughout the platform. So we can always see who’s doing what. So there’s no hiding in Celigo.

So if someone makes a change or an update has been made through the UI within the software, we’re going to capture that. So it’s really beneficial when you’re going through things like implementation and UAT if you’re playing around with different ways you want to sync this data. And it’s working just fine, but then all of a sudden it throws these errors at you. You can go in and see what has changed, revert those changes if needed, or find a better way to get what you’re looking for. Within these integrations, a lot of them are facilitated in real-time. So they’re very much event-driven. So looking at our schedule here, we can see the push and pull of this data is happening in real-time as it relates to accounts and customers, contacts, opportunities that, for example, get marked as closed. One, push those into NetSuite to create your sales orders and drive that billing process within NetSuite. We also have a set of integrations. For example, the financial sink. So with NetSuite, its bread and butter being around the financial side of the house, we have the ability to sink customer financials, so really like balance information, days overdue, overdue balance on build orders, those sorts of things, and have that synced on a scheduled basis. We can also sync transaction details. So this can be invoices. It can be payments. It can be credits, cash-outs, deposits, refunds. It’s pretty much the whole game of the AR, so the NetSuite household.

But, again, the way that we would set up these schedules, it’s really facilitated through all these dropdowns and these picklists, which is really a theme throughout our platform. And the idea here, again, is to make sure that there’s more than just one department that can leverage and maintain and use this tool going forward outside of just the confines of the pre-built integration application for Salesforce in that suite. So if I want to come in here and change this around to every hour on the hour, starting at 1:00 AM, maybe just Monday through Friday, again, it’s all kind of click, not code, and that’s really a theme that we take to heart here at Celigo. And then you can always run things on demand. So if, for example, you’re only syncing these transactions maybe once a week but your month-end close falls on a Wednesday, we want to make sure that Salesforce has every piece of up-to-date data as we lock down the AR side of NetSuite. Then we can go in, run that on demand, see that move on our dashboard, see what’s been completed, and how many records we process. But ideally, you’re not going to be in Celigo day in and day out, making sure that all of this is working for you. And so what we do is we let you set up as many users as you like. There’s no user license component within a Celigo subscription. So we don’t have the concept of seats. So you invite who you want into the platform and then give them the level of access that they require. Whether that’s a monitor, whether that’s a managed-level access, you can essentially differentiate those by read versus edit-level access roles.

Then you have admins, you have owners, those that can actually invite different users in. As an admin, I can actually delegate out when a user should be notified on specific job errors or if a connection ever goes down. I can also manage their permissions throughout the entire integration. So if I say they should be able to manage certain integrations, actually edit those– maybe it’s something like ADP than NetSuite or another type of HRIS system, maybe another CRM or marketing automation service, ticketing automation tools, and then different ones to monitor. Data warehousing is quite a lot that, again, we can facilitate project management tools through the platform. So we can really get to a granular level of who can do what throughout the entirety of the platform from that admin or owner perspective. And then when it comes to the notifications, this is where you can also invite different users in, and they can basically subscribe to the integration. So you can either assign it from the top down or just let everyone log in and, like I said, kind of subscribe to the integration. So if they only need to see NetSuite-centric errors, then that’s all I’ll ever see in my inbox. I only want to see if NetSuite goes offline. Those are only going to be the things I get notified about.

And then even when it comes to the settings, so to Mark’s point, the stand-up and the time to value of getting everything synced up, again, you’re seeing all those kind of picklists. So here are all the transaction types that we can sync into Salesforce from NetSuite. And these are, again, just the ones that kind of come off the shelf out of the gate. You can, through our platform, sync really whichever transaction types you like and plug those into Salesforce wherever you need to or, vice versa, working with Salesforce as much as I have. A lot of people use Salesforce very differently. It’s not really a one-size-fit-all, but there are a sense of commonalities through which this integration application hits all those different notes. But, again, that theme of the picklists and the dropdowns, radio buttons, checkboxes is really something that you’re going to see as part of even the setup. So, again even getting stood up and really implementing the solution is, again, something where you don’t need to be someone that’s comfortable within a more technical or developer type role.

So backing up here, just a little bit, so when we’re talking again about the integration app for Salesforce and NetSuite, that might hit maybe 70, 80% of the use case that you’re looking for. But again, there’s always different nuance, again, with something like Salesforce, which is frankly like the Wild, Wild West of CRMs the ways that people customize and utilize it, ultimately. There might be other ways that you’re looking to facilitate your data exchange between Salesforce and NetSuite that don’t come inherently with this pre-built integration. But again, that’s when iPaaS comes and saves the day for you. So very different from those native plugins or those point connectors where you can’t really customize, you can’t really build on top of it, this is designed to give you a really good head start in terms of syncing all those kind of usual suspects between the two systems, things like accounts and customers, items, products, those sort of things. But then to then grow outside of that is pretty common. So something where you could set up maybe even an additional tile to help facilitate that type of integration. So whether that’s an integration between Salesforce and NetSuite, whether it’s more of exchanging flat files through an SFTP, Zendesk, and NetSuite. Or maybe you have a use case where you need to hit multiple different integrations through one single flow here, where we have different applications within one flow. So even though we’ve been talking in the confines of Salesforce and NetSuite, this is ultimately what a flow can be. It can be multiple steps, multiple applications that are exchanging data across those different platforms in a various schedule or frequency that you’re defining.

Now, if there is a use case that you see, and you see I’ve built up quite a lot, of different kind of proof of concepts, but you can always, again, come in here and leverage our Flow Builder tool, which is the screen we’re looking at now, to help facilitate those kinds of integrations. So if we needed to create something that, again, falls outside of the scope of that pre-built connector, this is where we’re going to come in here and be able to leverage the platform to, again, push and pull that data as we see fit. So if that’s, for example, starting from Salesforce, we can go in and select our application, and starting with our source, our destination screen is going to look very similar. We’ll see that in a second. But this where you can see all the different database connector types that we have, universal adapters for anything that might fall outside of our connector library. And simply a connector for us is we’ve seen this enough to where we essentially seen enough demand to build out a connector where we’ve abstracted those APIs into, again, those pick lists so that we can then work with– we want to work with the customer API where we want to list out all those customers and then build some parameters around which customers we want to pull.

Now, again, because there’s tens of thousands of softwares out there today, we have these universal connectors to facilitate integrations to even proprietary systems that would have some programmatic way for us to fetch data and interact with that system. So once we get connected to it, again, that’s where the benefit of the integration platform would come in for you. So if we wanted to, we can walk through this here quickly. Let’s start with Salesforce. The question here, “What would you like to do?” is really run the schedule. So is it going to be an export of those records on a scheduled basis? Or are we going to be listening for specific events taking place on those records to then push into the other system? We’ll go ahead and say, “Listen for the real-time events.” And then we’ll have a connection that’s already stood up, and then you can also recycle and reuse those listeners or those exports so you don’t have to start from scratch every time. And then as we hit Next, starting from scratch here is where we can come in and give it a name so we can and say get Salesforce record A. And then from here, I’m sure you’re tired of me mentioning these pick lists?, but here it is again. This is now where we can see all the different object types that are exposed through the R connection to then work with as we push that into, in this case, NetSuite.

So if it’s any kind of standard objects like your accounts, your contacts, maybe that’s something like a contract, contracted price, you can see, again, there’s quite a lot that we can work with. Or if it’s even a custom object, that’s, again, where we would come in and help facilitate that for you. So I apologize for the scrolling here. I’m just looking for something specific. I believe that I’ve got a project object that we can come in here, actually build into our trigger for that custom object. So again, we work with custom objects all day long. It’s not really something that we’re too worried about. We just want to make sure that we have the right records, the right systems talking to each other in the right frequencies and cadences.

So Chris–

Yes.

So Chris, when we think about applying this to a business problem for a customer, this is something you could use to say if someone had a reoccurring billing solution out there that maybe they were using NetSuite SuiteBilling or they had Zone Advanced Billing or maybe Zuora and they wanted to get some of that reoccurring subscription data into Salesforce. Is this what they would use to accomplish that?

Exactly, yeah, exactly right. So as you know, with NetSuite and Salesforce, you can kind of bolt on different modules. You can add new objects as you see fit to help your use case and then that’s where you would use this tool specifically to then pull or push that data as you see fit. So in the case of say like SuiteBilling, you need to create subscription records inside of NetSuite. Anyone that’s worked with SuiteBilling knows there’s kind of a sequence of events of things that need to happen in order to create that subscription. So that might be, hey, take this contract in Salesforce and then use that information to create the subscription, create the customer, the billing account, everything that’s needed in order to save that record within NetSuite. Or if you’re looking to pull that information out, you can do that as well. Or if you’re working with– a lot of the companies we work with work on a consumption based billing module, or a model I should say, where they might have some proprietary solution calculating usage. So in this case, we’re pushing that into Salesforce and we can even do that and facilitate that through our platform, right? Hook up into a proprietary system, push usage information into Salesforce for reporting or to help drive that billing cadence.

And then from here, we can preview that data, get a feel for all the different fields, like the quantities, the usage ID, the amounts, the types that would come out as a part of that, and then have that pushed into NetSuite. And then we can define different filters for when we should sync that data. So as it relates to that usage, when we want to define the parameters and really control the timing of the sync, maybe we want to make sure it’s a specific type of usage, or maybe making sure that the amount is greater than zero. You can incorporate those different rules as it pertains to your process, and it builds out those expressions for you. So you don’t even need to know, in this example, we’re talking about Salesforce, so you don’t need to get to the level of understanding SOQL expressions, for example. And then from there, once we save and close that, it’s defined, okay, this is how and when and what data we’re pulling, in this case from Salesforce. We need to import that into another solution like a Zuora or a NetSuite SuiteBilling, or a NetSuite or Zone Advanced Billing, for example, again, just a different module that we can work with, is where we would point our destination to. So in the case here, we’ll just go ahead and call it NetSuite and say, okay, well, now we’re going to take that information and we’re going to import it into NetSuite, designate our connection that we’ve already established, and then we’re going to use that usage detail to then create maybe something like invoice details.

So we’ll say, okay, it’s import invoice then, again, we’re just coming in here and selecting the transaction type that we want to work with. So in this case, an invoice, what operation we want to do, is that an ad or is it an update. If it is something like an ad or update, we’re going to say, “Okay. Well, how do we find those existing records? And that’s where you can use things like system generate keys and IDs to make sure we’re linking the right records together. In this case, we’ll just go ahead and add. And then from here, it’s really going to be about your field mapping and making sure that we’re syncing up all the correct details between Salesforce and NetSuite to make sure that everything is synced up between the two systems as you needed to, again, drive your billing cadences, drive your reporting, and help – just from an automation perspective – reduce the time to value for you.

Okay. Chris, that makes a lot of sense. If someone out there has, say, right now, a fairly, let’s call it, standard or vanilla Salesforce CRM implementation, but they know they’re getting ready to take a bigger leap – maybe they’re going to expand their sales team, launch some new products – and they know they’re headed towards CPQ in a year or so, how does that factor in this? Do you still use– do you still use the Salesforce NetSuite integration application? How does that impact things?

Yeah. Good question. So with something like CPQ– and, again, we have a lot of customers that work with CPQ. And really sort of the nice thing about CPQ is a lot of the– I’ll call it the logic complexity, frankly, lives within Salesforce, but it still leverages a lot of standard objects you would come to find. So things like opportunities, it might generate– an opportunity might be marketable as one based on a primary quote being marked that then drives the creation of a contract, that contract spits out an order, and then from that order is what we would actually use to then go and sync into NetSuite. So we’re only coming in at the right time, in the right place to then pull that information out. But, again, if you needed that integration to work in a different fashion, that’s where we might take more of a hybrid approach where we’re using this baseline connector to, again, connect all the standard things that we need as far as account customer syncs, product and item syncs, the things that are really needed in order to facilitate creating those transactions. But then maybe on the back end, we’re creating something– I just exit out of here. That might be more along the lines of having a contract sync to an invoice or having a contract sync to a subscription. There’s always those different nuances, opportunities, creating projects is actually a very, very common practice that we see with a lot of our services-based customers. So those kinds of things are typically where we take more of a hybrid approach.

Fantastic.

All right. Now, a few other things just to mention just overall about the platform. So different tools, we just went through the flow builder. We also have our own data loader tool. This is actually a free tool that you can sign up and use today. Fun fact, I used to use this when I was back at NetSuite for data migration. So I found this to be really helpful for loading in those CSV files or Excel files. We have different supports. We support different file types, and it’s something that’s facilitated through web services. So I just found this to be a lot quicker especially with historical migrations. So definitely we’re taking a look at it if you’re doing any sort of implementation. Different reports that you can run just taking a look at how well the integration is performing for you. You can also pull in everything that we saw, for example, on the dashboard as it relates to these integrations. We can pull that, everything that you see here on has an API behind it. Being an integration platform, we figured we should have some pretty good APIs to work with. So if you wanted to pull this kind of detail into, maybe it’s a data warehouse where then you run some kind of analytics tool over it to get some executive reporting or you want to see how well our tool is performing for you. That’s something that we’ve seen quite a few customers perform as well. And then at the end of the day, although we’ve gone through everything and we haven’t coded anything, we haven’t gotten to the level of incorporating JavaScript, the platform can absolutely do that.

So there’s always use cases that will require some manipulation of data at that extent into that level. And so that’s where we can work with actually incorporating specific scripts within your integration. So if you need to, again, manipulate your data as we’re passing it between these different systems. We can absolutely do that. Transformation rules that you can incorporate or logic, for example, we’re hooking up to a system that’s written in XML. We read an adjacent, so we go ahead and we perform the transformation for you. That’s something that we can go ahead and do, again, within the playground. Now, if you’re not on that technical side of things, you don’t have to see this. You don’t have to play around in the playground if you don’t want to. It’s something you can simply turn on or turn off within your profile. And then we have a lot of different places for help. Our help center is very, very robust. I mean, specifically around Salesforce and that’s where there’s a ton of really good content within our help center to see exactly how to facilitate those integrations, implications doing it one way versus another. Our community is a great place to go if you want to see a more collaborative experience between our team as well as our customer base. You can always work with support if you’re running into a wall, and then we have Celigo University, which is a really good place to go to. If you’d like to learn a little bit more, and I would say a tutorial based environment, this is a fantastic place to go.

And remember, I mentioned there’s no utilizing component with Celigo. Anyone you grant access to within Celigo has access to Celigo university. So if you want to designate someone in-house to be your kind of Celigo guru or go-to resource, this is a really good place for them to learn, get certified within our platform. Our certifications don’t cost you anything. So you can simply come in here and again, really build that knowledge in-house. So you don’t have to lean on us. You don’t need to lean on a third party in order to maintain this tool going forward. And then really kind of last but not least, I know we want to save some time for questions. Is our marketplace or if you’re curious around anything else we integrate into or out of what we have connectors built out for, maybe it’s templates or fully prioritized business process automations, this is something that you can see. You can also see this on our website. But within our marketplace in Celigo, you can see– I’m not going to scroll through the whole thing here. That would take the rest of our time. But you can see there’s quite a lot of other pieces of functionality that we can offer in terms of automation across the different departments within your organization.

All right. Thank you, Chris. That was great. Great walkthrough of the platform and some of the capabilities.

Absolutely. I want to see if there are any questions or anything that I missed since–

I know there were some questions that came in from the audience here. And specifically, I won’t get into specifically answering those individually, maybe until the end, but we can definitely handle– there was questions really about what different types of objects and records can we handle. And really, the key thing is because we have the iPass platform, we can integrate any of those into the platform. Some of those are actually covered by the– some of the needs are covered within the Salesforce nets with the integration app. But anything that isn’t, we always have that core platform capability to be able to integrate. So we can accommodate really any scenario that you come up with from an automation need between the two systems or third systems coming up. So just in kind of wrapping here, we want to go through a few more things. And just to recap we have, and I just mentioned here, but again the key thing to remember is that our integration application is built– is really best of breed, pre-built solution, unlike anything out there in the iPass marketplace, but again it’s built on top of an iPad. So you have also access to the pre-built connectors, universal adapters, and everything that an iPass brings you from a security and governance and capability standpoint.

So you really aren’t limited for your future and as your business needs change we’ll be able to work with you to accommodate it with our platform. And always great to look at some examples of customers out there that have been successful, and we’ll go into all of these in a ton of detail. But we work with everything and see successes from something from a company like Swapcard that’s an early-stage software startup who we were able to come in and, again, like a lot of companies, they were buried in a lot of manual effort and had expensive resources and their accounting team working on tasks. They’re very manual tasks and we’re able to come in and automate their Salesforce to NetSuite needs and synchronize their reoccurring billing solution and NetSuite to give them substantial automation and efficiency. And everything from that to CDC Foundation, which is a nonprofit. And I know that there was a nonprofit question that came up, but we work with many nonprofits, and depending on your needs our integration application can work out of the box, or if you’ve got one of the alternate implementations, we can use our, again, platform iPass flows to meet your needs.

And again, we saw with CDC Foundation the needs that– really the leverage both solutions. The integration application for Salesforce and NetSuite and platform flows to meet their needs and really help them meet their growth needs. And in particular we engaged with them during the pandemic where they saw a big explosion of inbound funding, and help them grow and expand a great deal at a critical moment. And then they’re not just stopping at integrating order-cash process, but then moving beyond to more finance automation through leveraging Concur, and also to HR automation as well. And the final one is WeTransfer, which is a later-stage startup, higher-revenue software company that’s further along in their journey. And while they started leveraging our Salesforce to NetSuite integration solution, that was just the beginning for them. They were not only looking to complete out the quote-to-cash automation, but accelerate their full close process, as well as move beyond and automate a lot more areas of their organization, and selected Celigo as the iPass for that, and we were able to achieve that efficiency in their organization through leveraging our platform.

So really, wherever you’re at in this quote-to-cash automation journey, no matter how sophisticated you are, whether you’ve got. You’ve got 20 applications already in quote to cash or you just have your two foundational applications and you’re starting and you’re doing integration for the first time. We can work with you and Celigo can meet your needs on that journey. And we really do that uniquely because we’re able to integrate a huge spectrum of business applications, whether they’re modern SaaS applications or legacy solutions that are maybe providing file transfers or custom applications that your team might have built. We can cover all those automation needs through our integration applications. We’re actually embedding business logic, and that’s very unique to what we do. So you’re getting an absolute most sophisticated type of solution that’s on top of the foundation of an iPaaS.

And then, as you saw from the demo that Chris showed, you don’t have to be a developer to leverage our platform. We’ve designed our platform so that it can be leveraged by business teams. So that tech-savvy business users can engage with our platform to manage, maintain, extend, and even develop new flows. And all of that adds up to accelerate your digital transformation as an organization. And with that, I want to thank everyone for attending, and I also want to try to catch a few of the questions that may be coming up here. So, I know there was a question here, specifically about nonprofits. As far as integrating the Salesforce nonprofit edition to the NetSuite nonprofit edition, I think, Chris, you’ve done a little bit more in-depth work on that. Is there anything you’d like to add as far as accomplishing those integrations?

Yeah. So, that pre-built integration does work with both of those solution sets. I’ve seen and I’ll note is, a lot of times we typically tend to go that to either a hybrid approach or that is something that we build through the platform holistically because of just the nature of how a nonprofit functions versus a for-profit company. So opportunities typically are treated a little differently. Maybe they’re treated as a pledge where we need to generate an invoice, right? They’re not using sales workers. Or maybe it’s a one-time donation event, right? That we’d need to move into. And that’s really then maybe we create something like a cash sale if that was a credit card transaction that was from a website, such as Salesforce, and then we’d pull into NetSuite. Those are all different ways that we would leverage the platform to help facilitate those integrations. So, a long way to say yes.

Great. And exactly the same way. That’s how we would handle custom objects. And then another question came in around connecting vendor accounts and subsequent data is — Chris, is that included in the Salesforce, NetSuite integration application?

So that would be more of a platform-based flow. If you needed a vendor account to create a vendor record inside of NetSuite, and the associated contacts for that vendor, you could easily build out that same type of integration, which is pointing at a different title.

Okay. Excellent. And I know a question came in around if we have plans to output a test class for the Salesforce trigger. In order to deploy through a chain set, you need a test class.

That’s a good question. I don’t know if we have that built into it as of yet, but we can look into our product portals and see if that’s something that’s already been released or if that’s already been enhanced. That’s also something you can see within the platform. I don’t think I touched on that, but we can go ahead and check on that.

Okay. Yeah. That’s something we can work with product management on to get the answer and see if that’s in the road map. And then with that, we’re at time. I appreciate everyone for joining. Letting us share the platform and helping lay out, hopefully, what everyone found to be a useful roadmap to starting and continuing your automation journey. Thank you very much.

Thank you, everyone.