Best Practices for Integrating Sage CRM with Your Accounting System

Here’s 6 Key Tips to Ensure a Seamless Integration

Sage CRM is a feature-rich Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution which is easy to use and fast to deploy. It helps you manage your entire contact base in one place, track your leads and make smart decisions based on accurate information.

When considering integrating Sage CRM with your accounting system, whether that’s Sage 50, Sage 200, or a different solution all together, it’s important you are fully prepared.

Being prepared ahead of time helps ensure your data flows smoothly between platforms, avoids headaches later down the line and prevents costly disruption to your business operations.

To ensure you can integrate with confidence, this article highlights the best practices when integrating Sage CRM with your accounting system.

Best Practices

1. Define Clear Integration Objectives

It’s important you identify what data needs to flow between systems and in what direction. Having a clear understanding of this is critical to help prevent duplicate records and guards against conflicting updates.

When defining your objectives, your focus should be on supporting your business processes. For example, your sales team might create quotes and orders that flow into accounting for invoicing. Then if payments are tracked in accounting, that data could flow back into your CRM system.

Having a clear plan for your data can also improve your overall system performance. This is because it can reduce potential resource-intensive bi-directional syncs that may not be necessary. This therefore reduces unnecessary processing, improving efficiency and even performance.

2. Determine Ownership of Data

By determining ownership of data, you’re ensuring that each system remains responsible for the data that it is designed to manage. In simple terms, each system knows what data it owns and how to handle it.

For example, you could identify Sage CRM as the owner of company information and contact details when first engaging with a prospect, but customer trading terms and credit limits be owned and maintained within your accounting system (post integration). You may also wish for billing contacts and address details to be managed within your accounting system, but for updates to flow back into CRM.

Having this ownership of data clearly defined can make things clearer and overall easier to manage information and your integration objectives.

3. Cleanse Your Data

When integrating Sage CRM with your accounting system, you’re connecting two powerful engines that drive your business operations. So, if the data flowing between them is messy or inconsistent, it can cause serious friction.

That’s why a key strategy for a smooth integration is to ‘clean’ your data. Cleansing your data means removing any duplicate data, standardising naming conventions and ensuring the format of the data that you will map for synchronisation is consistent.

By doing this, you are not only making sure your data is trustworthy, which supports better decision-making, but you are enabling a reliable, error-free integration between the two systems.

4. Consider Data Security

Another key strategy for safety purposes is to make sure that only the data that needs to be shared, is. Just because you can share the data between each system, doesn’t always mean you should.

There should be a clear business need for the data to be shared, and appropriate user-level permissions should be in place for sensitive information.

For example, there is often a requirement for CRM users to be able to see a snapshot of financial data (such as outstanding balances). However, the standard default for when accessing this data from within a CRM system is to lock down for editing, preventing accidental updates.

5. Plan for User Training and Change Management

Effective training on how to use the integrated system is key to a successful transition. It ensures that your team understands not just how to use the tools, but also why the integration is happening.

Running training sessions with your team offers you the opportunity to communicate the objectives of the integration, the intended benefits and your broader business strategy. These training sessions can help to align your team’s expectations, build confidence, and minimise confusion and resistance to change.

6. Perform a Test

It is essential to test your integrated system before going live. You should perform a test with realistic data and go through the full end-to-end processes. Where possible, you should use large volumes of data and focus on testing scenarios that are outside the normal range of expected behaviour.

For example, when creating quotes and orders, this could mean looking at things such as taxes, multiple currencies and combinations of different line types. This will most accurately reflect how the real integration will go and will allow you to identify any issues.

Within a new integrated platform, it’s important to ensure that any documents produced, especially customer-facing documents, are accurate and can be generated with ease from your CRM or accounting system.

If you’re interested in learning more about Sage CRM or have any questions, do not hesitate to get in touch with your Account Manager or give us a call directly on 01332 588508. 

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