A Better Collections Solution

Our customers tend to get excellent mileage when we build integrations together. We’ve been using Integration Manager (or IMAN) to deploy some valuable integrations that just would not be possible without this tool. Here’s an example of how we created a a better collections solution using a combination of IMAN and Salesforce.

“It’s streamlined, it’s efficient, and it’s saving time in the collections process. It’s helping with our numbers because customers receive a copy of their past due invoice with the initial collections notice and they’re paying without us having to call.” – Anita Clements, Senior Accountant, Echo Engineering

The challenge with having siloed systems and applications is that the data are compartmentalized. This makes it time-consuming to see the “big picture” all in one place and act on aggregated data. In this example, Echo kept contact and sales information in Salesforce and accounting information in the ERP system.

The data in Salesforce was used to flag contacts as “Collections Contacts”. Salesforce was a useful and natural place to store that flag, but it does not have a built-in way to communicate that information to the application that would actually send out the collections data!

In this case our mission was to have a tool that could “look at” the data in Salesforce. From there we would retrieve the desired contact information from that database and present it to Sage Alerts & Workflow, which could then send out an initial collections request to the customer, leveraging financial data stored in Sage 300 ERP.

This initial collections request eliminated the customer’s former manual process where a staff person would send our hard copy statements each month.

We worked with Anita Clements and her team at Echo Engineering to use IMAN’s Salesforce Connector to retrieve the contact-level data from Salesforce. This data was then inserted into a custom database of our design where it could be read by the Sage Alerts & Workflow application. Therefore, Sage Alerts & Workflow was able to view the latest information about Salesforce contact information and account managers, link that data to the Sage 300 customer data, send collections letters, and track the sent letters.

Anita concluded with why this really is a better collections solution:

“Since we use Salesforce as our CRM, we don’t have to store the contact info in 2 different places. All we have to do is maintain our contacts and decide who we want to be the collections contacts at each customer. All the logic DataQuest built into the integration makes it a one-stop shop to get the collections letters out automatically.”