The features and benefits of FinancialForce Billing
Streamlined, accurate invoice processing
FinancialForce Billing delivers powerful, dedicated tools for more efficient, accurate and consistent creation and handling of sales invoices, to improve the process support of any financials or ERP system.
And salesforce.com customers gain even more streamlined and accurate sales invoice creation and processing, because Salesforce CRM and FinancialForce Billing share a single, secure platform, database and toolset. So, for example, enabling users to create an invoice directly from any "opportunity", support case or other billable activity captured in Salesforce CRM – in one seamless system, without rekeying shared details.
Click on any of the features below, to find out more about how FinancialForce Billing could benefit your organization.
Quicker, more accurate client billing
FinancialForce Billing streamlines invoicing processes by using information already held in Salesforce CRM – so there’s no need for manual rekeying or complex integrations. For example, customer and product details can be simply added into an invoice at the click of a button.
See the application tour - Opportunities page 
It also gives the accounts team access to customer information that is more complete and up to date, because it’s maintained by customer-facing departments that have day-to-day contact with them, such as sales, marketing and customer services. This speeds up payment by ensuring that invoices are issued as promptly as possible and that payment is not delayed by incorrect or out-of-date details.
Better client management
FinancialForce applications can also add a whole new dimension to the information at the fingertips of your customer-facing staff, by giving them a real-time view of a client’s account activity. Billing can feed back details of recent invoices, and when used with FinancialForce Accounting the picture is even clearer, providing details of payments made, payments outstanding and accurate credit limits.
For example: details of unpaid invoices can be shared with your other Salesforce CRM users, so they are aware of the debt and can help with the collection process. It also means you can reduce the risk of further sales being made to bad payers.
Complete control to support your processes
- Creation – users can choose to either drop in all the relevant customer, product and pricing information from a Salesforce CRM opportunity or start from scratch.
See the application tour - Opportunities page
Built-in integration also enables invoices to be input from Excel® spreadsheets or created from Basecamp® timesheets/project data.
- Editing – lines can be added or deleted, prices changed and tax rates and the invoice currency altered if needed.
See the application tour - Create Invoice page - Output – once posted, the invoice can be viewed as a PDF and printed or emailed as required. If necessary the invoice can be converted to a credit note without the need for any manual rekeying.
See the application tour - Posted Invoice page
FinancialForce Billing also supports high-volume printing for batched production of invoices.
More intuitive user-focused working
FinancialForce applications offer unique “Launchpad” facilities to assist users.
These provide a “friendly”, graphical, process-based interface so that users can see and carry out tasks in a clear, ordered sequence that relates to how they actually work.
This step-by-step approach improves user adoption, whilst helping to ensure that processes are completed efficiently and consistently.
Encouraging swifter settlement of bills
One of the additional facilities enabled by our applications’ web-based integration capabilities is to give your customers a “Pay Now!” button in your invoice email*, so that they can make an instant payment to you via PayPal.
N.B. Whilst this is not currently part of the standard application, we do provide instructions and free email templates – via our developer site – so that your IT team can quickly set up this facility for you.
Enabling “spike-free” revenue accounting
The income scheduling facility gives you the ability to create an invoice and apportion the income received throughout the accounting year, thus avoiding revenue spikes in your management reports:
- Highly flexible and configurable invoicing, payment and revenue recognition scheduling capabilities to support the complex accounting needs of service and subscription based companies.
- Each revenue recognition schedule is defined by the user and can be different to invoicing or payment schedules.
- Auto generation of revenue recognition journals greatly simplifies period end processes and eliminates spreadsheets for revenue recognition handling.
Better visibility and transparency
- A drop-down panel on every invoice line means that you can add notes or assign dimensions to that item, so it can be used for subsequent sales/marketing reporting and analysis.
See the application tour - Create Invoice page - Once the invoice is complete, it is posted to the ledger and is assigned a unique transaction ID for easy auditability.
See the application tour - Posted Invoice page
Instant visibility
- FinancialForce applications are designed to put the most relevant information at the fingertips of your users – quickly and easily.
- Billing users can access instant “dashboards” of key indicators (a variety of graphs and charts). These provide a clearer, up-to-date picture of account activity to support them more effectively in their day-to-day work.
Fast, straightforward reporting
Because FinancialForce Billing works as an integral part of your Salesforce CRM application, you also benefit from ready-to-go, intuitive reporting tools, including a range of role-related reports.
You can simply select which filters and accounts to include and then you can edit the report by moving or adding columns – so you can quickly and easily customize reports to suit your specific business needs.