We got an exciting request from one of our customers—they wanted to show the Gross Profit on a Salesforce Opportunity based on their online accounting data. What made this exciting is that the online account package doesn't offer traditional Job Costing, so the solution had to exceed the existing capabilities.
The customer's goal was to put Purchase Orders and Bills under a Salesforce Opportunity (allowing for multiple of each) as well as Invoices. This had to show live accounting data, so when an Invoice was marked Paid in the accounting software, that had to flow through to Salesforce.
The customer's business model is pretty interesting. They are part of the IoT (Internet of Things) Revolution. Remember when someone walked around your school with a white coat, hair net and thermometer and checked the temperatures of your school lunch for Health & Safety? That is being replaced by live, real-time wireless devices that save schools money and increase accuracy. And this company is on the cutting edge of providing wireless monitoring devices to the education, health care and pharmaceutical industry.
Except, they were unsure what their profit was on each Opportunity. Determining this required running accounting reports, exporting data to Excel and then massaging it so they had sight on their Opportunities. It was tedious and time consuming. Worse, every time an Invoice or PO was added in, the report became instantly out of date.
Our solution was to use Breadwinner to achieve a two-way integration from Salesforce to online accounting and back, including all the Invoices, Bills, and Purchase Orders. We had deployed Breadwinner before for clients who needed Invoices as part of their finance solution, but now we were using Breadwinner for Bills and Purchase Orders as well.
Breadwinner was able to handle this well, including having multiple Purchase Orders per single Opportunity go to different suppliers. We (Xenogenix) added custom fields to the Product that specified which Supplier the Product came from. And Breadwinner ensured that the right products were ordered from the right supplier.
As well as saving time in the ordering process, the client was able to get insight into their business and finally see their Gross Profit by Opportunity. And with that, we had a happy, more profitable customers, which is our goal every engagement! "
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