Integrate Your Salesforce and Accounting Systems with Accounting Subledger

As a nonprofit-focused consultant, one question I often hear is “how can I integrate Salesforce with our accounting system?”  The answer, until now, was that a custom solution needed to be built, or that we needed to rely on unpredictable solutions built by accounting companies. Thankfully, this Summer, Salesforce has released a product to solve this problem with the new Accounting Subledger. 

Accounting Subledger expands the great aspects of NPSP (Opportunities, Payments, and General Accounting Unit Allocations) with functionality that works behind the scenes to automatically create data records, called Ledger Entries, based on information that is already being regularly entered in Salesforce by Development professionals. These Ledger Entries can then be exported from Salesforce and imported to the General Ledger of any accounting software. In other words, Accounting Subledger acts as a translation tool between Salesforce and accounting, decreasing reconciliation times, increasing data accuracy, and saving time from manual data entry. 

Benefits of the Accounting Subledger

Eliminate Dual Data Entry

Before working at Arkus I had the pleasure of serving as the Finance Manager for a social services nonprofit in Los Angeles. While many aspects of the role were dynamic and interesting, one of the not-so-pleasant responsibilities included manually creating ledger entries for around $7m worth of revenue for 20 separate programs per year. By automatically generating Ledger Entries in a format that accounting understands, Accounting Subledger alleviates the need to enter these records into your accounting software by hand. This makes Accounting Subledger a great choice for organizations that receive a large number of donations. 

Accounting Subledger comes with pre-formatted reports for most major accounting systems including Quickbooks, Workday, and Financial Edge. These reports can be modified with any needed custom data. Here is an example of a report. 

Communication Flow

While working at the social services nonprofit, communication between the Development and Finance departments was never perfect. At least a dozen times a week I’d ask the Development Director, “what’s this check for?” The Accounting Subledger solves this communication gap by creating a clear data flow and process from Development to Finance, in a language that Finance understands. Development knows your donors and your donations. That information is stored and entered into Salesforce and sent to finance in a common language without needing to consult various teams for information.

Audit Proof System

Auditors require that financial records be incapable of being altered after they are posted to the general ledger. This is a standard feature of most Accounting Software. Accounting Subledger brings this audit-proof functionality to Salesforce: Ledger Entries created through the Accounting Subledger cannot be edited or deleted, thus enabling Salesforce to become an auditable system of record. To make a correction, a new Ledger Entry is created to correct the past record.  

Things to Keep in Mind

• Ledger Entries can be created in three ways.
  • Automatically every time an opportunity, payment, or GAU allocation is created
  • En masse on a daily schedule
  • En masse manually by clicking a button. We recommend that you set the ledgers entries to be created manually, right before a report is sent to Finance for import. This will keep the system from creating extraneous records and clogging up your General Ledger each time your Development team edits an opportunity, payment, or GAU allocation. 
• Accounting Subledger only supports the latest version of Enhanced Recurring Donations.
• Accounting Subledger can be installed and tested in a Developer Org or Sandbox, but not a free NPSP trial instance. 
• Accounting Subledger offers 2 license versions: Starter and Growth. Starter is meant for smaller organizations with basic accounting needs such as recognizing pledges, payments, and reversals. The Growth edition offers support for Debits/Credits, Dynamic GL Codes, and Accounting Periods.

Need Help Deciding?

Accounting Subledger offers a lot of benefits, but may not be the right fit for every organization. If you need help deciding, read the official documentation and considering reaching out to us at Arkus through the form in our site footer. You can also ask us a question in the Trailblazer Community or tweet directly at me on Twitter @dustinmcole.