Integration of E-Commerce with Abacus Financials on Salesforce

E-Commerce has been the buzz word of the digital era for almost a decade now and the latest entrant is its younger sibling, Live-Commerce. The purpose of both is the simplification of the buying experience for customers to achieve higher sales.

E-Commerce operational systems generally automate the buying experience to a large extent, but at the same time create a gap in the automation of back-end systems. The main reasons being the complexity of the business processes and the high number of E-Commerce use case scenarios.

The disproportionate ratio of automation between the operational systems and back-end ERP systems combined with the lack of an accounting system designed for complex E-Commerce transactions, which can sync the data downstream, are the major contributors to the gap in digital convergence.

With growing dependence on IT automation and Cloud Convergence, the sooner organisations adopt digital convergence strategies, the sooner they will ensure maximum ROI on technology investments. 

Current Problems with Digital Convergence

• Not having an organisation wide IT convergence strategy before developing the disparate systems.

• Not planning the automation of E-Commerce use-cases and data flows effectively until they arrive at the back-end ERP systems.

• High data volumes generated by large numbers of online E-Commerce transactions cause the back-end systems to be either out of sync or failed sync because of limited system resources on the Cloud.

• Large number of small monetary value transactions such as commissions, taxes and refunds causing inaccuracy in accounting, leading to potential compliance and audit issues.

• Non-availability of a dedicated off-the-shelf accounting system designed for complex E-Commerce transactions which can sync the data downstream.

• Not having the mechanism to maintain and synchronize the organisation-wide metadata set, master reference data and a single view of the customer data.

• Manual consolidation of data from operational E-Commerce systems and time-consuming manual keying-in to the accounting system, leading to errors, non-compliance and wasted human effort.

• Deploying human and other valuable resources to solve the mundane tasks of accounting and finance which could have been easily solved by software instead.

• Organisation wide ERP systems not connected with the operational E-Commerce systems.

• Missing a single System-of-Records (Single Source of Truth) in the organisation due to multiple and spread-out technology systems on different environments.

• Spending a considerable amount of money to build data visualization, data analytics, reports and dashboards for the management team, when this could be done easily without incurring additional expenses.

• Highly dependent on the IT team for help and support during business operation hours, thereby causing hindrance to the productivity of business and field users.

• Delayed or no single view of customer data between sales, operations finance and support teams.

Key To Digital Convergence

Irrespective of the E-Commerce operational system, business process and the industry of the business, one common department across any organisation is Accounting & Finance. The accounting & finance tasks are mostly well-defined and well-established processes across the globe.

So, it makes complete sense to start the automation and digital convergence of an organisation from the finance department so as to reap the maximum benefits on technology investments. Since the whole department follows Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), it is always better to delegate them to reliable and easy software such as Abacus Financials so that the organisation resources can be better deployed in solving other, more innovative and niche problems which are specific to a business.

Technology Selection

For small, medium or large companies Cloud adoption is the way forward. The whole business and technology fraternity is now well convinced that digital convergence on the Cloud is the suitable option to achieve maximum IT automation. The key is to select a reliable Cloud platform which can offer most of the IT services out of the box, so that the business will have to focus only on the application logic of the software systems. Ideally, PAAS systems like Salesforce are always ahead in this arena.

The reasons why Abacus Financials is built on the salesforce.com lightning platform is its reliability, 24X7 availability and state of the art Cloud security.

The E-Commerce Use-Case

In the following section we can see how a complex E-Commerce use case has been solved using Abacus Financials.

Any typical E-Commerce business has a standard set of processes initiated with their own industry specific terminology and variations. Though the operational names of these transactions may vary per industry, the GAAP financial principles to recognise these as accounting transactions remain the same.

Some of the e-commerce scenarios where there is an obvious need for integration with the back-end Finance & Accounting application are:

• Order, pay online and get the product or service delivered

• Pay first and get a receipt; obtain the product or service and get an invoice

• Cancellations and refunds

• Apply coupons and vouchers.

When a customer does any operational transaction in E-Commerce such as buying some food online, it’s just one transaction for the customer. But from an accounting perspective, the very same online transaction is made up of around 6 or 7 different transactions as shown below. This example illustrates the way in which these complex data is brought into Abacus Financials and fits into the backend accounting system.

Let’s consider an online retailer website where a customer (who is not VAT registered) makes a purchase worth £100 using a third-party payment gateway. Now this £100 is a single Order transaction for the customer. But under the hood, the E-Commerce retailer or aggregator needs to apportion this amount into the various different accounting transactions.

In this example of a £100 Order the customer pays via PayPal, who takes a £5 fee.  The customer money is paid into a segregated Client Account until the service is delivered, at which time the £4 income is recognised along with £1 VAT and the supplier of the service is paid £90 for their contribution.

Customer Orders for: 100 GBP, in which each of the involved party has its own share. In accounting, this single transaction will be split up as per the posting rules and will be separated and posted to the General Ledger accordingly as shown below.

To try these transactions for your organization, download the application. 

Once the individual transactions are split and posted to the General Ledger, the various financial reports: Balance Sheet, Account Receivables, Account Payables, Profit and Loss and Tax Liability will be drawn directly from the Ledger (single source of truth) preserving the data integrity across the system.

With Abacus Financials as the Accounting Software on the Salesforce platform, any E-Commerce business can now clearly and easily integrate with accounting across the organisation to achieve a single source of the data. This would solve the most prominent problem of digital convergence of any E-Commerce-based business.

Features of Abacus Financials:

Apart from the E-Commerce integration benefits offered by Abacus Financials, the product itself is loaded with several out-of-box accounting and software features.

• Support for all accounting transactions

• Real-world emulating UI/UX

• Little user training required

• UK & Ireland specific design to reduce initial setup and speed-up onboarding of users.

• Easy and intelligent Bank Reconciliation process

• Financial reports

• Accruals and Cash UK & Irish VAT

• Post Brexit VAT support with MTD integration

• Fully customizable Reports and Dashboards

• Tested with millions of records with a huge E-Commerce data load

• Pre-built Restful APIs to integrate any external system with ease.

To know more about Abacus Financials and to schedule a demo, click here.

Conclusion

The success of organisation-wide Digital Convergence is driven by the Cloud presence, automation of complex E-Commerce operations with the ERP and a bottom-up approach of the application integrations.

Considering Accounting & Finance at the heart of any digital convergence program and getting it on the Salesforce Cloud platform is the right choice for organisations looking for complete Digital Convergence. Abacus Financials connected with the E-Commerce operational system, fits the bill exactly due to its flexibility in integration in a quick span of time.

To schedule a curated demo for your industry specific problem on AbacusFinancials, contact here: pj@abacusfinancials.com ; +44 (0)161 262 0300