Financial Force is a full Software as a Service (SaaS) accounting application, developed on salesforce.com's cloud computing platform, Force.com.

At Cogent we took the position, from the outset, that it's better to build a business on world class infrastructure than it is to introduce it later in the business lifecycle when integration with established practise and culture makes it a more onerous undertaking. 

With that in mind we established, and are continuing to build, our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system on Salesforce.com's Enterprise Edition, an expensive option for a business that was in startup phase at the time but, as we realized quickly, an option that becomes a well priced investment as the client base, and revenue, increases, and where the overall cost of ownership is small in comparison to a proprietary system. Besides, it's a really cool application, and a flexible development platform.

Financial Force emerged as an option right about the time we realized that there was a gaping need to integrate the Company's financial management with our CRM platform. We didn't have an issue with our previous application, we were familiar with it, it's widely used and accepted, and it did everything we needed, except integrate with Salesforce, or not in a way that we wanted it to.

Being a performance marketing business, Cogent's complete inventory is in the digital domain, which lends itself to metric analysis. Cogent's requirements are to consistently monitor the arbitrage between acquiring data, a cost,  and using that data to drive great results for our Client's online initiatives, revenue, in an environment where the variables are constantly changing.

We have been passionate adopters of cloud based computing systems so the obvious question we asked ourselves was; wouldn't it be great if our CRM and our Financial Management were integrated? The efficiencies to be gained made it a priority enquiry for us.

Financial Force gave us that integration. In fact FinancialForce is so integrated with Salesforce that the entire application is as one. We now have complete visibility of our Clients, and Vendors, from initial contact all the way through to invoicing and payment. 

Obviously the stability and continued development of the platform was an important part of the decision. We were inspired by the following, from the FinancialForce.com website;

The company [Financial Force] has been created to exploit and expand on the CODA 2go on-demand accounting solution and its technology. It was funded with an investment from UNIT4 (parent company of accounting software specialist CODA) and salesforce.com. FinancialForce solutions combine CODA's 30 years of designing and building financial applications, with salesforce.com's decade of platform dependability, availability and security.

Given the relationship between Salesforce and Financial Force we felt comfortable in our decision to adopt the application. Cogent, it could be assumed, doesn't quite fit the target market for FinancialForce. We're certainly no Telegraph Media Group, yet, but it's likely, now that more companies like ours, who realise that cloud based computing on platforms like Salesforce and Financial Force offer reasonably affordable access to significant, and secure, computing power, will come onto these applications early in their growth cycle.

Our experience with Financial Force, now we have had it in production for four months, has been a good one. In the coming articles on this topic I will convey our experience, what we learned, what we like, what we don't like and how it's working for us. We're using version 3.03 of Financial Force now and, as I understand it's almost due to go to version 4.0 so some of the development questions we have will probably be answered. The fact is we understand that great applications evolve, in fact that excites us given our technical orientation. We are much more likely to be passionate about an application where our input, no matter how small our company, is appreciated, where we have direct communication with the people behind the application - rather than suffering the ignominy of an offshore call centre in between us and the people who can actually help - and where we get real hands on assistance when we need it.

Feel free to join the Financial Force discussion and stay tuned for more insight into our experience.

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