Financial Force has been our financial platform for six months now the words of our general manager in an IM chat with me summed up our experience nicely "Imagine if we never had Salesforce and Financial Force these days!   Arrrgghh!"

As I intimated in my previous post on the topic Cogent has taken the view from the outset that it was expedient to introduce corporate level fiscal discipline and supporting infrastructure at the outset rather than introduce it into an already established process and culture. We've never regretted this decision, even though it's a somewhat costly approach, it quickly becomes a worthwhile investment in terms of efficiency.

The migration to Financial Force involved considerable work, if you are considering this product you have a distinct advantage if you are starting in a greenfield situation than you are if you are migrating from a previous system. Financial Force now comes with a QuickStart option that was not available when we did our migration. But, lets face it, this is an enterprise financial system, you're not likely to be installing it to do your weekly grocery budget, it's going to take some planning and a few days work to get it up and running.

We decided that our cut off point in the change over to Financial Force would be the end of financial year Q2 (December 31st here in Australia). We would migrate open, or part paid, invoices and purchase invoices, and the brought forward balances of all other General Ledger (GL) accounts. We had no need to integrate with SAP or other external systems.

The installation process is the standard process for all Salesforce App Exchange applications, this article assumes a basic knowledge of Salesforce administration so I'm not going to elaborate on this. 

The configuration of Financial Force is a two stage process, the first being the configuration, or integration of the application into Salesforce, the second being the configuration and setup of your financial system including your General Ledger. You are going to have to know your way around Salesforce administration and financial applications (or the people setting it up will) to get this done. Fortunately Financial Force comes with excellent built in documentation and two flow charts called "Browse Sequences"to step you through the process.

The Browse Sequences are hyperlinked to the relevant section of the Financial Force help documentation, the boxes with the green borders are mandatory, the others optional, and, provided you follow the sequence, it's pretty hard to go wrong.

The fun starts once you have the installation and configuration bedded down and get into the financial system itself. 

First up you have to create your chart of accounts. In the absence of QuickStart (in our case) it's necessary to create the chart of accounts from scratch. What I initially thought was an onerous process was actually a good opportunity to refine and improve the chart from the previous system, and, once I understood how the Trial Balance and Balance Sheet reporting hierarchies were structured I appreciated the more detailed analysis available. The one thing that would have made the whole process a little easier would have been the capability to enter opening balances while setting up the accounts. Opening balances are entered later by way of a journal entry - or, should your chart of accounts extend to more than 50 items like ours, multiple journals (a limitation in Salesforce so I understand).

As you can see by the second of the two Browse Sequences there are several more steps to the set up of your financial system, a detailed explanation of which is not for this post, but once you've established your chart of accounts and set up your company the rest is pretty straight forward.

There are a couple of things that you need to be aware of when setting up your chart of accounts, doing your opening balance journals and, come to think of it, pretty much everything else in Financial Force.

First, Financial Force expresses debits as positive integers (numbers) and credits as negative integers and typically, especially in reports, in single columns, so, if you are used to a left (dr) and right (cr) column system this takes a bit of getting used to. I found myself reciting "assets equals liabilities plus owners equity" quite a lot while going through this process. Seeing profit (owners equity) expressed as a negative integer is kinda weird!

Second, Financial Force does not allow you to edit anything once you have posted it to the general ledger. Once posted, an erroneous transaction must be reversed, credited, or journal entries created to correct the issue. At first I was dead against this, I understand how something like this is promotes the integrity of the accounting data but I challenge the notion that it's 100% necessary to have a financial system locked down so tightly without some form of management override available. However, and reluctantly, I've become accustomed to this 'feature' and it does impose a certain discipline that we lacked before.

The final stage of the migration, for us anyway, was the importing of open, or partly open invoices and purchases (referred to as sales invoices and payable invoices in Financial Force), and to do it in such a way that would present accurate aged receivable and aged payable reports without overstating our sales revenue (entering sales again) or purchase costs.

The key to doing the is a utility, provided by Financial Force called Financial Force XL, which allows you to extract and work with your data in MS Excel (only the PC versions).  We use Apple Mac's so we got around the PC issue by running Windows XP, and MS Excel, in VMware Fusion, which works well.

The XL process is, however, quite tedious. It's not (for obvious reasons) like you export a whole pile of data, create a data map and simply import it into Financial Force. It does require that you prepare the data correctly so we did the import one Customer at a time and separated Sales Invoices and Purchase Invoices into separate batches to avoid confusion. But, it does work, it provides good integrity checking, and we got our migration finished right on time for a January 1 2010 change over.

I'd like to hear from anyone else who's been through this transition. 

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