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[AppExchange Series] Salesforce QuickBooks Integration and its New Suggested Account Match Feature

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On March 11, 2022

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About the author: Curt Hopmann has a history of developing new products and improving existing ones, including various Salesforce Apps. As CEO of Breadwinner, Curt is driven to help those businesses that use Salesforce and accounting and payment processing software such as NetSuite, QuickBooks, Xero, and Stripe to succeed by discovering the power of Breadwinner’s intuitive integration solutions.

Is your organization struggling with cross-departmental coordination and communication? If your sales and finance teams are not in sync, a third-party integration tool such as Breadwinner could be the missing piece of the puzzle. An integration software that syncs your QuickBooks with your Salesforce CRM helps to align your sales and finance data for improved coordination and communication across your organization while creating centralized workflows. And the launch of Breadwinner’s new suggested account match feature makes the process of configuration between the two software even more powerful and practical.

Integrating QuickBooks with Salesforce (How Does It Work?)

Fortunately, it’s never been easier to integrate QuickBooks with Salesforce. Breadwinner offers a purpose-built connector solution for sales and finance teams to streamline their workflows. If you’re growing tired of navigating between QuickBooks and Salesforce to access customer and account data, Breadwinner mirrors critical financial data in real-time across both platforms.

This Salesforce-native application gives sales and finance teams access to automation features designed to radically streamline and simplify the use of QuickBooks and Salesforce. When your team members make changes to data inside Salesforce, this is reflected in QuickBooks within just a few minutes. Sales and finance can use real-time data to make informed decisions.

Connecting QuickBooks with Salesforce creates unified workflows for organizations frustrated with navigating through a disjointed stack of applications to complete simple tasks. Implementing an integration tool like Breadwinner, sales and finance teams are well-equipped to meet customer needs and can play a pivotal role in driving efficiency.

It’s never been more important for ambitious organizations to have access to effective workflow automation solutions. With more sales and finance teams embracing workflow automation than ever before, now is the time to start taking a few intuitive tools for a test drive. This will give you the chance to see how some tools could potentially optimize and enhance existing workflows.

Breadwinner’s New Suggested Account Match Feature

Breadwinner have recently added the new suggested account match feature to their Salesforce and QuickBooks integration. Like all the automation features, account matching is designed to accelerate workflows and eliminate the need for users to manually match QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts–helping to save a significant amount of time.

Their suggested account match feature works like a magic trick. When you bring customer data from QuickBooks into their Salesforce-native application, each QuickBooks customer must match to a Salesforce account. Rather than getting your team to manually match QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts, their account match feature does all the heavy lifting.

You can take the following steps to leverage the new suggested account match feature:

Scroll to the bottom of the main dashboard and select Preview Customer Match.

Once you are on the Breadwinner Account Match page, you will see a preview of how they are aligning your data across QuickBooks and Salesforce. At the top, you will see an option to Accept All Suggested Matches in light grey. If you are satisfied with how the data is aligned in the preview, you should click this link.

A pop-up will appear – providing you with details on how many customers Breadwinner was able to automatically match. You are given the option to either match sub-companies with their parent’s Salesforce account or their equivalent Salesforce account. Once you have selected your preferences, you can proceed by clicking the Yes button.

Taking a full range of data variables into consideration, Breadwinner will make an attempt to auto-match your QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts. As Breadwinner can align your data with a remarkable degree of accuracy, all your team will need to do is go through and simply accept the suggested matches. This speeds up the entire onboarding process.

If you have hundreds or even thousands of suggested matches to approve, Breadwinner isn’t going to make you approve each and every one of these. They give you the ability to approve suggested matches in bulk–so you do not need to scroll through them all. Once you’ve looked at just a few matches, you will see whether the data is correctly aligned and ready for approval.

When Breadwinner attempts to match a QuickBooks customer with a Salesforce account, it takes a range of data points into consideration, including the customer’s company name, postal address, and phone number. In the event that Breadwinner is unable to match a QuickBooks customer with a Salesforce account, you can select a Salesforce account with the lookup box.

How Sales & Finance Teams Are Using The New Feature

As a workflow automation solution designed to enhance the productivity of your organization, Breadwinner comes jam-packed with a broad range of automation features. Their new suggested account match feature prevents users from spending hours scrolling through data to manually pair QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts. This isn’t a good use of your time.

The suggested account match feature is one of several functionalities enabling users to hit the ground running with Breadwinner and immediately unlock value. The purpose of their connector is to prevent sales and finance teams from spending hours aligning Salesforce and QuickBooks data. Organizations are using our new feature to unlock value even faster than before.

From the outset, sales and finance teams experience the power of workflow automation. When you leverage Breadwinner’s solution, you do not need to set aside time to align QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts. With the introduction of the new suggested account match feature, aligning your data is a quick and easy task that’s no longer overwhelming for your team.

Sales and finance teams are using our new suggested account match feature to pair hundreds and thousands of QuickBooks customers with Salesforce accounts. With Breadwinner in your corner, you do not need to feel daunted by this task. After you’ve scrolled through a few of the suggested matches, you can choose to accept all matches and speed up the process.

At Breadwinner, the team is continuously working to push the functionality of their QuickBooks Salesforce integration further. The introduction of the new suggested account match feature is just one example of their efforts in creating a robust integration between the two systems. They have built a highly practical integration that successfully leverages automation to create unified workflows for sales and finance teams.

Take Breadwinner for a test drive with a free trial today, or book a demo with their team.

[Salesforce / AppExchange Series] Meet Accessnow, Salesforce Emergency and Privileged Access Management made easy!

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On May 21, 2018

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This week’s guest post for the AppExchange Series has been written by Francesco Quinterno, founder of accessnow which built a Salesforce app to help emergency management…for more details jump down to this great post!

accessnow was founded by Atlanta based Francesco Quinterno and Lesley Morgan.
They’ve leveraged their experience while working for The Coca-Cola Company, Colgate-Palmolive, Warner Brothers, IBM and Coca-Cola Enterprises to build an application that enables Governance, Risk Management and Compliance on the Salesforce platform.
They can be reached at [email protected].

Our purpose as Developers, Admins, Architects is to deliver applications that improve the lives of our customers. When things go smoothly the user community is appreciative and fills us with praise. However, when things go wrong, it can be a lonely place with no praise. A place where everyone’s focus shifts to asking who and how the issue was caused. In these heated moments, it takes cool heads and swift actions to get the business “back into business.”

One of the critical tasks during an emergency is getting the right experts the right access as quickly as possible. It is not uncommon during these high pressure situations to neglect security and governance protocols and act in a non-compliant way. Sys Admins can provide super user access without any reference to an incident number or change request which is then further exacerbated when and if the access is not taken away. All the above are the ingredients for a failed audit in the months to come.

With accessnow, the premier Salesforce Emergency and Privileged Access Management application, you don’t have to compromise speed for compliance.

How?

Meet Maggie Greene, the IT Support User: when an emergency arises, Maggie creates an accessnow request.

She inserts:

  • a reference number (which can be an incident number or change request number from the Case, Servicenow, Remedy or any ticketing system)
  • the reason for needing the elevated access
  • duration of the request
  • start time (immediately or scheduled in the future)

She selects:

  • the profile and/or role
  • or permissions
  • or permissions and role
  • or a single role

Available roles/profiles/permissions are defined based on Maggie’s skillset and job function.
Once she’s selected everything, she saves and submits for approval.

At this point, the request is either automatically or manually approved based on configuration of who the requester is and what is being requested.

Notifications can be configured for all these stages. Requester can be notified of his request creation and approval. Approver can be notified there is a request pending approval.

On approval of the accessnow request, Maggie automatically receives elevated access to begin the troubleshooting process.

While troubleshooting, all changes to data, configuration changes and data views are captured in audit logs that are native to Salesforce.

accessnow also captures logs when users with an accessnow request use the Log In As function. Anyone viewing the audit logs will clearly see the changes to data or configuration were carried out by a person who was logged in as someone else.

In screenshot below Maggie Greene created request and used the Log in As function to log in as Darryl Dixon. While Maggie was logged in as Darryl she changed data on a case. She then logged out as Darryl and changed Data as herself.

Call Center Resource Management Use Case

During heavy call volumes you need help from other resources to answer the phones. Sys Admins shouldn’t be spending their valuable time changing profiles, permission sets, and roles for multiple people.

Call center supervisors create slots of time where help is required. Internal employees claim these slots and for every approved time slot, an accessnow request is generated and approved.
Once the request is approved the internal employee is assigned a Call Center profile for the time defined in the slot.

While working with the new profile, all activities are logged. Once the time elapses the internal employee’s Call Center profile is revoked and their original profiles are reinstated.

Reports

Dashboard showing the top users, request by status and the permission requested.

Value

The application’s value is that it eliminates the dependency on Sys Admins for granting and revoking temporary Privileged Access. It allows users to urgently gain temporary access on-demand and automates the approval of the request and revoking of the privileged access. It allows auditors to access logs of activities performed while users had privileged access without having to interrogate Sys Admins. The logging is vital for SOX Internal Access Controls. accessnow allows Architects and Sys Admins to implement the Least Privilege Security Model by reducing the number of permanent Administrators required in the system. It allows organizations to close the gap on GDPR articles 17, 19, 23 and 32.

Contact us at [email protected] for more information.

[Salesforce / AppExchange series] BeeFree: responsive Email templates

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On April 25, 2018

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This week’s new post is dedicated to a new AppExchange app, meant to give us an awesome edge in Salesforce and that is creating beautiful, responsive Email Templates with a simple drag-n-drop editor.

Thanks to our week’s guest blogger Jitender Padda.

Jitender is the founder of CodeJinn and also an avid Salesforce developer who is always looking for innovative ways to make our lives easier on Salesforce.

The Challenge – Designing Elegant Responsive Emails

When it comes to designing perfect, responsive emails one has to make sure that it runs smoothly on all devices and this requires a team of professional Designers to toil endlessly to ensure that they create the perfect email which provides a rich and soothing vision to your customers. After all, it is one of you’re primary modes of communication with you’re audience and it needs to be done just right!

The Native Solution – Salesforce Email Editor

Let’s face the truth, even though we voted on this idea to have an improved email editor more than 1000 times, we still haven’t gotten what we would expect from a modern email editor. And now with the new Salesforce Marketing cloud, which does offer an enhanced native Email editor, it is highly unlikely we will see something like a drag-n-drop editor in our Sales Cloud or other Salesforce products. And thus we are forced to use custom HTML or visualforce which is quite time consuming and requires some technical knowledge.

Our Solution – BeeFree to the rescue

BeeFree is actually a third party app offered by MailUp. It provides you the easiest, quickest way to design elegant, mobile responsive emails. All we did was integrate it with Salesforce and now all you need to do is install the app and in a few simple steps all of you’re users (no coding required) can get access to the editor which will allow them to quickly create an awesome looking email template. Once you’re done, you can now use it with workflows, mass emails or however you like! And best of all, as the name implies, it’s free 🙂

Features

  1. It features a drag-and-drop interface that enables anyone to create a beautiful email message.
  2. It creates emails that adapt automatically to small screens, such as that of a smartphone.
  3. Once the message has been created, you can be preview, test, and save it as a custom email template.
  4. It allows you to access Merge fields inside the Editor.
  5. Save Special Links to be used directly by dragging them in to the Editor
  6. You can use BeeFree Email templates with Mass Emails.

Here is the link – https://appexchange.salesforce.com/listingDetail?listingId=a0N4V00000DZQiVUAX and just so you know, we are currently in the middle of the Security Review process so we should be listed publicly soon. And this one is for the community, thank you for you’re awesome reviews, it keeps us going 🙂

[AppExchange series / Salesforce] Field Dumper – Extract Data Model to Excel

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On March 28, 2018

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This week’s guest post has been written by the guys from P0P, who just made a simple yet really usefull app to extract your org’s metadata.

P0P is a new Scottish software house focused on delivering admin focused Salesforce Apps that make working with Salesforce that a bit easier.  Field Dumper is their first AppExchange offering and was released in November 2017.

Thanks to Enrico for allowing us to introduce to you our ‘Field Dumper‘ application.
Available for free on the AppExchange, it’s a simple and quick tool that allows you to easily extract your Salesforce data model into an Excel workbook.

Background

Simple really – Schema information is available within Salesforce but it is scattered over multiple different pages and it can be time consuming  to navigate, collate and analyse.

That information can be much easier to work with once extracted to Excel.

Sure, for the developer and administrator there are other tools that can access this metadata (workbench, IDE plugins etc) but having a single document can be handy.
It is a great reference for a whole range of different tasks – getting the field api names when writing SOQL, for spell checking help text or for helping with problem analysis for example.

Frequently either non-Salesforce or less technical Salesforce users require visibility of the data model – integrators, business analysts, auditors, reviewers, documentors – and this is a great way of providing a quick offline snap-shot document for them.

Information is simple to access with each object displayed on a separate Excel Sheet within the workbook.   Multiple standard and custom objects can be extracted into one workbook.  Field API names, field labels, help text and field types are just a scroll or search away and Excel is already a tool these users are comfortable using.

Challenges

A simple concept, but we hope that we executed it well – some thought had to be put into the implementation and design.

A single Workbook:

Outputting multiple separate excel files for each object would just complicate and confuse things so coding effort was put into outputting a single multisheet excel workbook, having a separate sheet / tab for each object.  The solution required visualforce renderAs outputting a xml formatted document rather than the more well known contentType="application/vnd.ms-excel#SalesForceExport.xls"

Large Orgs and Salesforce Limits:

Effort needed to be spent to ensure the app worked for the largest of Salesforce orgs.  An Unlimited edition org can have 2000 custom objects, each with 800 custom field.  There are also over 400 standard object in an org.  The volume of text in help and formula fields can vary.  The app is not artificially restricted to the number of objects that can be exported but we do have to work within Salesforce limits.

It is intensive to collect metadata and produce an output document.  Schema describe calls are used for each object and then looped to list out each field.
The fields output include Name, API Name, Type (text, datetime, lookup etc), Formula Text, Help Text, Size and optionally Picklist values.

With potentially high volumes of meta data, it is impossible, even following best practices, to extract everything to one massive spreadsheet without breaching various Salesforce limits (and the spreadsheet would be unwieldy too).
In benchmark testing we were able to use the app to extract upto 150 objects to a single file but you mileage may vary.

A input interface was built featuring a multi-picklist interface to allow the user to select the specific custom or standard objects they require to export.
If limits are hit, a smaller set of objects can be selected.  If a user has a really big schema they could chunk it to produce multiple extracts.

We thought the focus would be on exporting the common standard objects you could add custom fields to and your custom objects, but after some early feedback, we added an option on the UI to allow object selection from all of the standard objects too.

Reception

We were not sure what the uptake or reception of the application when we launched at the end of 2017 would be, but we have been pleasantly surprised.    We have had several really nice 5 star reviews and great feedback and we are glad that we have been able to supply a tool that has been useful to a wide variety of Salesforce end users.  Thanks to all our downloaders and reviewers.

Please check it out for Free Data Dumper on the AppExchange and let us know what you think!  Thanks for you support.

 

 

 

[Salesforce / AppExchange Series] Streamline Project Management with Cloud Coach Milestones

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On February 28, 2018

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This week’s AppExchange hero is Brandi Johson, marketing consultant at Cloud Coach, who is going to present us Cloud Coach Milestones, the ideal tool for simple task and project management on the Salesforce platform.

Brandi Johnson is a marketing consultant and certified Salesforce admin. She focuses on helping clients create effective marketing strategies and leverage the right marketing technology to meet their unique business needs.

Cloud Coach specializes in enterprise-class project, PSA & PPM software built for businesses that want to make strategic investments in their success. With our unique four-tier approach to project management solutions, as your business grows, Cloud Coach can grow with you. Learn more at CloudCoach.com.

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything you had to do at work was easy?
Then they may not have to call it work!
As businesses grow, the challenges they face get more complex – especially when it comes to working with your team to accomplish your goals.

One critical example of this is new customer onboarding.
Whether you’re in SaaS, professional services, or manufacturing, having a streamlined customer onboarding program is vital to your success.
A strong customer onboarding program helps you increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn. Plus, it reduces the stress on your team as they’re moving through the process.

Let’s take a look at Serenity Software – a B2B SaaS company. They’ve nailed their sales process leveraging Salesforce. But once a new customer signs on, the wheels start to come off the process. Emails fly back and forth between the account executive and customer support team trying to track down the details needed and sharing status updates.

The customer success manager keeps shared spreadsheets for each of the clients that they’re working with.

Unfortunately, the team isn’t great about keeping them up-to-date with status updates – leading, of course – to more emails.
They also tried using Trello to keep track of their projects, but they had the same problems: nobody wanted to log into yet another system to see what they needed to work on or post status updates.

Finally, the customer success manager discovered Cloud Coach Milestones in the Salesforce AppExchange. In minutes, she was able to start organizing her customer onboarding projects and increasing collaboration with her team.

She started by creating a template from the spreadsheet she had been using. It was easy to add additional details to each task using subtasks, and assign the work out to her team. Plus, Cloud Coach Milestones put everything into an easy-to-use Gantt chart so she can see at a glance how long everything each tasks takes, and when things are running behind.

Serenity Software took streamlining their projects a step further, and leveraged Salesforce Process Builder to automate their project creation.

Now, whenever an opportunity is marked as Closed-Won, a new project is automatically created leveraging the template the Customer Success Manager created.

Those new projects are automatically connected to the account, so everyone has a 360° view of the customer and the project while its in-progress.

With Cloud Coach Milestones, Serenity Software streamlined their project management processes.

They have happier clients, faster onboarding, and better team communication.

Since all of their projects are in Salesforce where they’re already managing the rest of their business, they can see all of their important business KPIs on centralized dashboards.

No data imports, no APIs.

Could Cloud Coach Milestones work for your business?

If you run projects, then yes, it could.

Plus, you can get started in less than 10 minutes.

Step 1: Install Cloud Coach Milestones from the Salesforce AppExchange. Of course, we recommend installing into your Sandbox, not your production org.

Step 2: Check out the getting started videos. When you visit the Cloud Coach Milestones App, you’ll see a tab for “Getting Started.” These videos give you a great overview of Cloud Coach Milestones in action, and help you answer a ton of questions before they get asked.

Step 3: Create a project. Before you start sharing Cloud Coach Milestones with your team or customizing, I recommend that you build your own simple project. This helps you see how Cloud Coach Milestones works out of the box so you can make better choices about integration and customization.

Step 4: Customize your projects. Since Cloud Coach Milestones is built on the Salesforce platform, you can do a lot of customization on your projects to meet your business needs. For example, you may want a field to identify what type of project your team is doing for a client. Choices would be onboarding, maintenance, or special request. By adding a field on the project object, you can add this customization in minutes.

Step 5: Integrate with your existing objects and processes. Out of the box, Cloud Coach Milestones has lookup relationships to Opportunities, Accounts, Cases, and Campaigns. To associate projects with another object (custom or standard), create a new custom lookup field that points to the Cloud Coach Milestones object. Then, add the Milestones related list the page layout, and any projects you launch from that list will be visible on the project.

With Process Builder, you can automatically create projects from your business best-practice templates. The Cloud Coach Milestones Knowledge Base has details on how to autocreate projects with Cloud Coach Milestones and lots more.

Step 6: Assign permission sets to the users that need access to Cloud Coach Milestones. There is no limit to the number of users within your org who can use Milestones. Just like everything else about Cloud Coach Milestones, security was designed with simplicity in mind. There are only two permission sets you need to work with:

  • CCMI | Minimum User Permissions – grants a user access to all standard Milestones functionality and views. A user with this permission set assigned can create their own projects, view projects that aren’t their own, and manage their tasks and projects.
  • CCMI | Admin Permissions – permits exactly the same functionality but also includes the ability to load sample data. This is useful for Partners or Users who need to demo or test the product but do not want to spend time creating sample projects.

You’re never alone when you’re working with Cloud Coach Milestones. In addition to the extensive knowledge base that’s growing every week, we offer a free 30-minute onboarding consultation for new installs, and weekly open forum webinars to answer your questions.

Ready to get started with Cloud Coach Milestones? Just head over to the Salesforce AppExchange and click “Get It Now” to get started!

And it’s available on Salesforce Lightning and Classic!

[Salesforce / AppExchange Series] RingsTrue: Smarter phone numbers in Salesforce

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On February 14, 2018

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This week’s new post is dedicated to a new AppExchange app, meant to help us in one of the most difficult and annoying tasks on every CRM: phone number validation.

Thanks to our week’s guest blogger Iain Clements.

Iain runs Cloud Ursa Ltd, a registered Salesforce partner based in the UK. In addition to helping customers configure Salesforce, we also make RingsTrue.

XConnect is a world renowned telecommunications routing specialist that provides the world’s leading global telephone number data and phone intelligence services. XConnect combines trusted information from hundreds of disparate global data sets and enables our customers to build the best communication services and applications using our unified data via simple, secure, scalable and real-time interfaces.

Managing data quality in Salesforce can be time-consuming.

Making sure that your customer records have correct telephone numbers is an endless task. However, authentic numbers lead to less failed call backs and lower contact centre costs. If that phone number belongs to a new potential customer, getting the right data also improves your business.

Can’t I just fix them with regular expressions?

Not easily! Unlike other global numbering schemes (eg IP addressing), Telephone Numbers have evolved organically, (and not necessarily logically). Using Regular Expressions (REGEX) means creating a set of rules, to take a string of information and ‘reformat’ that information into something else.

But what are these rules for Telephone Numbers?

  • Is the number in national or international format?
  • Does it include the national dialling code (eg 0)?
  • Does it include a country code ? How many digits is that country code?
  • Is the country code valid?
  • Does the remaining number have the correct number of digits for that country code ?
  • Is the National number prefix valid for that country?

So what’s the answer?

Well, we’re biased of course but we think our app RingsTrue is a huge time saver for this work.

RingsTrue powered by Xconnect brings a wide range of number checking functionality to your Salesforce environment and tells you if your telephone numbers are authentic or not. It’ll do the heavy lifting of formatting, validating, and actively testing the telephone number for every contact in your database.

Using RingsTrue, powered by XConnect, you will be able to:

  • Identify which telephone numbers in your CRM are Authentic and whether an authentic telephone number is a mobile number, fixed line number, or some other telephone number type.
  • Check which of the authentic telephone numbers is known to be In-Service with telecommunications provider.
  • Discover additional information about the capabilities and services supported by the end-uses devices, as well additional data made available by the mobile service provider.

How do I install it?

  1. Go to the Appexchange
  2. Click on Get It Now
  3. Choose to install in your test environment or your live environment
  4. When installed, go to the RingsTrue homepage and either click ‘Run’ or choose a schedule of phone checking to suit your company
  5. When RingsTrue has checked all of your records you will see clearly what the current status of that number is

Where can I try it out?

Try it for free for 5 days with no obligation, click here to start now!

[Salesforce / AppExchange Series] Skyvia: easy way to load your Salesforce data into Amazon Redshift

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On January 30, 2018

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Here we are in the next Salesforce app guest post.

Skivia is a great solution for Data warehouse in the cloud, with tens of integrations and connectors to integrate, back up, access, and manage your cloud data
with an all-in-one cloud service. With Skivia service you have to think less about where to put all your data (from all your data sources on the cloud) to concentrate on analysis.

Skyvia is not an AppExchange app but it’s an amazing service that fully deserves to be mentioned in one of the best services out there to work with Salesforce data.

The guest blogger

Jacob Martin is crazy about all stuff connected with coding, particularly all Hi-tech ones, such as Cloud computing, Big-Data, BI tools and CRMs in the broader sense.
He is a cloud engineer at Skyvia – the universal cloud data platform for no coding data integration, backup, management, and access.

With the powerful data analysis features and low storage costs of cloud data warehouse services, loading data from cloud applications to data warehouses becomes a very common task. For example, you may want to get your cloud data to a database and then use some BI tool, such as Looker, Tableau, or chart.io, or just to store your historical cloud data in a database for archiving or compliance purposes.

In this article I will describe a way how to load data from Salesforce to Amazon Redshift with almost no efforts using Skyvia service. It is a cloud data platform for data integration, backup, management and access, which can perform this task with no coding and very little configuration.

Replication Configuration in Just a Few Steps

Skyvia is a completely cloud solution that requires no local software except a web browser, and all actions in it are performed via web browser, in a convenient web GUI.

To replicate your data via service, first, you need to register on it. Creating an account is free, and you can try Skyvia within its free pricing plan that allows you to load up to 5000 records per month between cloud applications and databases.

After you create an account, on the Integrations page, click Create Now under Replication. A replication package editor page is opened.

Setting up Connections

In our example, we will use Amazon Redshift as a target database for replication. Note that you may need to configure your AWS security settings to allow access to your Amazon Redshift cluster from Skyvia’s IP – 40.118.246.204. This is necessary for Skyvia to be able to load Salesforce data into your Redshift database.

First, we select connection types in the Source and Target headers, as we want to etl Salesforce data to Amazon Redshift, will choose them respectively. Note that Skyvia also supports other data warehouses and relational databases, including Google BigQuery, Asure SQL DWH, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc. The full list of supported data sources you can find here.

After this, we need to create the corresponding connections. For Salesforce, the service supports both Username/password and OAuth connections. With the latter option, your Salesforce credentials are not stored on the Skyvia server. You simply enter a connection name, log in to Salesforce and allow Skyvia access to your data.

For Redshift, you need to specify the corresponding connection parameters. Note that for replication you not only need to specify main parameters for connecting to Redshift itself.

You also need to click Advanced and specify parameters for connecting to Amazon S3 storage.

To improve the replication performance, Skyvia creates CSV files with Salesforce data, uploads them to Amazon S3, and uses Redshift COPY command to quickly import data.

Selecting Objects

After you connected to your Salesforce and database, everything is simple. You will see the list of your Salesforce objects and you just need to select check boxes for the objects that you need to copy. A convenient object search allows you to quickly find and select the necessary objects.

You can perform complete or partial replication. For each object you can edit task and exclude some fields or set up filters to copy only a part of the data.

Running Replication

For one-time data loading this is enough. Click Save, and then you may run your replication.

By default, Skyvia automatically creates tables with the corresponding structure in the database, and in some minutes (depending on the volume of your Salesforce data), you will have an exact copies of your Salesforce objects in your database.

Keeping Data Up-to-date

Simple copying of data is not the only feature of Skyvia’s replication. However, for business analysis tasks it’s better to have access to as fresh data as possible. This task can easily be solved using flexible scheduling settings and allows automatically keep your copy of the data always up-to-date.

You can schedule your replication to run automatically and keep your Redshift database always synced with Salesforce. To configure a schedule open the created replication package for editing, and under Schedule (at bottom left of the package editor) click Set schedule.

Skyvia allows flexible schedule configuration. You can configure your replication to run monthly, weekly, daily, on specific weekdays, etc. In non-free pricing plans you may run replication and update your database with a fresh data from Salesforce every hour or every few minutes and get real-time insights on your data. Thus, after you configure your replication, you can easily keep your database always up-to-date.

Skyvia uses incremental updates. This means that every time it loads only the records that were changed in Salesforce since the previous package run, and applies the corresponding changes to the database. It can significantly improve performance and decrease costs, as the latter depends on the number of replicated records.

Universal Cloud Data Platform for Integration

Skyvia is a universal cloud data platform, and replication is only one of the supported integration scenarios. In addition to replication, it supports other operation kinds: import, export, and synchronization.

The replication is used when you need to simply copy data from a cloud app to a database or cloud data warehouse and automatically keep this copy in a current state with minimal configuration efforts. Synchronization synchronizes data in two sources bi-directionally. Export allows you to export data from cloud applications, like Salesforce, and databases to CSV files. Import serves for unidirectional data loading.

Import has some more complex configuration than replication, but it is much more flexible. It allows importing data from CSV files or from cloud applications and databases directly to other cloud applications and databases. Unlike replication, it doesn’t create target tables automatically. Instead you configure mapping between source and target tables and columns.

Powerful mapping settings allow you to load data between the data sources with the different data structure and formats while preserving relations between data. You can provide constant values, use powerful expressions, lookups, etc.

Import can be configured to load only newly updated or inserted records from Salesforce. Thus, we can perform a replication once to create the necessary tables and import all the data, and then configure import to load new and updated records from Salesforce.

As an all in one cloud data platform, Skyvia also offers a cloud to cloud backup solution, an online SQL query tool, and OData REST API server that can make your data available over the web.

Pricing

Skyvia’s integration pricing depends mostly on the number of loaded records. Additionally, higher pricing plans allow scheduling packages to run more often and having more scheduled packages.

Skyvia has a free pricing plan for data integration, allowing you to load 5000 records per month for free. So you can register an account on Skyvia for free and test it whether it suits to your needs and then decide whether to upgrade your pricing plan.

You can see details on Skyvia pricing on their pricing page.

Here is a handy video showing live how Skyvia works.

[AppExchange series] 10 best things you can do offline with Salesforce data (and Resco Mobile app)

By

On January 8, 2018

In Post

Happy new year to everyone!

First post of 2018 celebrates the AppExchange: the call for guest AppExchange posts is getting a lot of answers and amazing ISVs want to share their app.

In this guest post I want to present you the Resco Mobile App, an amazing solution for Salesforce offline management, fully customizable with no coding skills, that leverages the power of Salesforce when the Salesforce app is not enough!

I’ll leave the word to our guest blogger Barbora Piatrová, Content Strategist at Resco.net.

Barbora Piatrová takes her passion for digital marketing & mobile CRM everywhere she goes. Currently, she’s involved in creating & mastering content strategy at resco.net – one of the leading companies in the world for Mobile CRM. She is now actively also discovering and participating in new thriving communities for Salesforce enthusiasts.

Offline matters. Especially nowadays.

Even in Europe, where Internet connectivity is generally perceived as very good, there are areas and countries with poor 3G and 4G support. There is a pocketful of places with poor or no connectivity possible. What about the garages, planes, rural/uninhabited areas, or elevators?

Offline is now available for Salesforce users in the field, indeed. Including sales professionals and field service technicians. The question is, how much offline can we actually get? Is access to the last 5 recently viewed objects what a field technician truly need? The same guy whose mission is to complete all the planned tasks, inspections or sales visits needs permanent offline access to all Salesforce data. It doesn’t end here though. A motivated sales and field service rep wishes to fulfill the mission irrespective of internet connectivity. Continuous work is necessary even in areas where such limited offline would not help.

Consider true offline. Follow the leaders.

Resco is among the leaders in providing world-class offline mobile solutions for various back-end solutions, including Salesforce.

You might have noticed that offline capability is currently being added to mobile apps by most CRM vendors such as Salesforce, Microsoft, and others. In our opinion, offline is not a capability, which can be easily added to an online CRM app. Offline doesn’t only mean to add a local database support, providing the CRM data when the app is disconnected.

“Offline means that ALL the features and functionalities of the mobile CRM app are available also when the app is disconnected – with no limitations. Thus, the logic of every feature must be developed and implemented to the mobile app independently from the server. Otherwise, a feature will simply not work when the app is disconnected. But a mobile CRM app is usually the main business tool of every mobile sales or service professional. So, if it doesn’t provide 100% of functionality anywhere and anytime, it can cause immediate damages for a company’s business.”

Radomir Vozar, CEO at Resco
The primary focal point of Resco Mobile CRM is its offline capability. It has been implemented since the very beginning of its development. A complete, robust mobile solution, ready to serve its users whenever and wherever they happen to be. A completely different story in comparison to online CRM apps with offline capabilities.

In every release, we launch approximately 40 new features and improvements to our mobile app, including offline features. 18 years of development and hard work brought over 700 mobile features to life! And so, believe me, it was no easy feat, but we did come up with a list of 10 most used & useful features that prove that (in this case) both quantity and quality matter.

How to work with Resco Mobile App in an offline mode?

The same as if you’ve never left the room with wi-fi, switched off your mobile internet data or lost connection!

What exactly do we get in Resco with full offline support?

  1. Business logic (not just data)

    Offline-first approach means, you can perform complex business processes and constraints allowing you to not only view – but create or edit business logic of the solution that works offline.

  2. Maps

    System admins can define which maps will be stored in the local memory, so users can use the map view even without wi-fi or cellular connection to the Internet.

  3. Document management (viewing and editing)

    Offline-capable solution knows no limitations. When working with documents (pdf, HTML, MS Office, MS Excel, HTML, SharePoint, Dropbox) offline, you can simply set up the filters that dictate which files should be downloaded to the offline database in your phone or tablet.

  4. Knowledge base articles

    You get to not only access, but to play around with the articles about products, parts, and more. Filter articles of any format (pdf, HTML, video, audio, image…), copy them, add to favorites, associate with case or edit its details.

  5. Reports

    Yes, that’s right! You can generate pdf reports on spot limitlessly. Generate and work with them even further. Want to store a report? Send it or print? It’s all up to you.

  6. Offline HTML

    Who wouldn’t want to create their own business logic to the app for Salesforce? You can expand the app with tailor-made forms to add product presentations or to replace the standard user interface – all with offline HTML. Create stunning pres¬entations, get the scoop on your prospects by quickly looking at their online presence. Iframes allow you to show any HTML content in the application.

  7. Lead conversion

    Did you know you can qualify/disqualify leads or convert them to a closed deal even offline? Yes, automated processes truly simplify the lives of sales guys on-the-go. Finally, you can nurture your leads properly.

  8. Multimedia

    Show product presentation or attach pictures to your notes or any Salesforce record at any time! You can upload, edit, and delete multimedia including images, audio & video files (JPEG, PNG, AVI, etc.) and other formats.

  9. Quotes

    Can’t create a quote while disconnected? That’s no longer a challenge. You can freely create a quote with respect to an actual corporate product catalog and its pricing policy.

  10. Faster performance

    App performance is not to be underestimated in the enterprise space. With offline this robust, you don’t ever have to worry about waiting for network transactions to take place. Database reads and writes are stored locally, so the tasks are being completed instantly.

    And there is plenty more you can do! Endless offline capabilities include task management, notes and business information editing, offline managements of all objects (standard, custom), product/parts management, offline calendar, favorites, and so much more.

*Note that:
In offline mode, the database is stored locally on the de¬vice (for offline capability and faster performance of Resco Mobile CRM) is encrypted by default. The data encryption is based on an application key. The appli¬cation key is randomly generated when the database is created and protected by the user’s password. The key is stored in an encrypted form in device’s file system and decrypted when needed.

Curious to see real offline mobile solution for sales and field service scenarios in action? Simply, drop Resco a line at [email protected] or request a demo at the website!

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