How to Integrate Salesforce with Netsuite?
Salesforce is the most popular CRM on the market, handling lead generation, account management, and sales data. NetSuite is the premier enterprise ERP application, managing everything accounting-related from invoicing to inventory. Many businesses make use of both Salesforce and NetSuite, but out of the box, these two systems aren’t connected.
Raising invoices, sales orders, and estimates in NetSuite based on Salesforce data can save time and reduce errors. And seeing financial data within Salesforce gives you a complete picture of your client relationships, as well as allowing staff to make decisions based on a client’s payment status.
In this post, we’ll look at three common ways to link the two applications together:
- iPaaS (Integration-Platform-as-a-Service)
- Breadwinner
- NetSuite Restlet
iPaas
One way to integrate NetSuite and Salesforce is to make use of a cloud-based integration service like Boomi or Celigo, which both offer connectors for these two applications. These services connect a wide variety of enterprise apps and are highly configurable, also allowing data to be combined or modified as it moves from one application to another.
This can be really helpful if your sales data needs to be tidied up before being loaded into NetSuite, or if you need to make use of multiple data sources or endpoints. The downside is that cloud-based connectors of this kind usually take quite a lot of time, effort, and money to get up and running, requiring upfront investment in a complex configuration process alongside ongoing subscription costs and maintenance.
Key benefit: Extremely flexible
Drawback: Lengthy and costly set-up
Breadwinner
A similar but simpler approach is offered by Breadwinner, a Salesforce-native application that can be up and running in less than a day, rather than requiring weeks or months of scoping and installation. While Boomi and Celigo connect many different kinds of applications, Breadwinner focuses entirely on integrating Salesforce with financial platforms, leading to a simple set-up and a streamlined user experience.
Out of the box, Breadwinner mirrors key NetSuite data within Salesforce in real-time, allowing your staff to see up-to-date invoicing, billing, and payment records against your client and vendors in Salesforce, along with product and pricing info. Breadwinner also allows Invoices, Sales Orders, Bills, etc. to be raised in NetSuite directly from Salesforce.
While Breadwinner is easy to set up and configure, this ease of set-up is only possible because Breadwinner does not connect to the 100+ tools that a generic iPaaS platform might connect to. As such, it may not be suitable if your data needs to be cleansed or combined in between Salesforce and NetSuite.
Key benefit: Fast set-up, easy configuration
Drawback: Limited data-transformation tools
RESTlet
The final option we’ll discuss is building your own connection between Salesforce and NetSuite, using the APIs of those two platforms and a RESTlet web service. This is certainly the most configurable of the three options we’ve discussed here: since you’re writing the code, you can build out the connection whichever way you want!
However, be warned that integrating two systems as complex as Salesforce and NetSuite will not be simple. This approach will require a serious upfront investment in building and thoroughly testing your integration, particularly given the sensitivity of financial data. You’ll also need to commit to maintaining your integration in the long term as Salesforce and NetSuite are updated frequently. But if the other options mentioned above don’t meet your specific requirements, and you’re ready to start coding and bug-squashing, consider this approach.
Key benefit: Completely customizable, no subscription costs
Drawbacks: Highly technically demanding, ongoing maintenance
Next Steps
If you want to explore integrating with Salesforce further, then your main options are to:
- Contact Celigo or Boomi to find out the cost of the one-time Professional Services fee and the recurring annual license fee
- Contact Breadwinner to find out how much the recurring annual license fee will be and to start a free trial (Breadwinner free trials can be set up in an hour or less)
- Contact a third-party developer who can write Apex Code that will connect to NetSuite REST or RESTlet