NetSuite Salesforce Integration Guide: How to & Best Practice

Too often, your ERP and CRM  exist as two disconnected systems, creating two isolated data sets that are unable to tell the whole story around the business. Without integrating the ERP and CRM platforms, data sharing becomes a long, tedious process. You get stuck in an endless cycle of manually exporting, cleaning, and organizing data to then spend hours manipulating it for analysis in spreadsheets. It’s not fast or efficient, and it can mean a lot gets lost in translation.

But learning how to integrate two of the most common source systems — your NetSuite ERP with Salesforce CRM — can be confusing for anyone who’s never done it before.

Once you’ve figured it out, NetSuite Salesforce integration helps you get the data you need in one spot, so you can see the bigger picture of your company’s performance. To get the full picture, integrate the two systems with a Strategic Finance Platform like Mosaic. You’ll get cohesive access to the metrics that matter for your business, so you can present that data more effectively for fully connected financial storytelling.

Benefits of the NetSuite/Salesforce Integration

The NetSuite Salesforce integration helps facilitate collaboration and data access across departments. Without it, you have a fragmented data sharing process dependent on manual data entry.

Once NetSuite is implemented it can only show you data once the opportunity closes — it doesn’t know what’s in your pipeline or your bookings. Salesforce shows you your pipeline and revenue schedule, but it doesn’t pull in your expense data.

To get data from both systems, someone has to go back and forth between NetSuite report builder and Salesforce, pulling out the important data and compiling it. This process is tedious and relies on someone to find and enter data into spreadsheets or sharing via email. That can result in delays, errors, and inconsistent visibility for all departments.

In contrast, integrating the two systems comes with numerous benefits.

Easier Access to Data

Data access is essential for achieving insight into how the company is performing. When NetSuite and Salesforce are integrated, it’s easier for any department to access data they may need from either NetSuite or Salesforce reports and dashboards.  Accessible data leads to faster insights and more proactivity around making decisions that can benefit the business.

Data Alignment and Accuracy

Businesses are most successful when departments are aligned and working together to achieve goals. When data is siloed in separate finance and sales systems, it’s difficult for different departments to maintain alignment because they’re not necessarily getting the same data at the same time.

Once integrated, NetSuite and Salesforce data provides a better overall view of how the business is doing. This helps improve metrics like cash flow efficiency, but it also helps with forecasting for the future.

Fewer Errors

The NetSuite Salesforce integration allows you to see information from both platforms at the same time. You’re less likely to miss something or end up with incorrect data due to a typo or spreadsheet error when aggregating the data manually.

Increased Productivity

Gathering and organizing data from two separate systems takes time and effort — sometimes weeks of time and effort — and that time could be better spent. When it’s no longer necessary to wait on someone to compile, organize, and share all the necessary data from NetSuite and Salesforce, workflows become more efficient. Team members can spend more time on cross-departmental collaboration and strategic planning and action.

Limitations of the NetSuite/Salesforce Integration

Since NetSuite is a more robust ERP and Salesforce is a fairly complex CRM platform, there can be some issues with getting all the information integrated correctly — which can deeply depend on the integration app you use. Here are some of the challenges and limitations of NetSuite Salesforce integration.

Time to Value

Salesforce NetSuite integration is a complex process that takes time and attention to detail. Because you’ll need to enter or adjust some metrics manually during integration to ensure that they match up properly, you’ll need a detailed execution plan ahead of time. Make sure you know your goals for the integration and schedule time to work through the integration. It may be best to wait for a period of downtime or a slow season for the business for optimal integration.

Can Be Messy

Data may be inaccurate or presented incorrectly after integration because the systems often don’t link together properly. As such, it typically requires someone in-house with the know-how to link data between the two systems. If there isn’t someone with the technical ability or the bandwidth to manually link the data, it becomes really time-consuming and tricky.

Missing or Duplicate Data

Data migration between the two systems is critical to ensuring the platforms talk to each other correctly. However, the automatic data transfer is rarely complete. You might be able to bring some data directly over from Salesforce to NetSuite, but you won’t get all of it without someone collecting and blending this data manually to ensure cohesiveness. You also have to be careful that opportunities and attributes match up correctly to avoid issues with overwriting, duplicate data, or data that’s missing altogether after integration.

Issues with Differing Amounts of Data and File Size

Depending on what integration app you’re using, there can be limits on file size or how much data can be integrated. Make sure you don’t have any limits on the amount of data or the file size when integrating Salesforce and NetSuite, or important information might not be migrated properly.

Some Syncing Is One Sided

When using Salesforce Professional, the integration flow is designed for fields to be synced only from Salesforce to NetSuite. As such, updating an account’s financial detail fields should only be done from Salesforce.

Additionally, while data is synced in real-time from NetSuite to Salesforce, it is only synced from Salesforce to NetSuite at predetermined intervals, so you won’t be getting real-time data integration across the board. Errors have also been reported in NetSuite when data is synced from Salesforce to NetSuite.

Requires Extra Focus on Security

Because the two platforms share sensitive data, make sure data flows are secure and backed up. That requires someone who’s tech-savvy enough to understand where data breaches could occur in each system. Without someone with the knowledge and time to perform these security checks, you could be vulnerable to security problems.

The Steps to Integrate NetSuite with Salesforce

One common starting point for integrating NetSuite and Salesforce is the NetSuite to Salesforce Connector API offered through Celigo. Since this is a fairly technical process involving some coding, you’ll want a data engineer or technically savvy member of the team to help with this. If you don’t have someone like this within the company, you may need to hire a consultant. That said, this REST API allows you to integrate these systems with the following four steps:

1. Create and Add RESTlet Scripts on NetSuite

The first step of integration involves creating separate Java Script (JS) files for each new object you want to sync between NetSuite and Salesforce. Once you begin adding JS files to NetSuite, you can then add new fields and contacts. You’ll need to add new script files every time there’s a new object you want to sync.

2. Incorporate Authentication Requests

Authenticated requests ensure that data can transfer between Salesforce and NetSuite. It’s generally recommended that you authenticate NetSuite credentials in Salesforce and use Salesforce to retrieve data from NetSuite. However, the reverse is possible.

3. Transfer Data In NetSuite and Salesforce

For data to be transferred in NetSuite and Salesforce, create separate web services in Salesforce. Create each individual web service by syncing the Salesforce opportunity. To get data from NetSuite, create a data fetching batch to build callouts and get JSON data from NetSuite and store it in Salesforce objects.

4. Run Batch Classes Between NetSuite and Salesforce

Run batches in Salesforce to ensure objects are synced efficiently and correctly. You can also create an associate button that calls the classes anytime you’d like if you’d rather the sync process take place in real-time.

For someone used to coding, this may not seem overly complicated, although human error while writing code can cause a variety of functionality problems. And, if you’re not used to writing Java Script, it’s a lot for you to try to figure out.

Improve Your NetSuite/Salesforce Integration with Mosaic

NetSuite Salesforce integration can be complex. Without careful attention and properly matched fields, you end up with data that’s presented inaccurately, incorrectly, or missing altogether. And without the right integration and scalability, you never get the whole picture of what your business needs. But not when you use Mosaic for your integration solution.

Mosaic integrates data from both NetSuite and Salesforce, allowing both source systems to communicate with each other and come together to provide a full picture of the business. Integrating with Mosaic’s Strategic Finance Platform shows all your data in one place, rather than having to manually pull data from two totally different, and totally separate, platforms. You get detailed and accurate representation of vital SaaS marketing and sales metrics  that give you strategic insights into the success, growth, and future of the business.

With the help of Mosaic automation, your data is synced properly, cleanly, and fully burdened with all the information you need. You also get the efficiency of real-time access to data, so there’s more time for cross-departmental collaboration.

Mosaic’s data visualization automation ensures metrics are calculated quickly for real-time updates that appear immediately through out-of-the-box, prebuilt templates and dashboards, like the Sales Cycle Dashboard below.

Metric trends are then easy to see and understand, so you have time to get at the “why” behind the numbers.

Mosaic bridges the gap between data you need from NetSuite and Salesforce to inform proactive strategies that move the business forward. If you’re ready to discover how Mosaic’s financial modeling software can make your NetSuite Salesforce integration easier, more efficient, and customized to your business needs, request a personalized demo today.