Connecting accounting records to service delivery

The client provided accounting, corporate-secretarial and related services through several subsidiaries across Singapore and the region. Each subsidiary had its own accounting system. Staff carried out substantial manual and paper-based work, while management needed to coordinate service quality and customer information across the group.

Management established a shared operations centre for its accountants and consultants. Supporting that arrangement required customer and transaction records from the different subsidiaries, project workflows, deadline notifications and renewal reminders. Zolution was engaged to build a custom system around those requirements.

Zoho Creator acted as an intermediate application between the accounting systems and Zoho CRM. It consolidated customer and transaction information, processed that data into the form operations teams needed, and synchronised it to CRM. Sales, marketing and operations could then work with customer information across the entities.

When an invoice was created in an accounting system, its data was synchronised. Creator processed the information before passing it to CRM, where staff could track project status across the subsidiaries. Management could generate reports from these records.

The architecture retained the separate accounting systems. Creator handled the movement and preparation of information between those systems and CRM.

The system requirements covered project automation, internal deadline notifications and customer renewal notices. These requirements connected the transaction records to ongoing service work: staff needed to know which projects were in progress and which customers needed attention.

For your own project, choose one invoice and follow it through to the work your team must deliver. Use these questions to plan the process:

• How do you recognise the same customer when two subsidiaries hold different records?
• What service information must be available before operations can start work?
• What happens to the project record when an invoice changes or is cancelled?
• Which dates determine staff reminders and customer renewal notices?
• Which subsidiary’s information may each team see?

Use an anonymised invoice, a project record and a renewal example to test the proposed data mapping before extending it across all entities.