RevOps Tech Tips: Connecting Salesforce to NetSuite

One of the first big steps any scaling organization takes is investing in a financial and accounting system to help better track and report on incoming and outgoing transactions. But as you expand your systems of record, the architecture and flow of data become both much bigger issues and much bigger value drivers.

When implementing a new system for finance and accounting, organizations with a well-designed system architecture that facilitates automated and accurate data integrations will save an immense amount of manual administration and clean-up.  

The problem is that this ideal system landscape is NOT easily realized and requires RevOps technical expertise, foresight, and strategy that many organizations don’t have.  

Have you defined your end-to-end data flow with a structured data dictionary detailing who owns key data points and where the data originates? Is your market-to-cash system architecture documented, up-to-date, and referenceable?

These are all critical steps in successfully building the ideal system integration that helps marketing ops, sales ops, and revenue operations leaders make decisions backed by clear, accurate business data.   

For this very reason, we often have companies come to us looking for help fixing data issues between their CRM and ERP systems, essentially to build a NetSuite to Salesforce integration.  

Challenges Salesforce NetSuite Integration 

Most organizations spend a TON of man-hours just fixing and updating data. Even those that make a significant investment in best-in-class systems of record like Salesforce and NetSuite struggle to get these systems to talk to each other – there’s a significant data gap.

To bridge this gap, many double down and purchase a data integration tool like Boomi or Celigo that promises to have pre-built Salesforce to NetSuite integration to connect the systems with a couple of clicks and no significant code/API experience. But despite all of this, problems with data integrity persist, and costs of manual data administration rise. 

The reason is simple; most data integration tools that promise simple template-based integration configuration only support the vanilla Salesforce to NetSuite data flow: Accounts > Customers, Opportunities > Sales Orders, and Contact > Contacts.

Organizations that use NetSuite add-ons or customizations need to build out custom integration logic, mapping, and operations manually.  

For example, we see many organizations using NetSuite’s SuiteBilling functionality for subscription management. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to use the out-of-box NetSuite connector to support this through data integration via Boomi, because it requires a custom Rest-based HTTP client connection with custom Rest API calls to pull and push data to the specific SuiteBilling object.  

These organizations must understand and circumvent the complexities of the NetSuite data model to push data in the right format and order, which requires very specific technical and data-focused skill sets that many companies simply do not possess.  

Our Hard-Won Solution: Connecting NetSuite to Salesforce via Boomi 

The first time a client hired us to solve this common problem, it took multiple iterations to build custom integrations and understand the right order to populate the subscription, price plan, price interval, subscription plan, and subscription lines to create the accurate representation of a Salesforce opportunity in NetSuite.

After patching the holes in the walls from all our head-banging, we finally had a correct integration build via thousands of postman logs and NetSuite test records. 

Here’s an example diagram of an iteration of just one of the processes in the NetSuite Salesforce integration – the Opportunity to Subscription/Sales Order process in Boomi:  

The above Boomi highlights a portion of this solution that pushes Closed/Won Opportunities to NetSuite. This single simple process uses three different connections (Salesforce, NetSuite, custom HTTP Client for NetSuite Rest Services) and touches nine data tables across both systems.

This complexity is required because SuiteBilling functionality is not available over the standard NetSuite SOAP API in Boomi and the structure of the Subscription data in NetSuite.   

Benefits of Connecting Salesforce and NetSuite 

There’s a huge benefit to the NetSuite to Salesforce integration, but anyone who has tried it knows that there’s not an easy, out-of-the-box integration. In particular, if you’re using the SuiteBilling module, you need an entirely separate API to integrate with it. Here at Hyperscayle, we are experts at solving this problem, and we have developed a custom pre-built Boomi integration to do so quickly and efficiently. 

Benefit from our experience to get Salesforce and NetSuite systems talking to each other as expected in a simple-to-understand, manageable way. Once this NetSuite Salesforce integration is set up, organizations can realize the true business value of an integration by minimizing manual data entry (and in turn data errors) and by keeping your key systems of records aligned throughout the entire market-to-cash process.  

With our approach, you can trust that your data is flowing into NetSuite to make sure that you are tracking sales, invoicing clients, and generating revenue without all the administrative load - so you can focus on GROWING your business. Reach out to us to learn more about it.