Customer testimonial FinancialForce - Blue Shield of California Foundation

"We made the move from Quickbooks to FinancialForce
Accounting and have never looked back. We can now
see up to date financial data at the push of a button and
our pay cycle is much quicker."
Scott Travasos, CFO, Blue Shield of California Foundation
Success Story
Customer Profile
Company:
Blue Shield of California Foundation (BSCF), an independent member of the
Blue Shield of California
Blue Shield Association, is a not-for-profit health plan dedicated to providing
Foundation
Californians with access to high-quality health care at an affordable price.

Its pledge is that if it earns more than two percent net income in any year, it
Application:
will return the difference between what is earned and the two percent to its
FinancialForce Accounting
customers and the community.

URL:
BSCF decided that it was time to upgrade the existing accounting system because of
http://blueshieldca.com/
the limitations it placed on the business. "We had been using Quickbooks and decided

we needed a more sophisticated system," says Scott Travasos, CFO. "Networkability
Company Size:
was poor and there was no systems integration. All new staff members had to learn
Medium business
the system from scratch which was a drain on valuable resources. Our ambition was to

leverage a cloud platform so that we could build a single apps infrastructure to support
Industry:
the organization, and Force.com proved itself by far the most mature platform. We
Not For profit/Healthcare
could see that FinancialForce Accounting delivered the features we needed and the

native integration with Salesforce CRM made it a no brainer. We were very quickly able
Results:
to use a FinancialForce Accounting dimension to link to our contacts in Salesforce.
- The cloud and Force.com
This has enabled the Accounts Payable process to become more efficient saving us at
are delivering significant
least one day every pay cycle".
improvements
A native Force.com application strategy also provided other efficiencies for BSCF.
- Single application infra-
structure with Salesforce
Previously, if a finance department employee was absent for any reason without prior
CRM and FinancialForce
planning, the accounting department would grind to a halt. Having FinancialForce
Accounting in a single
Accounting and Salesforce integrated on one platform means employees can solve
system
bottlenecks remotely so nothing gets held up. "We have also been able to put extra
- Time to complete pay cycle
controls in place," continues Scott. "Our AP Clerk is able to make an entry into a
reduced
journal, but not able to post, for example. This allows us to approve everything before
- Dashboards give quick
it enters the system and massively reduces the potential for errors."
snapshot of up to the
minute performance and
Another major improvement has been in reporting. Using Quickbooks, BSCF had
financial data
to wait for monthly financial reports and never had an accurate real-time view of
financials. Dashboards built into FinancialForce Accounting give an at a glance view
of financial data whenever it is needed which has a massive impact on both reporting
and planning. "We can post reports from FinancialForce Accounting into salesforce.
com and share with senior executives any updates easily and clearly because the
www.FinancialForce.com

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Success Story
executives are used to working with the Salesforce CRM system on a daily basis, says
"FinancialForce
Scott.
Accounting allows us to use
Salesforce workflow. We
"In addition, we are saving more time on the training side as any new staff coming into
have built in a dual approval
the company can be trained by multiple co-workers instead of just the one or two that
system as part of our AP
were familiar with the old accounting system," says Scott.
process which keeps our
"We made the move from Quickbooks to FinancialForce Accounting and have never
auditors happy."
looked back. We can now see up to date financial data at the push of a button and
our pay cycle is much quicker. Moving to the cloud and specifically Force.com, we are
more agile and responsive and in a better position to push the organization forward.
"FinancialForce
The best thing about FinancialForce Accounting has been the ability to automate
Accounting allows us to
workflows and get to our goal of a paperless office with one system. We are about 80
work remotely, seamlessly
percent there and once we add the native Professional Services Automation (PSA) app
and meet our auditor's full
from FinancialForce.com we will be working from a single cloud system, paperless and
requirements."
with the ability to work remotely while meeting all of our auditor's requirements."
BSCF is already finding significant benefit but the addition of salesforce.com's social
"Because FinancialForce
networking application, Chatter, is further improving efficiency and effectiveness.
Accounting automates the
Chatter is a great repository for BSCF to answer questions and easily search topics.
whole accounting process,
"I can check in while travelling or working from home like you would with twitter and
it allows certain controls
approve something that would previously require me to come into the office, " added
to be put in place which
Scott. "Additionally, the benefit of having Chatter tied to all of our projects/invoices
reduces the potential for
allows us to be more organized - we don't have to dig through emails or paper to find
manual errors and save us
out the history on a particular departmental topic because it's already archived via
a lot of time."
Chatter."
"Because of salesforce.
com, FinancialForce
Accounting and chatter,
our soft close has gotten
much faster. It also
improves our efficiency;
we spend less time in
transactions and more
time in strategic analysis
and value added work."
"Prior to FinancialForce
Accounting distributing
financial reports was not
an easy process. The
ability to quickly and easily
communicate the state of
financials with our senior
executives via the salesforce
portal is invaluable."
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information only, as it is summary in nature and subject to change. FinancialForce and FinancialForce.com are trademarks
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