Realignment of Salesforce as Center-of-Truth

Industry: Financial Services

Business Challenge: As part of a shift toward technology efficiency, bank leadership needed to audit and update firm systems centering around the role of Salestorce as a single source of truth. A litmus test for success was a specific case of subtenant relationships and operating expense reconciliation that has plagued the firm for years due to its complexity and siloed data consolidation efforts.

Tools Utilized: Accounting Seed, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Conga, ActionGrid, Excel

Company Profile: As one of the leading educational underwriters on the West Coast, this boutique investment bank has had a long, respected tenure as a financing partner for some of the nation’s top educational institutions. A small firm of less than 30 people, their work has nevertheless helped build some of the most impressive college campuses in America for over 3 decades.

The Carabiner Connection: Over a two-and-a-half-year engagement, Carabiner Group principals completed a wide-ranging digital transformation effort that impacted nearly every division of the firm in question. Project focuses included the transition from Salesforce Classic to Salesforce Lightning, the implementation of AppExchange packages such as AccountingSeed and Conga ActionGrid, and the resolution of the afore-mentioned accounting challenges. Throughout the engagement, Carabiner became a trusted thought partner to the C-suite leadership chairing the effort, working closely to ensure that the digital process improvements matched the corresponding policy changes and internal retraining and enablement efforts.

Resulting Effects: Across the firm, digital process and automation accounted for monumental increases in productivity and efficiency. Salesforce as the single source of truth allowed for reliability of reporting and centralization of workflow, both critical to firm leadership as they prepared for future expansion. The resolution of the accounting concerns recouped for the firm over $1 million in operating expenses and resolved a long-standing headache while simultaneously establishing a standard operating procedure that would prove sustainable in the years following its implementation.

They worked diligently and tirelessly for months, successfully completing a complicated project which had defeated others… skillfully used Salesforce and Excel in tandem to create a single source of the truth, and then report on that truth in a way that was persuasive to a critical counterparty and to our company’s external auditors.

– CFO of Investment Bank