Customer success story
When a printed report is only true for a day
AdvancED works with 34,000 schools across 73 countries. Its field staff used to carry printed payment reports into meetings, which is how schools ended up paying some invoices twice. Rapidi links Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics NAV, so the answer is now live instead of a day old.
AdvancED is a non-profit that accredits and improves schools worldwide, working through thousands of volunteer education professionals as well as its own staff. It chose Salesforce as its CRM, then evaluated four integration vendors before picking Rapidi. Accounts and contacts entered in Salesforce update NAV; a sales order becomes an unposted invoice in NAV, and once Finance posts it, the invoice and every subsequent payment synchronise back to Salesforce.
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The organisation
AdvancED works with 34,000 schools around the world with one goal: advancing the quality of education. Its Improvement Network gives members a framework for data-informed school improvement, alongside accreditation, STEM certification, diagnostic reviews and professional learning.
The name is recent — formed in 2006 from the merger of three regional accreditation bodies — but the work goes back more than a century. It now operates in every US state and in 72 other countries, from Canada and Mexico to Peru, Egypt, China and Saudi Arabia.
It is also a non-profit, and it runs on thousands of volunteers who are themselves education professionals, many of them serving or former principals and superintendents. Fees exist, but they are deliberately modest, which puts an unusual weight on internal efficiency: every hour saved on paperwork is a school that can afford the service. More about the organisation at advanc-ed.org.
Our focus is always on improving the experience of the students so they can learn and take advantage of their time at school to be prepared for their future.
Why Rapidi
Not long ago AdvancED ran on several customer databases that did not integrate well with each other, let alone with Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Choosing a CRM was the first step, and Salesforce won it for reasons specific to the sector: tools built for non-profits, including volunteer management, preferential non-profit pricing, and the breadth that comes with being the most widely used CRM.
That decision created a single home for sales and service data. It did not connect that home to NAV. For the integration, AdvancED evaluated four different systems.
Rapidi was chosen because the conversations showed the deepest knowledge of both ends. Not just how Salesforce and NAV operate, but the specific data structures that had to be mapped between them — which is the part that decides whether an integration project finishes on schedule.
How it works
Bringing a new school on board now means entering the data once. Accounts and contacts are created in Salesforce and appear in NAV shortly afterwards. The old pattern of data-entry errors, and of hiring temporary staff simply to keep up with paperwork, has been dramatically reduced.
The billing flow is more involved. A business process starts in Salesforce and produces a sales order. Rapidi transfers it to NAV as an unposted invoice. The finance team checks it and posts it, and the posted invoice synchronises back to Salesforce — as do payments, as they arrive.
That last step is the one that changes daily work. Operations and customer service can now answer “has this been paid?” in the middle of a customer meeting by querying Salesforce, rather than calling Finance or trusting a report printed at some earlier point in time.
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The whole story as a PDF
Six pages: the 34,000 schools, the invoices paid twice, the four-hour sync they want to make instant, and Rosario Rodriguez in her own words. Yours after one short form.
The results
Rosario Rodriguez was nervous at the start. As CFO she owns the billing process, so an integration touching invoices is not an abstract IT project for her. Confidence came from two things: consultants who knew what they were doing, and first integrations that landed on schedule.
Having this integration has increased our productivity, both for operations and finance. It has allowed us to keep the accounts cleaner.
The duplicate-payment problem is the clearest example of what changed. Schools sometimes paid the same invoice twice, because a field employee was working from a report showing the payment had not arrived. Correcting it meant issuing a credit memo, which cost everyone time and made the organisation look careless.
“A printed report is valid for about 24 hours and then you need to check with Finance,” Rodriguez says. That class of error is now gone, because the current answer is always available in Salesforce.
The effects reached beyond the finance team. “The implementation of Salesforce and the integration with Rapidi has resulted in a more informed organisation overall, which has resulted in the redefinition of some operational roles, and the reallocation of resources,” she reports. “The frustration level of staff has decreased as our collections performance has increased.”
There is a small, telling detail at the end. The CFO now often looks things up in Salesforce rather than NAV, because the web interface is more convenient. She can only do that because she trusts the integrated data to be right.
Not finished yet
AdvancED is still working through what this makes possible. Business processes that would have been unthinkable without organisation-wide access to customer information are now on the table.
The data currently transfers every four hours. Once the remaining processes are in place, the intention is to move to near-instantaneous synchronisation between Salesforce and NAV, which Rapidi also supports.
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