Although it provides financing to businesses, unlike a traditional lender that expects to be repaid with interest over time, the firm purchases a percentage of its clients’ future accounts receivable. Also, while lenders may take months investigating their applicants’ past performance and available collateral, the firm offers a simple online application process and makes decisions about funding in as little as 72 hours.

Prospects who apply for funding online are entered into the company’s Salesforce system. The application is reviewed by staff, and a decision is made. When the applicant is approved and accepts funding, it becomes a client. Data must then be shared seamlessly and automatically with its accounting system, which is built on the NetSuite platform.

NetSuite is popular with many companies for its sophisticated accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools. However, though NetSuite does offer a customer relationship management tool, Salesforce is the undisputed best-of-breed CRM solution. Conversely, some feel that Salesforce lacks the sophisticated ERP and accounting solutions that NetSuite delivers.

So it’s not surprising that the finance company wanted to access the benefits of both systems. Yet despite NetSuite’s suggestion that its software integrates easily with Salesforce out of the box, the truth is that its data-sharing needs — like those of many companies — are far too sophisticated for a simple integration. In fact, many enterprise businesses face a similar challenge to the finance company when it comes to integrating their customer relations management solutions with their accounting software.

Without Aptaria’s integration, it would have been faced with several less-than-ideal options. It could have chosen not to integrate the two platforms at all. That would have left its customer relationship data separate from its accounting data, forcing employees to manually transfer data between Salesforce and NetSuite whenever a prospect signed the paperwork to accept funding.

Businesses that choose this path often do this by copying text from Salesforce fields and pasting it into NetSuite (or vice versa), inevitably making data-entry errors as they go and wasting hours of time.

Or it might have chosen one of packaged connectors that claim to integrate the two systems out of the box, without significant customization. But these adapters don’t work very well for businesses that have complex data-sharing requirements, as the financing firm does.

A third option would have been to rely on expensive middleware that sits between the two platforms and acts as a kind of universal translator. While that may be a reasonable solution for companies that need to integrate many different enterprise applications, when striving to share data only between NetSuite and Salesforce, it makes more sense to build the integration directly from one platform to the other without the need for middleware.