By Building 2go on Force.com, CODA Delivers an Accounting Revolution
CODA has not been a name synonymous with on-demand development. For nearly three decades, the UK-based ISV has built a formidable reputation for its financial accounting software, which resides on local servers in some 2,600 mid-to-large organizations around the world. But at Dreamforce Europe 2008, CODA Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Roche’s demo proved that his company has done for accounting what salesforce.com has done for CRM—by leveraging the Force.com platform to build and launch a new software-as-a-service (SaaS) application suite called CODA 2go.
Since the launch of its accounting application service, CODA has become a darling of the cloud computing world, garnering not only positive media coverage but plenty of customer inquiries. A number of carefully selected companies are currently testing CODA 2go in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The CODA 2go development effort is a case study in how a well-established software vendor can enter the SaaS world. By building in the clouds on Force.com, CODA saved an estimated two years of development work while opening new market opportunities.
Schofield notes that “while there are other vendors with on-demand accounting solutions, we have been experts in on-premise finance for 28 years with customers operating across 100 countries. We have a ‘multi-everything’ approach: multi-lingual, multi-currency, multi-company. In the accounting world, we enjoy enormous credibility, especially among mid- to enterprise-level organizations. CODA 2go gives us new opportunities among smaller, fast-growing companies.”
CODA 2go debuted with sales invoicing and accounts receivable functionality, addressing a clear demand from many organizations for a seamless, software-as-a-service solution to manage the process of converting orders into cash. CODA’s state-of-the-art development effort employs Force.com platform technologies, including Force.com Apex code for the business logic and Visualforce to build the user interface.
From business plan to full-scale development
CODA’s development team had been reviewing the emerging market for on-demand applications for some time, but the CODA 2go project was prompted by repeated customer requests to integrate Salesforce’s CRM with CODA’s accounting applications. From there, CODA developers began thinking about the larger challenge: building their own applications in the cloud.The project at first seemed daunting. “We knew that developing our own on-demand platform in-house would be a lengthy and expensive project and that we were looking at at least two years before we could start building the solution on the platform,” says Schofield. “Even with Force.com, we initially thought that development would be difficult and time consuming, but we were quickly proven wrong.
“After talking with Salesforce, we realized we could be very efficient about the delivery of our accounting solution because of the strength of the Force.com platform,” explains Debbie Ashton, product director at CODA. “In particular, we felt Apex code was critically important, as was the coming availability of Visualforce.”
After a trip to San Francisco to discuss the project with Salesforce.com engineers and marketing personnel, the CODA team developed a business plan. They won approval, put together a team of developers, designers and testers, and went to work on a proof-of-concept project using simulated data from a fictional but realistic target customer: a mid-size business with multiple offices managing a sizeable inventory. The success of the pilot opened the door to full-scale development.
In creating CODA 2go, the development team took advantage of the Force.com platform’s strengths. Two standard platform features were particularly beneficial: reporting and workflow. For example, CODA created a set of standard reports to accompany its application in days —efficiency that was made possible through the rich reporting infrastructure provided as standard by the platform. By comparison, Schofield says CODA spends up to 3 months testing reporting functionality at the end of each major release of its on-premise accounting application to ensure that it integrates with third-party reporting products.
Salesforce.com’s traditional strengths in CRM also came in handy. “Financial management is the natural extension of the sales cycle,” Schofield said. “Clearly, companies want to turn their hard won orders into cash as efficiently as possible. And once CRM is tightly linked to the finance system, you can analyze sales and finance trends based on reliable, meaningful numbers. That’s a powerful proposition.”
Today, that integration means CODA 2go customers can produce invoices at the touch of a button, completely bypassing the manual, consuming, and error-prone rekeying of information that occurs at most organizations with traditional on-premise solutions.
The development team also built the customer-requested integration tool that originally spurred the project. CODA’s Integrator for Salesforce is available on the Force.com AppExchange, a marketplace of SaaS applications.
Collaborative effort
Throughout the project, the CODA developers have closely collaborated with salesforce.com, and continue to do so. “We have access right into the heart of the Salesforce development team,” Ashton says. “The support we’re getting is really great.”Schofield agrees. “Everybody at Salesforce has been incredibly helpful, willing to spend significant time to talk about what they do and why they do it,” she said. “As a result, we’ve been able to learn a lot from how Salesforce goes about developing, marketing and selling its own applications. Of course, CODA 2go is addressing a different target market, and we’ve been able to bring our own extensive expertise in developing international accounting systems into the mix. But we’ve learned an enormous amount from the Salesforce guys, and that has really helped us to move forward quickly.”
The innovation is far from over. CODA is now working to deliver accounts payable and full general ledger functionality. Once the company has released the core accounting applications, it will look to other areas such as procurement, assets, and sales order processing.
“We have planned a full roadmap based on our experience in the market, the appearance of additional functionality will in part depend on where our early adopters push us,” Schofield says. “ With Force.com, everything and anything is possible.”
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