A new application from boutique New Zealand based development house Trineo seeks to close the loop between CRM and accounting for salesforce.com users. Originally released to coincide with last months DreamForce event, Dime is currently avaiable for Xero users and is a library that makes the full breadth of the functionality in the Xero API available to salesforce users. Eagle eyed readers will remember that Trineo is the development house that I wrote about previously – they’re in the enviable (some would say through their own prescience) position of being both force.com developers and boutique Ruby on Rails developers using the (now salesforce owned) Heroku platform.

So, what is it and what does it enable? In this version, Dime converts Xero’s API into easy to use Apex methods, doing so means that Xero data is natively accessible to salesforce. What it enables, for example, is the synchronization of salesforce accounts to Xero contacts, or the ability to generate invoices in Xero from won opportunities within salesforce.

The video below shows Dime in action;

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At this stage, Dime is only available for the Xero API, but Trineo tells me that the intention is to broaden the offering to other accounting packages. This is important, while salesforce has thrown their weight (and money) behind FinancialForce, there are a number of organizations for whom the feature set or pricing of FinancialForce isn’t perfect – as Dime broadens it’s library, more and more accounting applications will enjoy the benefits that deep integration between CRM and accounting can bring.

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

1 Comment
  • Hi Ben

    We like Dime and feel it’s a great app for what it does, but we needed something they didn’t offer – bringing live, up-to-date invoice information back into Salesforce.

    Not only did we need that feature, but we figured other people would too, so we developed Breadwinner. It’s a native Salesforce app that does something no other Xero to Salesforce integration does – retrieve all your invoices from Xero – even historical ones from years ago – and bring them into Salesforce and keep them up to date. More info at http://breadwinnerhq.com/

    thanks
    Stony Grunow

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