The Salesforce platform can be a valuable tool for managers seeking to streamline fundraising, manage their portfolios more effectively, and gain competitive advantage. However, how exactly the fund manager can best use the platform can be a complicated decision.
What is wrong with using Moneyforce out of the box for money management?
The most common problem with using Salesforce for money management is that fund managers often pay more for licenses. Salesforce Sales Cloud is built for organizations with traditional sales and customer support workflows, such as dealing with prospects, opportunities, and support cases that are not designed for private equity fund managers or venture capital fund managers. So while Salesforce is a very flexible platform, using out-of-the-box Salesforce often causes users to discard the sales and support-related features they are paying for and use custom objects from scratch. If customers commit to implementing Salesforce themselves, using a platform license instead of a full Sales Cloud or Support Cloud license is an efficient and cost-effective option because platform licenses are less expensive and do not include private equity or venture capital features. Capital fund managers usually give up.
Salesforce Private Equity / Venture Capital Template
Salesforce offers an option for alternative asset managers who want to make Salesforce relevant to their industry functions: Salesforce Private Equity / Venture Capital template. This template is more useful than Salesforce out-of-the-box fund management, but unfortunately, the private equity/risk investment template is not a product that grows or develops; Salesforce does not demonstrate a commitment to product development or support, so templates users are usually Enhance, support and maintain on your own. In the end, the template can be a good example of what can be done through customization, but without the support of Salesforce, it can't effectively serve the fund manager.
The danger of building your own database with Salesforce
Since Salesforce is such a flexible platform, it is of course possible to build databases and data structures that represent the workflow inherent in fundraising, LP management, investor management, transaction tracking and portfolio management. Salesforce comes with a number of tools that allow users to build database tables to store information in a way that is relevant and beneficial to fund managers. In addition, the workflow feature automates the process, and more advanced users can further customize their system with Apex code and Visualforce, which can generate dynamic higher output than using Salesforce out of the box.
The main obstacle to self-implementing Salesforce for money management is deciding how to organize the data. Before you start building your system, it's important to understand how to model your business and how to build a table in your database to represent it. For example, some organizations may invest from separate pools of capital, while others may have only one pool of funds; some may make a single investment, some may participate in follow-on investments; some organizations want to consider previous fundraising activities or Round of valuation rounds. Therefore, the process of building a database becomes an exercise in modeling the data structure that represents the business.
For fund managers, this is certainly not impossible for themselves. However, building a truly extensible relational model requires an in-depth understanding of how the database works, and requires insight into what the user interface and reporting data ultimately want to see.
Self-enforcement also brings classic "build and buy" IT spending decisions. Salesforce is clearly a very flexible platform and does not require extensive technical knowledge to build almost any database model you want. Therefore, with unlimited time and interest, it is absolutely possible to build a very useful money management tool in Salesforce.
Fund managers need to answer a lot of questions before deciding to build their own systems. These questions include who will support the system, who will maintain it, and how to continue to grow and develop. Another issue is what happens if the employees who support and maintain the system eventually leave the organization. Without a clear plan for how to support and maintain the system, systems with cheap licenses and inexpensive implementations can become very expensive later in the solution's lifecycle.
Orignal From: Customize Salesforce for fund managers
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