Three Ways Slack Helps Enterprise Finance Teams Be More Productive

Successful finance leaders focus on driving company growth while working closely with executives to move the business forward. Doing the job well requires collaborating with multiple stakeholders across many systems of record and having accurate, real-time visibility into the financial health of the business. Any snags along the way — such as inaccuracies in reporting the company’s financial numbers — could jeopardize the company’s performance as well as shareholders, analysts, and customers’ perception of the company. Stock values could plunge, and major deals and mergers and acquisitions could be delayed or stalled altogether.

With the stakes being so high, Salesforce finance teams rely on Slack to help them succeed. Slack has helped transform how those teams work by bringing their reporting tools, processes, and people into one secure workspace. Now finance teams are experiencing greater visibility and faster approval times and decision-making. According to internal data, Salesforce reduced merger and acquisition approvals from as long as seven days to under three hours with Slack workflows in 2023.

“Slack is a huge efficiency for us,” said Jordy Brazier, Salesforce’s SVP of Revenue Growth and Automation. “It’s a much faster way to interact between functions, and you don’t have to look at five different applications to make a decision or resolve an issue.”

Here are a few ways Salesforce finance teams are using Slack as their AI-powered productivity platform.

Report and act on accurate data in Slack channels

Finance team leaders need access to accurate, real-time information to close out quarterly reports. Before adopting Slack, Salesforce finance teams would spend hours poring through multiple reports and dashboards produced by a variety of sources to make sure the data was accurate. Now all the datasets get pulled into a Slack channel.

Channels are flexible spaces created for specific projects or accounts that contain the people, tools, and files teams need to get work done; and they can be public or private, which means sensitive information can be shared securely with limited groups of people. Having a single place where a team can have conversations and act around data saves finance teams valuable time.

“Being able to work asynchronously and use channels instead of scheduling a meeting every time we need clarity helps us function as a unified global team, despite being spread across the world,” said Jon Worthington, EVP of Global Revenue Operations at Salesforce. “It accelerates response times because there’s a community within the channel, allowing for quick replies.”

While some other platforms on the market restrict teams to working on their proprietary (yet siloed) tools, our time-saving integrations with over 2,600 apps give teams access to the industry’s best financial reporting tools when they need them. Salesforce finance teams use Tableau dashboards to get the latest forecast numbers and Slack Sales Elevate to get the most accurate real-time opportunity pipeline data from Sales Cloud right in Slack — where they’re already working.

For staying on top of all their tasks, Salesforce teams use Slack lists, a work management solution available in Slack channels and messages. Take prepping for an earnings call. Anyone driving the project management for the call can start a list in a specific channel created for collaborating around the call. All of the multiple tasks leading up to the call — the script, the slide deck, documentation for analysts — can get added to a list with the respective deadlines and stakeholders responsible for each task. If one of the presenters has a question about who should be reviewing their briefing notes, they can simply @mention that person under the thread and leave a clip with their questions and concerns. The author can then respond and upload additional files for more context. Having everything in one visible place helps project managers and leaders organize and track work to completion.

When things are busy, it’s not always easy to stay on top of every single conversation in Slack. For customers who purchase Slack’s generative AI offering, Slack AI, teams can get a bird’s-eye view of their priorities by generating summaries of an entire channel or specific threads. Slack AI’s recap feature, for example, helps finance leaders stay on top of their most important work by creating an automated daily summary of specific channels so they can get caught up in seconds and focus on what’s most important: getting a complete picture of the company’s financial health.

Automate approvals with workflows and bots

According to internal data, Salesforce finance teams fulfilled over 850,000 travel and expense approvals in 2023. A single team member might receive a hundred requests in a day, and, without a way to automate incoming requests, they can pile up and slow down operations.

Before adopting Slack, Salesforce employees would submit requests to their finance counterparts via email, and the process would drag out for days. The company’s finance teams needed to keep track of emails that would get lost in their inbox, and there was a lot of back-and-forth because information was missing and distributed across different systems. Salesforce expedited its expense request process by integrating almost every system that requires approvals into Slack with Slack’s no-code Workflow Builder. Now the average response time for approvals across Salesforce has gone from two days down to two hours, according to internal company data.

With the company’s custom-built Approvals app, employees submit expenses using a workflow that prompts them to provide all the request details in a Slack channel. The information is then visible and trackable from the channel and gets traced back to the respective system of record, which speeds up the time it takes to identify and resolve issues. When an employee wants to book a flight on a third-party site, they submit the expense request, and a member of the finance team is notified and can approve it with a click of a button in the channel.

Salesforce finance teams also use a custom bot to move along pricing adjustments on contracts submitted by sales reps and account managers. The bot pulls data from CRM records to populate a template document with the new deal structure and relevant notes, and then it alerts all of the stakeholders. Managers can approve the request instantly after seeing all the context they need without having to track down information in various emails or applications.

Josh Clark, a senior manager in Salesforce’s product and pricing operations, said the bot helps manage millions of approvals that come through every year. “Before Slack, everyone got a single blast email, no matter which account requested a change. And so people just turned them off. They were noise,” he said. “Slack changed that. Now people only see the deals they’re working on, and they can bring all the needed people under a thread so issues can get resolved much faster.”

Work faster with external partners on confidential information

A publicly traded company like Salesforce must stay in compliance with the Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX), not to mention myriad other federal, state, and international regulations around data integrity, auditing, and reporting structures. Compliance teams at enterprise companies need a fast, productive, and secure way to work with external partners and vendors.

Slack Connect is the solution that checks all the boxes for Salesforce finance teams‌. It’s been a game changer for leaders like Sarah Semprez, Salesforce’s Global Vice President of SOX compliance, because it keeps work secure with Slack’s enterprise-grade security features and compliance standards. When people work in email, there’s always a chance someone could accidentally share a ledger to the wrong email. That doesn’t happen with Slack Connect.

In addition, Slack Connect speeds up work by extending all of Slack’s capabilities to the people who finance teams work with outside the company in dedicated, secure channels. During mergers and acquisitions, Slack Connect makes it easy for teams to share documents and conversations with external partners so the company can get to harmonization faster. Whether it’s a team of consultants or a vendor representative, anyone can start or join a huddle to quickly discuss sections of an audit, answer questions by sharing a quick clip, or compile information with a canvas.

“Being able to put third-party providers into a channel and collaborate with them the same way we do with our own people is hugely valuable. So much of what we do requires constant interaction,” Semprez said. “It just doesn’t work over email. There was really no discussion about it; outside parties like PricewaterhouseCooper have to be integrated deeply with Salesforce using Slack. They are an extension of our team.”

Give your teams a secure platform that promotes productivity

When finance teams work in Slack, your organization can focus on strategic work that drives the bottom line. Learn what Slack can do for your finance department. Contact our sales team today.