Creating CRM flows from accounting activity
How a Cape Town NGO accelerated their donor engagement by automating real-time Xero to Salesforce synchronisation — eliminating duplicate data entry and ensuring donor records are always accurate.
Results at a glance
About U-Turn Homeless Ministries
U-Turn is a Cape Town-based NGO serving and empowering homeless people since 1997. Using an innovative skills-based programme with long-term results for rehabilitation and reintegration, and partnering with supporters in South Africa as well as donors in the UK and USA, 80% of participants remain employed and sober six months after the programme. With a high level of engagement and value placed in their supporters and donors, their Salesforce CRM system is essential to ensure donors receive feedback and information about the organisation's work.
Manual processes that couldn't keep up
Keeping the CRM system in sync with accounting required large amounts of re-entered data — pledges and donations captured by the Accounting team had to be manually entered again by the Donor Relationship team into Salesforce.
Contact details were maintained in both Xero and Salesforce, making it impossible to know which version to trust when updates were made in only one system.
Discrepancies between the accounting and donor management systems risked undermining donor trust and engagement.
Real-time Xero to Salesforce automation
Having recently moved to Xero for accounting, and with both Xero and Salesforce offering extensive APIs, the opportunity was presented to remove all duplicated work and automate the Xero to Salesforce synchronisation.
Using Xero's WebHooks, a server automatically receives all Invoice activity in real time — no polling or scheduled syncing required.
Each activity event is analysed according to U-Turn's requirements, and qualifying invoices are automatically transformed and pushed into Salesforce as Opportunities.
All contacts are now kept in a single system with a unique ID linking back to the other, so contact information is always up to date and trustworthy.
A real-time shared spreadsheet is updated with every qualifying invoice activity and resulting Opportunity, providing a full audit trail.
So when will the Xero Invoice capture be reflected in our Salesforce? — Oh, it'll be there automatically as soon as the invoice is captured.
U-Turn Homeless Ministries
Cape Town, South Africa
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