Salesforce.com and Unit 4 Agresso formed FinancialForce.com in 2009 as . FinancialForce.com's applications for accounting and professional services organizations are built on top of Salesforce.com's Force.com development platform, and had previously been tied into its core CRM (customer relationship management) application.

It made sense to connect FinancialForce.com's accounting software to the Service Cloud, said Tom Brennan, vice president of marketing, in an interview.

For one, Salesforce.com has said the Service Cloud is now a US$500 million business, which shows clear demand from customers, Brennan said.

In addition, "There's a lot a lot of financial activity coming from call centers and service desks," he said. "Companies are moving a lot of billable work to their call centers. There's chargeable activity coming off call centers. Companies are trying to make call centers more profitable." He cited the example of a tech company up-selling premium services to users that call into customer-support lines for help with a problem.

The integration between FinancialForce.com accounting and the Service cloud does away with the need to create special invoices and the manual sharing of documents between call center workers and finance, Brennan said. "Now when you're in the Service Cloud, you can create an invoice from a case, push it into the Force.com workflow, and then into accounts receivable."