Data Integration for Finance: ERP, Planning, CRM, and HRIS Connected

The ERP holds the financial truth. The planning tool holds the budget and forecast. The CRM holds the pipeline. The HRIS holds headcount and compensation. The billing system holds invoice detail. FP&A needs all five joined to produce the monthly variance analysis the CFO expects — but the joins don't exist. Each system uses different dimensions (the CRM's account hierarchy doesn't match the GL's customer dimension), different time grains (the planning tool is monthly, the billing system is transactional), and different identifiers (the HRIS employee ID doesn't match the GL's department coding). FP&A assembles the data manually every close, spending three days on the extraction and one day on the analysis.

Finance data integration done right maps the dimensions across systems before building the pipelines. The CRM's account hierarchy mapped to the GL's customer dimension. The HRIS organizational structure mapped to the GL's cost centers. The planning tool's forecast dimensions mapped to the GL's natural account and department structure. With these mappings in place, the integration layer produces a unified financial data set that FP&A can analyze without manual assembly. The pipelines are close-aware — they know when to capture adjusting entries, when the forecast refresh happens, and when the GL is finalized.