Cloud accounting and financial applications provider FinancialForce.com has released Accounting Summer ’12, which includes several multicurrency enhancements, deeper CRM and accounting collaboration, and a community site feature.

For one, by embedding FinancialForce Accounting into the Salesforce Service Cloud, companies can automate the billing of support and service charges, empowering customer service reps to immediately bill and sell add-on products and services.

“The current trend is to move accounting out further out into the organization and we’re doing that more with the Salesforce integration,” said FinancialForce.com vice president of product marketing Tom Brennan. “This release is about the growth of the service sector and service teams, and a big part of that is integration with Salesforce Service Cloud, which is now a $500 million business for Salesforce. More people are trying to take support centers and turn them into profit centers, which create more financial transactions coming from other departments and problems for the accounting department. When special invoices come in they are handled outside the normal flow, but now you can automatically create an invoice and place it in a workflow queue [with FinancialForce Accounting Summer ‘12].”

Also, with Accounting Summer ’12, sales and service personnel can see a financial picture of the customer, including the ability to view outstanding invoices, payments and credits on the account, regardless of where the transactions originated. 

In addition, the company added the FinancialForce Community, a social and online learning destination designed, to serve as a central meeting place for FinancialForce.com users and partners.  It is embedded in all FinancialForce applications, allowing users to log cases, find answers and offer product enhancement ideas directly from within the application.

FinancialForce.com’s primary shareholders include Unit4 and Salesforce.com.