Dakota Financial Uses Rollup Helper to Make Smooth Transition to Salesforce

Dakota Fin logo

Dakota Financial is an asset-based direct funding source that provides equipment funding solutions for more than 10,000 customers in the United States. They deliver national funding programs to partners who have customers with prior bankruptcies, tax liens, judgments, and repossessions. Dakota’s primary borrowers are in construction and trucking, and they provide funding solutions for trucks, trailers, and construction equipment.

Benjamin Gilberg, Product Development Manager at Dakota Financial is overseeing the transition from their in-house system to Salesforce®. Dakota had been using a customized CRM that's based on a FileMaker platform, which was originally built about 20 years ago.

As they outgrew their old system, they needed the ability to integrate with partners and services like TransUnion, so Dakota chose Salesforce.

One of their critical priorities has been ensuring that Salesforce can act as a single point of truth for every department in the company. They needed to create objects for each department and quickly aggregate information from multiple sources to meet the varied requirements of their departments. However, they were running into limitations with Salesforce's rollup summary fields and master-detail relationships. 

Benjamin told us, “We went on the AppExchange and picked Rollup Helper because it had the best reviews. We got the free version to test the functionality of the tool, and after using the three free rollups, we were excited about the potential. We reached out and immediately started using it. We went from three to 50 rollups and then up to 65 quickly. During the last few weeks, we're getting close to 100 rollups as we've brought over more information from our different sources.”

“Rollup Helper is really what's allowed us to achieve this because we're taking very large swaths of information and running lots of rollups on those. Since there are limitations in Salesforce on the number of rollups you can have, it was drastically slowing us down. So, Rollup Helper has made a big difference for us,” he said.

Managing Invoices, Tracking Payments & Fees

“I have probably around three million different records in over seven different objects that we’re rolling up. Any given contract will have a series of invoices attached to it as well as payments that come in. There could be a $1,200 invoice but that invoice might be for five different items, so we track both when that money came in and track how it got applied,” he explains.

Dakota Financial also tracks fees for things like parking tickets and toll violations. They own the equipment and people lease it with an option to buy at the end of the deal, but that means Dakota is the owner of the record. So, if the borrower gets a parking ticket, or runs an automated toll plaza without being up to date on their toll tags, or any other number of things where the specific violation issuer only has a license plate to verify against, as the owner of record, Dakota receives the actual violation.

In the past, if a customer had seven toll violations, they would talk to someone from Dakota’s collections team or asset management team. The customer service representative would have to look in multiple applications and manually calculate totals on the fly, but this information is much easier to access in Salesforce with Rollup Helper.

Now they can rollup that data so it's in one place. When someone from their team opens an account, they see all the different fees broken out by fee type, original total amounts, and remaining amounts due for each type. They’re also breaking them down into complex sets like “What's currently due?” So, if the customer has an invoice that hasn’t been paid yet, they can quickly pull that number and keep it separate from the entire amount that’s owed.

“We've had to create multiple objects in Salesforce. Even though I have three million records, it might only be 600,000 invoices that we're looking at. But because of how we break it up, we've had to make it that much deeper to accommodate the various fee types. So, we have a lot of individual pieces that we're trying to connect,” he added.

Rollup Helper Streamlines Data & Eliminates Time-consuming Fee Calculations 

One of the things Benjamin says that he loves about Rollup Helper is the ability to rollup information from anywhere to anywhere. He continues, “By building this other top-level object that has all the rollups for them, we’re saving our team time by not having to go back and do hand calculations from different sources. The information is right there. If 70% of the time we can save them a couple of minutes here and there, that’s a significant savings over the course of a week, or month, or year.”

“Having never worked with Salesforce before now, we weren’t sure what information we’d be able to bring into this centralized locale. But now that Team A has access to new in-depth information, they want to see it differently than Team B who works only with that information. Before starting this project, I realized I wouldn’t be able to get all the information parsed out properly through the Salesforce rollup system. I’m happy I found Rollup Helper and that our information is accessible and easy to work with,” he explains.

“Rollup Helper is impressive. It was reasonably straightforward for someone who is not a tech guy. The help pages and the setup information are easy to understand. Rollup Helper has made it so much better,” said Benjamin.

He concludes, “Overall Rollup Helper not only does exactly what it says it will do, it does it better than I ever thought it would. It’s been a huge help!”

 

Learn more about Rollup Helper 

Thompson Pump Gets Around Rollup Limitations & Simplifies Reporting with Rollup Helper Customer Success Rollup Helper + Lookup Helper: A Winning Combination for Aspire
Chat Offline
Contact Us Here