In a world of fast-paced growth and acquisitions, one global enterprise found itself at a tipping point. Years of merging systems, rapid-fire migrations, and inconsistent processes created a tangled web of duplicate customer records, disjointed finance trails, and frustrated sales teams. What should have been a digital engine of growth became a brake on business momentum.
The Challenge: When Growth Creates Data Paralysis
With over 70 legal entities spread across global regions, each with their own regulatory, commercial, and operational rules, the business relied on both Salesforce (for CRM) and NetSuite (for financial and legal records) to manage the same customer base. The problem? Duplicate records lived in both systems. A single customer could appear dozens of times, under different names, regions, or legal groupings. Each entry held different, but still valuable, information.
This dual-platform setup created more than confusion, it caused time loss, misinformed decisions, and operational drag. Sales teams couldn’t identify the right record. Finance lacked alignment between accounts receivable and client management. And with 10,000+ records, the business was struggling to make sense of what truly mattered.
The Golden Fix: Harmonisation + Smart Ledger Intelligence
That’s where Cloud Perspective stepped in. More than just deduplication, in addition bringing a ledger-aware harmonisation strategy powered by Informatica’s CC360. Recognising the core importance of the General Ledger and the need to preserve double-entry bookkeeping integrity, we designed a process to identify valid account groupings without compromising financial compliance.
The result? A data-led algorithm that reduced 10,000 records down to a focused, functional set of just over 1,000 high-value account views, all with clarity, traceability, and financial integrity intact.
Built for Complexity: From CRM to Financial Truth
Our approach created a single source of truth per account, no matter which system you log into.
- In Salesforce, sellers saw a clean, consolidated view.
- In NetSuite, finance retained legal-account separation, now linked to the golden record.
Because some duplicates exist for valid legal or operational reasons, the system doesn’t blindly merge. It assesses usage, revenue, and relevance, and flags it for review.
Built-In Controls: When Automation Needs a Human Touch
We designed a fail-safe layer to support manual intervention when needed. If teams require accounts to remain separate, or need input across departments, those approvals are now built into the process.
This not only increases adoption but also opens the process to more users, reducing reliance on a small group of data stewards and easing operational load across the board.
The Outcome: From Messy to Meaningful
- Massive reduction in operational noise
- Sales clarity with fewer duplicate touchpoints
- Aligned financial and CRM data
- Increased readiness for account-based selling
- Real-time visibility across platforms
- Optimised team resourcing through headcount reduction
With cleaner data, the business can reallocate staff from manual merge and triage work to more strategic areas, whether in analytics, customer engagement, or innovation. This isn’t just a technology upgrade, it’s a shift in how the business operates.
Harmonised data isn’t just cleaner, it’s smarter, faster, and financially aligned.
Culture Is the Key to Value
Even the best tool only delivers if it’s used the right way. To realise full value, the business must embrace new data principles and resist falling back into old habits of manual merging when it’s not needed.
This shift takes education, reinforcement, and daily adoption, embedding the harmonised solution as a default, not a workaround. With the right cultural shift, the harmonised data strategy won’t just deliver clarity, it will power confident decision-making across the business.
>> Curious about how this ties into account-based selling? Read our strategic guide here.
