How IT Professionals Use Connect Cloud to Streamline Data Access for Finance Teams

As an IT manager, admin, or data professional, you’ve likely felt the challenge of managing a flood of data requests from various departments. Finance teams often need access to diverse datasets—accounting data from systems like Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Xero, or QuickBooks, along with sales and marketing data from platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and still others to measure budgets and return on investments. To make things more complicated, this data is changing constantly.

CData Connect Cloud gives you a single platform to manage data access to all these systems and more, allowing you to empower your finance teams to self-serve data once it’s set up. You can automate the process of virtually integrating multiple data sources, creating datasets, and ensuring governed, self-service access for end users wherever they prefer to work.

Set up connections to key data sources

The first step in using Connect Cloud is connecting the data sources that matter most for your finance teams. These may include cloud-based accounting systems like Sage Intacct, NetSuite, Xero, or QuickBooks, as well as other platforms such as Salesforce and HubSpot, or even databases like SQL Server and MySQL.

The process is simple and secure. You need to use your admin credentials the first and only time to establish connections. Configure your connections just once, and Connect Cloud will maintain them for you, ensuring up-to-date access to all your data sources. This eliminates the need for repeated manual work and custom integrations, allowing you to focus on higher-value tasks. As soon as you set up the connections, you can delegate access to other users you invite to Connect Cloud to get the data they want, or manage individual user credentials to govern who is accessing which data systems.

Create virtual datasets once for finance teams, or enable them to create their own

Once connections are set up, you can then create virtual datasets—predefined data sets that your finance teams can use directly in their tools like Power BI, Excel, or even Tableau. These datasets can combine data from multiple sources into a unified view that’s ready for analysis, always kept up-to-date, and delivered in real-time by Connect Cloud.

Connect Cloud gives you the flexibility to get users the data they need:

• Pre-configure datasets yourself: Create datasets once, ensuring that all users have consistent, governed access to critical data. This ensures that finance teams get accurate and up-to-date information every time, without manually pulling data from each system. Best when users need the same data schemas, but updated records over time.
  
  
  
• Invite finance teams to pull their own data: You can also invite your ambitious users to the platform and give them permissions to create their own datasets with easy-to-use tools in Connect Cloud, like the Query Builder and AI SQL Generator. These intuitive tools allow users to quickly generate the data they need without writing complex queries or relying on IT support.

Custom datasets and data connections, available to users wherever they work

Once your datasets are set up, they’re now ready to use in BI tools like Power BI and Tableau, or spreadsheets like Excel and Google Sheets—wherever your users prefer to work. IT staff can save datasets and then give the finance team access to them in their reporting environments directly, without requiring data users to log into Connect Cloud themselves.

Connect Cloud ensures that these integrations are seamless, maintaining data governance and security, even as you open up access to a wider group of users. The data will always be up-to-date, so there’s no more manually pulling the newest version of data every day or week.

Customer highlight: FullBloom transforms PO processing with Connect Cloud

A perfect example of how Connect Cloud can automate complex data workflows for business users comes from FullBloom, a social impact solution provider in early childhood education. FullBloom’s IT team faced significant challenges in automating purchase order (PO) processing between their NetSuite and Microsoft Power Automate systems.

Before Connect Cloud, FullBloom’s sales team had to manually export invoice data from NetSuite, batch-process it, and then load it into Microsoft Power Apps. This manual process took over an hour and created friction across sales teams. By setting up a real-time connection between NetSuite and Power Apps using Connect Cloud, they were able to automate the entire workflow in real time.

Key benefits for FullBloom:

• Real-time access by sales to NetSuite data for immediate PO processing.
• Eliminated the need for manual data exports and batch processing.
• Improved efficiency and collaboration across sales and finance teams.
• Empowered IT to focus on strategic initiatives while Connect Cloud ran seamlessly in the background

Clear your data request backlog by delivering live data

Connect Cloud enables your finance teams to get the data they need, where they need it—whether selecting the dataset in the platforms they’re used to or building the dataset themselves in Connect Cloud. Clear your backlog of dataset requests and tickets to connect data systems, allowing finance teams to spend more time analyzing data instead of trying to get the data they need.

Ready to streamline your data access and empower your teams? Start using Connect Cloud today with a free 30-day trial and see the difference it can make for your finance and accounting teams.