Case study
Automating VAT-Compliant Event Registration with Fonteva and Certinia
The Council of International Schools (CIS) is a global membership community shaping the future of international education. The CIS community includes more than 1,530 schools and universities, representing 122 countries.
CIS is focused on connecting ideas and cultures across the world, developing socially responsible leadership through international education. CIS uses Salesforce as its CRM and manages its portals in Salesforce Experience Cloud.
The Challenge
CIS hosts dozens of virtual and in-person events and workshops throughout the year for its membership community. They sought a new system to simplify event registration and enhance the user experience for their members while simplifying internal processes.
The primary objective was to integrate the event registration experience in Salesforce and the CIS member portals. CIS wanted a modern and easy-to-use platform to facilitate registration. They also desired a flexible solution that would work with existing financial systems. CIS’ previous event registration system was handled externally to Salesforce and, therefore, could not meet these long-term requirements.
The Solution
Fonteva Events was installed to manage CIS' event registration from the member portals, with registration data captured in Salesforce contacts and accounts. Members could access and register for events seamlessly within the CIS member portal, including purchasing tickets through CIS' custom invoice process, handled via Certinia (formerly FinancialForce).
Zentso built custom automation to integrate Fonteva Events with Certinia, passing ticket pricing and billing information to Certinia and retrieving VAT rates to ensure Fonteva displayed the correct VAT price at checkout, with CSS customised on the Fonteva Event pages so VAT text met Netherlands tax law. As Certinia does not work with native Salesforce automation out of the box, another third-party consultancy collaborated with Zentso on the Certinia side, using standard Certinia Message Types.
The result let members select any number of tickets and pay the correct VAT price for their location, with the existing invoice automation kept intact and the CIS finance team's current VAT engine leveraged automatically.
A second phase added a default tax rate for events based in the Netherlands, via a checkbox on the Fonteva Event record and custom metadata tables in the Salesforce back-end, giving the CIS events team the flexibility to bypass programmed VAT rates and update them easily if they change in future.
From our first meeting, Zentso helped us frame our opportunity for this implementation and provided great guidance to ensure we met our goals. The questions they asked made it clear they had the expertise needed to help with the implementation. They proposed several approaches to meet our goals and provided great consultation based on their previous experiences. The team had a stellar approach to project management, too which created confidence that the project would remain on schedule and budget.
The Results
- Enhanced membership experience through integrating events into the existing member portal
- Improved visibility of event data integrated directly into the membership CRM system
- Fully integrated workflow leveraging the existing financial engine to handle VAT calculations configured with automation
See more from Zentso
View Zentso's exhibitor profile for more information, case studies and resources.
More Case Studies
