Appreciating innovation: Eide Bailly optimizes customer experience with Dynamics 365

Innovation is in Eide Bailly’s DNA. Since its founding in 1917, it has embraced change—not just to keep pace with the world, but to lead it. Today, as a top 25 accounting firm in the US, it continues to evolve by offering a comprehensive suite of services, from audit and assurance to outsourced consulting, technology solutions, tax, wealth planning, cybersecurity, and transition and exit planning. As one connected firm, it serves clients across industries, including construction & real estate; manufacturing, distribution, & logistics; healthcare; private equity, and technology. This deep connectivity across people and platforms empowers Eide Bailly to solve today’s most complex business challenges and help its clients thrive in a rapidly changing landscape.

Eide Bailly uses Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Sales, Customer Insights, and Microsoft Power Pages to enhance data integration, reporting, and client engagement. The solution automates routine tasks, improves operational efficiency, and provides real-time data for proactive client management. The firm’s digital transformation underscores its commitment to innovation and marks another way Eide Bailly optimizes performance to prosper into the future.

Optimizing performance, empowering progress

While the firm’s modernization strategy is a long-term one, its migration from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 was completed in only six months—an unusually fast timeline for the accounting industry. The company sought to modernize its customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities to enhance client services, streamline operations, and support business growth. The strategy prioritizes user experience, data access, and future agility, with Dynamics 365 at the heart.

Dynamics 365 fits the bill for several reasons. Though the company had already chosen to invest more broadly in the Microsoft ecosystem, including Microsoft 365, it still did its due diligence in choosing a new CRM solution.

Before migrating to Dynamics 365, Eide Bailly identified opportunities to accelerate growth, reduce system cost and complexity, and prepare its data estate for AI. Dynamics 365 is unique in its ability to address these challenges by offering an integrated platform that consolidates multiple point solutions while enabling seamless tracking of client engagement from marketing automation to sales and customer service.

As the company moves toward standardizing its technology stack, the strategy rests on platforms that meet enterprise-grade standards. If it's not a robust, scalable platform that fits across the business, “it’s just not something we're going to use moving forward,” explains Eric Dukart, Eide Bailly’s Transformation Office Director. “This is a major technology shift for us, and Microsoft is a cornerstone of our strategy. We’ve standardized our data layer on Dataverse and Fabric, and all our collaboration happens in Teams."

High-volume transactions

When the company does need something tailored for a niche need, it builds it in Power Platform to retain control and leverage the flexibility that allows the solutions to evolve over time without disruption to the business or to clients. “We see enormous potential in Power Platform. It allows us to build solutions that deliver value not just for our teams internally, but also for our clients. Putting Power Platform on the front end gives us the ability to modernize the experience without having to rip and replace everything all at once,” says Dan Metzger, Director of Application Delivery. As a result, the new client portal, EB Bridge, positions the firm to achieve more robust reporting capabilities and deeper client engagement.

Eide Bailly made a strategic shift from its existing portal technology to Microsoft Power Pages to further consolidate operations within Microsoft’s ecosystem. The new engine safeguards client data by giving users a secure, user-friendly interface to interact with data stored in CRM without giving direct access to the back-end system where more than 1.5 million files are stored. The portal funnels customer-submitted forms and documents directly into EB Bridge, enabling massive and concurrent intake of hundreds of thousands of documents without overwhelming internal systems or requiring manual input. This is especially critical during peak usage of the platform when customers are actively engaging through the portal and are submitting critical forms and tax-related documentation at high volumes without hiccups.

Sales process overview

Eide Bailly’s sales process blends traditional methods with modern digital tools, all managed within Dynamics 365. The sales journey begins with a mix of digital marketing campaigns and direct outreach. Campaigns and interactions are tracked in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, leveraging the enterprise data model to capture and manage customer engagement across channels. This integrated approach has helped generate over 60,000 new leads, many of which progressed into opportunities since the firm transitioned to Dynamics 365.

Eide Bailly began its transformation journey with a focus on centralizing operations. Unlike the traditional decentralized model where individual offices operate independently, Eide Bailly has been shifting toward centralizing processes to increase efficiency, improve scalability, and streamline operations across the board. The firm is currently evolving its account planning efforts within Dynamics 365 to improve coordination and visibility across teams to ensure all touchpoints and account activities are centralized, enabling account teams to see a complete picture of customer engagement. Opportunity workflows, risk reviews, and approvals are also managed entirely within Dynamics 365.

The firm is leveraging Power Platform using Power Automate to manage workflow automation and Power Apps to build customized user experiences. Dataverse plays a crucial role, acting as the central data layer for the platform, including handling authentication processes and tracking user activity.

While the portal collects key documents, the actual processing and handling of tax returns occurs in a separate, specialized back-end system tightly integrated with Dynamics 365. Once a sales opportunity is marked as closed in Dynamics 365, it automatically triggers the creation of a “job” in the back-end system, kicking off downstream workflows for project delivery and billing.

As data flows through Dataverse, centralized reporting and business intelligence are visible through Power BI. This end-to-end integration—from customer interaction to back-end execution—has resulted in a robust and scalable architecture, improving efficiency, visibility, and client engagement across the board.

To further enhance marketing effectiveness, the firm is launching a new initiative focused on campaign measurement, incorporating Dataverse and Power BI for advanced analytics and reporting.

Amortizing innovation

To drive adoption, Eide Bailly established a robust network of change champions—designated team members embedded in each of its 30-plus offices as well as across major service lines. These individuals acted as go-to resources, offering local and departmental support to ease the transition. Implementation partner Root16 led interactive labs for teams to test new features and gain confidence in the platform. Despite the compressed timeline and the onset of the busy season shortly after go-live, the cutover process was smooth and there were no significant technical issues. As Eric Dukart noted, “From the platform and implementation side, we had zero hiccups.” 

This transformation aligns closely with a broader evolution across the sales and marketing functions, as well as the development of scalable enterprise architecture. With Dynamics 365, Eide Bailly is not just about adapting to industry change—it's staying ahead of it.

The accounting, assurance, and advisory industry is changing rapidly as AI reshapes core service delivery models. The AI inflection point was a critical driver for Eide Bailly's need for change, and Microsoft's leadership in AI gave the firm an edge in leveraging Microsoft Copilot capabilities across Teams and other productivity tools as well as within Dynamics 365 where it’s already delivering value by generating quick account or opportunity summaries that help streamline daily workflows.

Combining Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales with Microsoft 365 Copilot unlocks powerful interoperability—linking Teams, Outlook, and CRM data for deeper, more contextual support. The vision is to create seamless, secure access to information, including the ability for clients to interact with their documents via Power Pages and SharePoint in a secure, intuitive way. This will enable faster responses, reduce manual effort, and elevate service delivery across the board.

Forecasting success

Looking ahead, a key strategic initiative is to expand the use of Copilot Studio to build custom AI agents that can answer common client questions related to tax returns or audit processes—queries to improve efficiency and client experience. By automating routine tasks, firms can reduce labor costs and improve operational efficiency. “Dynamics 365 project management tools help us deliver projects on time and within budget,” says Dukart.

Eide Bailly plans to continue enhancing Dynamics 365 capabilities, focusing on account planning and cross- and upsell opportunities with advanced analytics uncovering trends and patterns in client behavior. By embracing automation, AI, and data-driven insights, Eide Bailly is not just streamlining internal operations—it’s setting the stage for smarter, more personalized client engagement. As technology continues to evolve, Eide Bailly is equipped to anticipate client needs and offer innovative, forward-thinking solutions.