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Superior Integrations Win
Superior Integrations Win
Why Integrations?
Enterprise processes are complex. They take a lot of time and effort to be instituted and
streamlined. Enterprises have dozens of processes for multiple activities that have evolved over
the years. Process setting is a painful task especially because of the multiple touchpoints,
stakeholders and systems involved.
While some of the advanced geographies are flourished with multiple point-solutions aimed at
solving a particular process/need, trust deficit and slow moving geographics still have all-in-one
solutions (think SAP) that offer multiple solutions bundled in the same product. Point solutions
may provide a better customer and user experience compared to all-in-one solutions but this
improved UX comes at an additional cost as well. With more products, there’s a need for
multiple integrations as well for data to seamlessly flow between these products.
While integrations are critical for all sorts of enterprise products, building superior and hassle
free integration is more so important in domains where quality self-serve products are
abundant -- thanks to the low switching costs in such cases. Products like SAP are very difficult
to replace despite them offer subpar experience primarily because of the sunk costs in project
implementation and high stakes involved in experimenting with another provider. It, thus,
becomes a necessity for the products not only to provide integration support for these
incumbents but also keep challenging them at every sales opportunity.
What Integrations?
Typically every employee’s lifecycle at an organisation begins the employee on-boarding. This
is when employee details are first captured in any system of the organisation -- this particular
once being an HRMS solution.
Lifecycle of every employee at the organisation also typically ends with an HRMS solution,
either same or a different one, offering exit management functionalities.
Between these two ends, there are multiple processes and touchpoints for the employee and
other stakeholders. This includes project management systems (e.g. JIRA, Asana), messaging
systems (e.g Slack), travel management systems (e.g. Tripit), expense management systems
(e.g. Expensify, Airbase), accounting systems (e.g Tally, Quickbooks), etc. Every product needs
to figure out where it fits in the employee lifecycle and the process flow, and subsequently
evaluate integrations to be built out.
For instance, the following integrations might make sense for an expense management
product.
● HRMS integration
○ To auto-create user profiles on the expense product
○ To fetch attendance details for processing allowances
● Corporate cards integration
○ To fetch corporate card expenses for reporting
● TMC integration
○ To fetch flight rates for trip approvals
○ To provide seamless hotel and flight booking experience
● Slack integration
○ To notify the employees and approvers on a real time basis for new requests,
comments
● Accounting integrations
○ To post approved expenses in relevant ledgers in the accounting system being
used by the company.
Accounting Integrations
Let’s now pick up one of these integration use cases and expand on it a bit. There are typically
3 types of expenses any business has:
1. Salaries - These are the compensation and benefits offered to the employees
2. Vendor Payments - These are the payments for different products and services availed
by the company. This includes payments for aws invoices, sketch licenses, office rent,
payment for office supplies etc.
3. Employee Expenses - These are the expenses employees make on behalf of the
company. Expenses done by a sales team traveling out of town for pitching to a
prospect is a common example of such expenses.
There are different products trying to capture markets for these different types of expense. The
common underlying theme for all these products, is that they help organisations be on top of
these expenses in terms of relevant internal approval, limits and checks, and eventual payments
to the actual beneficiary (e.g. an employee or a vendor or the organisation itself, as the case
may be).
Once the payment is approved and processed, it should reflect in the company's books. This is
where the use case of accounting integration arises. There are dozens of accounting softwares
out there. Quickbooks, SAP, Oracle, Navision, Realbooks and many others are used by
organisations to manage their account.
All these products follow defined financial accounting standards in terms of Chart of Accounts,
Journals, General Ledgers, etc. They have provision to enter accounting entries manually for all
payments or transactions, or import the data using a predefined file format. Importing of is also
possible using APIs, if the product has technical support for the same.
If we consider the case of an expense management product, for instance, it is used by
employees to record their business expenses and get them approved. These business expenses
can be for different purposes e.g. accomodation, travel, food etc. These purposes in the
expense management world are called expense heads or expense categories.
Once the expenses are approved, they need to be reflected in the company's books which are
being managed by the accounting systems. Accounting systems talk in terms of accounts and
ledgers. Different companies organise their chart of account in different manner depending on
what they find convenient. E.g. accounts can be categorized by operating expense and
operating revenues. Accounts can further be categorized by departments and functions.
So, there’s now a need to map each employee on the expense product with an account on the
accounting product. There’s also a need to map the expense heads on the expense product
with cost categories or cost centers on the accounting product. This mapping is usually done by
a unique identifier for each account / ledger, also called GL Codes. This needs to be done on the
expense product side, so that data can be pushed to the accounting system in the expected
format.