Transcript for "Improve with integration: Supercharge 3 key finance processes":
Hello. Hello. I see a few of you rolling in. Thanks for coming today. We are gonna wait just a few moments to get started in, anticipation of a few more people joining or just to let people roll in. But, again, I appreciate everyone joining today. Hi, Anil. Thanks for joining all the way from Hyderabad. Thank you for tuning in. Alright. Just, be respectful to everyone's time. I think we're gonna go ahead and jump right into it. So first things first. My name is Brett Creech, and I'm a solutions consultant here at Soliglio. Just wanted to take the time to, thank you all for for joining the webinar here today where we're gonna be talking about improving 3 key finance processes with integration. Before we dive in, I would like to go through a quick agenda for us here. So we're gonna start by, walking through the 3 key finance processes and why automating them is important. Then we're gonna talk about what integrations are out there for you and, know, how Celigo can potentially fit into that picture. Then I'm gonna go through a demonstration of our product, Integrator IO, which we'll learn more about here shortly, and, wrap up with some customer success stories. Also, as we go through the presentation here today, please feel free to put any of your questions in the chat. We'll we'll make sure to carve out time here at the end so we can we can address those. But without further ado, let's let's jump into things. There we go. Okay. So as you think about automating your finance tech stack, there are 3 key areas that stand down or at least come to mind for me, with 1st or most prominent probably being the quote and cash process. Right? And so when your sales system lives in isolation from your finance system, your billing system isn't informed of any updates to quotes, terms, or other documentation, and that may lead to incorrect invoices and bills being generated as a result. The the ultimate results in, or this ultimately results rather in wasted time and effort by needing to correct and resend those bills, delays in the execution of contracts, or even delays in monthly, quarterly close and inaccuracy, for reports. 2nd here, we have expense management. And this is or it can be an expensive problem when you have to manually track and pay expenses and then update that information across financial systems, and we've seen that correcting these expenses can be as much as $50 per expense report. Lastly, for today's session, we wanted to talk a little bit about FP and a, you know, the the whole process of financial reporting, planning, and analysis. And this is incomplete if you don't have the right resources feeding data into your FP and a systems, and manually collating that data while keeping it updated in real time for measurement is just not scalable. One statistic that we found interesting was the fact that finance teams will spend as much as 70% of their time just collating their data, leaving only the remaining 30% for strategic analysis. Talking first a little bit about the quote to cash process. In in this rapidly changing digital world, even simple processes like quote cash have grown in scope and complexity. Now there are best of breed applications for every single step of this business process and for optimum efficiency, your sales and finance systems should communicate with each other and really all other ancillary systems. For example, you may be doing lead generation out of HubSpot, so you need to get those leads in the Salesforce and you need to, you know, generate a a quote using some type of CPQ system that may be disparate, and in order to integrate those quotes as orders into your ERP. And at different points where you may need approvals in that workflow, you can connect with Slack or another IMS to issue notifications and and get approvals to expedite different parts of your business process. More to come on that Slack use case. We'll we'll be sure to actually cover that in the the demo portion here today. But, really, the the options are endless, especially with all of the different integration options out there. If you notice, this process also covers our other two processes we mentioned such as FP and A with, systems like Anaplan or expense management with, Concur here. But moving to expense management specifically, there are mainly 3 benefits you can reap if you integrate your expense management system with other financial systems. You fast track not just payments, but tracking of paid expenses across your financial cycle by reducing processing and or manual processing and saving cost per expense. In addition, each expense is automatically available across your system, so your financial reports, plans, and forecasts are always up to date. You always get the advantage of compliance with taxation and also auditing requirements. With automation driving the FP and a process, your teams don't have to spend hours collecting data manually giving you 70% time savings in the financial planning analysis process and reducing compliance costs by up to 50%. You can get data from multiple financial systems, ensure real time updates to that data, and track performance and compliance with built models and plans all through a connected financial tech stack. All of this rolls up to always having accurate financial information available with 55% of financial leaders reporting greater confidence in their decision making due to financial integration and automation, obviously cutting out the issue of manual data entry issues or or duplication. And then now that we've talked a little bit about why integrations are necessary, it's also important that we should talk about the different integration options out there. And ultimately, that comes down to a few questions that each of us have to ask ourselves. Right? Like, what what is our integration strategy? Do we want to build? Do we wanna buy? I'm gonna walk through 4 different integration options and discuss the pros and cons of each along the way. But first, starting with one I'm sure we're all familiar with, manual data transfer. This is, however, it can be expensive, but it is error prone. It's time consuming and tedious really at the end of the day. Next, we have direct API integration. You know, another viable solution, but you get exactly what you want and you have complete control over the process. There are no recurring fees, but usually this turns out to be more expensive as you're now required to maintain the integration and need a developer to make that happen. And, if if you don't have developer resources available internally, you'll become dependent on outside resources for maintenance and ongoing support. Next, we have native or plugin integrations. Again, another great option. These can be quick, cheap, easy, but you get what you get. And, if you have any complex needs, they won't adapt and you're out of luck. That's usually the, you know, the concept of if you fit in the box, great. If there's any unique requirement, you you might need to look elsewhere. But lastly, here we have business process automations, specifically iPaaS or integration platform as a service. It's great because it's it's admin configurable, meaning someone else will maintain the code. So if it breaks, it it isn't your problem. It's very flexible and scalable as well. There there are recurring fees, but it ultimately turns out to be cheaper with higher return on investment compared to those other options we discussed. And with Soligo's integration platform, we have these popular ERPs and other finance applications like Concur and Anaplan to connect and automate your financial tech stack and also to have those approval based workflows built right out of Slack for seamless execution. And so we go's Integrator IO, lets you fast track your integrations via our 200 plus prebuilt connectors while giving you the flexibility to use universal connectors to really connect to any system. You can build custom flows where your integrations, map your data, and even let your more technical users build powerful, complex integrations with our set of developer tools that are always gonna be at their fingertips. And rather than just, you know, talking about it with slides, I think it's actually a good point for us to jump into the demonstration of the product or a few of those those different respective use cases. So let me actually, one second here. Apologies. There we go. Oh, it's a nature of a live demo, folks. Sit with me here for just one moment, and we will be a okay. Alright. Alright. So we should be able to see my screen here. We're looking at a home dashboard. Really an example of what your integrated IO environment or integration landscape could look like in a future state. Here we have a mix of prebuilt integration apps or integration templates or even fully customized integrations, and you're able to manage those all through one cohesive dashboard. We wanna talk through a few of these examples today, like, with, concur or even expense approvals through Slack. But first, I wanted to start by going through the Salesforce to anything tile. This is one of those custom integrations that, you can see where we're able to connect really any application, right, with, any of these respective ERPs like Business Central, Acumatica, or Sage Intact. But also we can connect to other respective systems to support other processes like connecting to your marketing system like HubSpot, you know, feeding, leads into your CRM kind of that use case we alluded to earlier, you know, supporting your customer support process or feeding data from all your respective systems into a data warehouse. But jumping back to, this the actual or the the ERP use cases, wanted to talk through some of the management components that, you know, are are kind of a benefit through the use of an Ipass as you have complete control over when and, what type of data you're syncing between systems at granular level. So you can see here we have both scheduled and real time operations. In the event that you did have a scheduled batch based flow, you would always have the ability to jump in and use one of the prebuilt frequencies, choosing the start time and the the day of the week you prefer this to run on. But also if you need things to be a little bit more specific, you can, jump into the the chron expression and build things to run up to every 5 minutes or, you know, even choosing the the days of the month that you prefer this to run. But probably more important to each of you is gonna be how the data is presented from one system to another, where each of the the data flows that you'll build will likely include some type of mapping exercise. And within Saligos mapping interface, we've made this easy for the average line of business user to manage on an ongoing basis. So after the work, building your integration is complete and you've, you know, you've you've got your your your different fields aligned with or between the respective systems, you don't have to be technical to go in here. Right? And so now we can see an example of what I was alluding to where we have, the fields coming from Salesforce or CRM in this instance and where we would like those to live once they make it into our ERP. And so this can be as simple as a quick matching exercise choosing from a list of drop down options from either side. Or, we know that mapping isn't always that easy. So we have a few different types of mapping to support the more complex scenarios like, hard coding of value. Maybe you wanted to always map to the same subsidiary, very common use case for us, or maybe you wanted to build out a, a concatenation. Right? Something where maybe the address fields from one system are coming from, separate locations. But when we go to the destination system, say NetSuite in this instance, they need to all be compressed into one field. So you can build up the logic to do just that, using the the multi field expression option or or really build out any other expression if you're familiar with handlebar helpers, or or or or, blocks you're able to say do things like find the absolute value. I won't go through that whole list, but there's a lot more to dig into there. Lastly here, we wanted to touch upon the ability to build out lookups, which these can be either static or dynamic. So, you know, if this is a a pretty common example where maybe the source system is applying the states in shorthand and, we need those to actually be in in their full form once they reach the destination system. So we can, build out that static translation as needed or we can do things more in a dynamic fashion, if that is a better fit. Alright. Jumping back out of this, I want to talk about a few of those other processes we alluded to earlier, more specific processes, like, say, expense management. So another benefit of using Integrator IO is the fact that we have integration that's always available in our marketplace. We'll talk more on that later. But, here you can see an example of one of those templates in use right where we're able to expedite the time to implement this solution as we already have flows we can deploy for syncing expense reports or the images tied to them or any of the relevant sets of master data that may be needed to support this integration. And while these may not be, as turnkey as some other native solutions, these provide a, a a great foundation to build out the the integration specific to your business requirements. But now, you know, in a in a future state, so you have that expense management process automated is when we can start looking at automating ancillary systems, to maybe route the approval process to Slack. And so, again, this is another template we have available in our marketplace, but this is designed to route expense reports from NetSuite. Really, this could be applied to really any ERP. Let's actually click run and take a look at that expense report within NetSuite. So you can imagine we have an employee, Sarah Torrance. She went on a marketing trip, and, she wanted to expense her flight out there. We can see that this is a little under $600, but in an ideal world, we have this integration running in the background where that expense report has then been routed to Slack. And so through, routing your expense reports to some type of expense approval channel, you can have obviously a private channel where there's only a few individuals, who are you you I guess you trust to approve expenses. But you can view surface level details such as the amount, you know, who this was created by, or even, you know, if you if you need to do further investigation, we can even provide a link so that you can open this up and dig into all of the specific details or an itemized list as needed. But if it is something where you are comfortable just approving this, What we can do here is actually, use a clickable action directly within Slack or your IMS so that, the integration tool is listening for that action to take place. It's not like you have to come in or set a schedule for this to run. You can see this is already in progress, and I may have beaten it to the punch here. But now once we refresh this NetSuite expense report, we can see that our relevant approvals have been updated and that, that expense report can move quickly or quicker along its its process. Alright. So there's a few other things that I wanted to touch upon for the demo here today that is specific to general platform capability. One of which aligns with, ongoing management where you may need to resolve the occasional error that will pop up. And so this error we're gonna take a look at is, the result of trying to sync an account from Google Sheets to Salesforce, where a required field wasn't entered. So it's it's missing, and, an error was turned as a result. This was automatically assigned to me as a, you know, employee persona and, where I received an email notification. I don't have to have this tab open in perpetuity using the tool. And this this error was automatically classified using our AI and machine learning to, classify those errors into 9 unique classification types, which if it falls into the bucket of a few of those different classification types, we will auto resolve those errors if possible. And if it does require human intervention to resolve an error, this is where we can send out notifications to someone like me, at a flow by flow or a connection by connection basis. So you can have different individuals or teams monitoring the integration specific to them. But once we were to navigate to or through that email to the error, we'll be brought to a screen like this where we can see an example of the data that was the source of the issue and actually make edits directly within this this interface. So if, you know, if we didn't wanna go back and forth between screens for our troubleshooting process, we could house everything here or you could go back into Google Sheets and make the update, push through the integration again. It's really whatever would work best for you in that scenario, but the option is there. Alright. Lastly here, I did wanna touch upon the integration marketplace. Again, this is a great resource available at not only, you know, paid Integrator IO users but also available through our free trial where you can, you can come in, download any of these respective templates, that will jump start your integration process. And so I know we talked about Concur earlier. You can see the example, or where we pulled that from where we're looking at so can you say employees or customer data, relevant expense reports all needed to support an eventual expense management integration. Alright. Jumping back into the, the slide deck for us here, folks. Let's go full screen here. So now that we've talked through the demonstration, I would also like to give a little bit of background about who Soligo is, what we do. So we are Soligo. We are the number one ranked iPaaS on g 2 Proud by customers based on verified customer reviews out of 236 competitors. We were also named a visionary in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPass by industry analysts. We process over 16,000,000,000 data records per month, and have more than a 150,000 business processes automated for customers across all industries including, you know, some familiar logos for for you like PayPal, Ceridian, Unilever, Home Depot. I won't read through the whole list. But along with that, we are using our AI enabled error management to auto resolve more than 417,000,000 errors per month with over 5,000 customers and over 40,000 users that are supported by over 700 saligians spread across the globe. Lastly, here I did wanna talk through a few customer success examples just to wrap up the presentation. Starting first with Swapcard. They are an AI powered event and matchmaking platform. They were facing the issue of poor visibility into cash flow, manual errors, and accountants spending, 95% of their time on unproductive tasks. So we go actually help them solve their problem by automating their Salesforce CRM and billing with NetSuite ERP and suite billing module to give end to end visibility into their financials and also tying back to our our conversation today, you know, helping support that quote to cash automation process. Similarly, CDC Foundation had a lot of apps fall over 20 years of operation. It shows Swigo to serve as a single point for all applications and built a powerful customized integration between Sales Force and their ERP. They also are currently integrating Concur expense management and their ADP instance to ERP for covering different HR process automations, things like, automating payroll or user onboarding, onboarding processes. Lastly, here we have WeTransfer. They had a custom in house built integration between their ERP and Salesforce, but it could never achieve the intended goal. They selected so we go over other competitors in the space like Boomi or MuleSoft for powerful functionality, ease of use, intuitive design, and a library of those prebuilt solutions like we looked at within our marketplace. We automated their complete quote to cash automation along with ancillary systems, moved data completeness issues, and accelerated time to close and financial visibility. And and with that, that does conclude the presentation portion of the webinar here today. I wanna thank everyone for your time with the remainder of the time we do have, though. Just wanted to open the floor up for, any questions that you may have. I might have the q and a turned off. Oh, I do. Okay. Sorry. I see those now. Alright. So, Goutham Reddy or your name got cut off. Thank you for posting a question. You said sometimes when we use REST API, we do not see the one to many option in the connector. In this case, how do I ensure that if I get multiple records or for example, in a single JSON record, how do I then split to send one order at a time to a destination? Say, order full for example. So in that instance, I I would say it's, I guess it's interesting that the option isn't showing up for you. I don't know if we're gonna have enough time to to dig into the specifics of that today, but what I can do is I can I can take that question down and we can always look into that for you? But, again, kindly highly, recommend submitting a support ticket where we can get a, you know, clear audit trail of of what went wrong and, maybe get a little bit more guidance for you in that scenario. But I'm going to take down that question in my notes here for us just so we are prepared to follow-up, but thank you for posting that question. So I also see another question here. What if we don't see our ERP or application listed here? Does that mean integration is not possible? The long and short of it is no. With an integration platform as a service, there are a number of different connectivity methods that we offer in more of a universal fashion. So if you don't have, an application with a prebuilt connector, just may take leveraging one of those universal connectors to establish an API connection or FTP, direct database. There's a number of other options there for you as well. See another question here. When you update the data for retrying the error, does it also update the data in the source file? Okay. That is that's a good question. So, the the the short answer to that is no. The data changes would push downstream unless you had additional logic built into your flow that would update the respective, source system in that scenario. So if you, if you did have a a data flow that wasn't pushing additional updates down or back upstream, that would need to be taken care of manually. But again, the the changes would be pushed to the the respective destination system. Okay. I see one more question here for us. You showed Concur for expenses. Can we do the same integrations with Expensify? Okay. That kind of relates to, a question a second ago or or 2 questions ago where, really the the the fact of the matter with an integration platform as a service offering is that we can connect to any application so long as they have the APIs or connectivity methods available to us that, could support an integration. So I've worked with Expensify personally, and I I know for a fact that, you know, we we can integrate and replicate a similar expense management process automation for you. But, again, it kinda goes back to that that more general answer of, you know, what what we could support with an iPaaS. Alright. K. I think that gets through all of our questions, at least that I see here. But, again, I do wanna thank everyone for attending, taking time out of their busy days, to to join and and and view today's session. Again, my name is Brett, and I I look forward to seeing you all at, at future sessions.