As the team at Acctual looked to bring their fintech platform to market—which allows customers to pay bills and send invoices in either cryptocurrency or fiat money—they knew they needed to include accounting integrations as part of the launch.

“Integrating with accounting tools would allow our customers to continue using the finance tools and workflows they’re used to. As a result, these integrations were critical for making our product a viable solution for finance teams,” explains Issa Hassan, Acctual’s co-founder and CTO.  

As the team looked at 3rd-party solutions for adding accounting integrations, they evaluated Merge alongside Codat, but ultimately chose Merge because the platform offered a faster time to value.

Issa provides additional context: “When evaluating integrations solutions, we were only a few weeks away from our minimum viable product launch, so we needed a solution that would let us add integrations quickly. After evaluating Merge and Codat, it was clear that Merge would let us offer integrations faster.”

After spending just a week building to Merge’s Accounting Unified API, Acctual was able to add integrations with Xero and QuickBooks. In addition, both integrations enable customers to sync a wide range of fields, including vendors, customers, invoices, payments, line items, PDFs, accounts, contacts, tracking categories, and items.

Once a customer enables an accounting integration in Acctual, it powers the following functionality for their accounts payable and accounts receivable modules:

• Accounts receivable: A customer can quickly create invoices in Acctual through pre-populated fields and dropdowns—which are pulled from the customer’s connected accounting system. In addition, as a customer creates, sends, and receives payments from invoices via Acctual, the activities get reflected in the connected accounting system

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• ‍Accounts payable: As a customer adds vendor bills in Acctual, the fields and dropdowns are also auto-populated from the connected accounting system. Moreover, any actions taken on a bill (e.g., marking a bill as “Paid”) automatically gets reflected in the connected accounting tool

Finally, the team uses Merge’s Authenticated Passthrough Requests for customers that have unique syncing requirements.

“Being able to access all of the custom data we need through Authenticated Passthrough Requests while still using Merge to handle authentication offers the best of both worlds—we can support all of our customers’ accounting integration needs while not having to involve our developers,” says Issa.

Using the accounting integrations, Acctual’s customers can pay off bills and send invoices exponentially faster. According to Issa, “Merge's accounting integrations allow our customers to save several hours per week, which is one of the biggest benefits of using our platform.”

The depth of the accounting integrations and their consistent improvements have also allowed Acctual to close several deals.

Issa highlights a few examples: “We’ve been able to close several deals just by letting customers add multiple line items in Acctual and sync them with their accounting systems. And we were able to close a customer soon after Merge added ‘Tracking Categories’ to their Common Model.”

So, what’s next in Acctual’s integration journey with Merge? Issa fills us in:

“We’re planning to add NetSuite as our next accounting integration. We’re also exploring HRIS integrations as we look into launching payroll features in our product. Based on our early success with Merge, we’re confident that they’ll help us execute these next steps flawlessly."