Basis, an AI assistant for accounting firms, needed to integrate with their customers’ financial systems to access data that would help their models carry out accounting tasks.

They initially built out these accounting integrations with another unified API platform, but the integrations fell well below the team’s expectations.

The provider didn’t allow them to access data beyond their data models, which limited the scope of information they could feed their models. The solution also didn’t provide logs, so the team had limited visibility on the health of their integrations and couldn’t identify and troubleshoot issues whenever they’d occur.

These issues led their team to look for a new platform, and once they learned that Merge met all of their security, observability, and performance needs, they knew they found their solution. 

Once Basis chose Merge, they quickly integrated with the accounting systems their customers rely on—QuickBooks, Sage Intaact, and Xero.

These integrations work bidirectionally: Basis can access a wide range of objects and fields, from journal entries to expenses to cash flow statements to invoices, and feed the data to their models. And Basis’ LLM agents can add and modify data in customers’ accounting systems.

These integrations allow their models to perform a variety of tasks, including:

• An ML agent can both analyze and add transactions in the customer’s accounting system. 
• Models can help verify that certain data in a customer’s accounting system is accurate by running specific tests, reports, etc.

Since adopting Merge, Basis has appreciated how transparent and flexible the platform is.

Mitchell Troyanovsky, one of Basis’ co-founders, explains that “Merge is incredibly flexible, both in the data we can access and the actions we can perform on that data. For example, while Merge doesn’t support PUT requests for accounting systems out of the box, we can easily make them via Authenticated Passthrough Requests.”

Mitchell also highlights that “Merge offers complete transparency. You can see how data from underlying systems are mapped to Merge and access fully-searchable logs through Merge’s dashboard. This allows us to better understand issues and resolve them faster and more easily.”

Finally, Merge has met all of Basis’ data security requirements. 

“There’s nothing more important to us than our customers’ data. Knowing that Merge complies with GDPR, maintains certifications with HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, and ISO 27001, and offers a variety of enterprise-grade security features, like Scopes and Audit Trails, gives us full confidence that our customers’ data is protected at all times,” explains Mitchell.

Merge has become a foundational part of Basis’ infrastructure. It allows their models to make intelligent decisions, reliably, for each customer. And, equally important, it allows their team to focus less on building and maintaining integrations and more on critical projects for improving their models, from fine tuning them to orchestrating them to work together effectively.

So, what’s next in Basis’ integration journey with Merge? 

Mitchell clues us in: “We’re looking at adding Merge’s file storage and payroll integrations. Given how well things have gone with our accounting integrations, we’re confident that these integrations can elevate our models and our customer experience even further.”