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Maintaining integrations, whether that’s fixing an issue, updating an integration, continually testing any, and so on, can be a nightmare for our engineers. Merge takes this work off our plates, and that's led our engineers to save hundreds of hours every year.
Building and maintaining integrations in-house required applying and getting accepted to expensive developer programs
BRM is an AI-powered collaboration tool that helps organizations find and manage vendors via agents. They needed to bring customers’ accounting and HRIS data into their platform to equip agentic buyers with the right information to help their customers buy.
Through these customer-facing integrations, their users could more easily manage vendor requests, track payments, analyze spend, and more, saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless time.
As their team began assessing the scope of work involved in building and maintaining HRIS and accounting integrations, however, they realized that it would force them to invest significant time and sums of money.
“We needed to build several HRIS and accounting integrations, and while the technical complexities of building to each provider were significant, the business development component was equally, if not more, overwhelming. We needed to get accepted into and pay significant sums of money to be part of an API provider’s developer program to access their sandbox account and API documentation,” explains Fabian Frank, the CTO and co-founder at BRM.
As Fabian and his team began evaluating 3rd-party integration solutions, they ended up deciding between Merge and Finch. Fabian explains why they chose the former at that point in time:
James McGillicuddy, BRM’s co-founder and CEO, adds that “Merge offers significantly more API-based integrations than Finch in the HRIS category alone. This, coupled with the fact that Merge covers many more categories of integrations, made the decision on who to partner with easy.”
Using Merge’s accounting and HRIS integrations to maintain approval workflows and enable intelligent vendor management
After taking a few weeks to build to Merge’s Unified API, BRM was able to add 10+ HRIS integrations, including Rippling, BambooHR, and UKG Pro, along with a couple of accounting integrations (NetSuite and Sage Intacct).
The HRIS integrations let them power the following flows:
- Initial sync: Once a customer authorizes a connection with their HRIS via Merge Link, all of the customers’ employees get added to BRM, which include their first names, last names, managers, email addresses, and departments
- Ongoing sync: BRM is able to re-sync the employee data once a day. This allows customers’ data in BRM to stay accurate, which, in turn, allows workflows in BRM to continue functioning properly and customers to analyze vendor adoption effectively
For example, if an employee’s manager changes in the integrated HRIS, the change is quickly reflected in BRM, enabling the affected employee’s requests to get reviewed and approved by their new manager.
Moreover, customers can track vendor adoption by individual employees and departments with ease and complete accuracy.
In the case of their accounting integrations, they can provide a couple of additional automated flows:
- Initial sync: Once a customer authorizes a connection with their accounting system via Merge Link, the customer is able to bring in all of the transaction data from their vendors. This includes transaction amounts, receipts, descriptions, dates, memos, payment methods, and more
- Ongoing sync: As a customer adds new vendors, moves away from others, modifies information on a given vendor, and makes additional transactions over time—all in the integrated accounting system—the changes will get reflected in BRM
By allowing customers to access all this payment information, they can quickly determine which vendors are coming up for renewal.
In addition, since BRM has also added additional in-house integrations with identity and access management systems like Okta, their users can see how much of a given subscription they’ve consumed (i.e., seats used) and who within their organization has a seat (via the HRIS integrations). This gives BRM’s users a complete view of their vendors and allows them to manage each subscription more easily and strategically.
Finally, by pairing their transaction data from their accounting systems with the transaction data from Ramp and Brex (which are integrations they’ve built internally), BRM can provide users with a consolidated view of their company’s level of spend across vendors and pair transactions across the integrated applications.
Saving their engineers hundreds of hours and increasing their close rate by 20% year-over-year
According to Fabian, one of the biggest benefits to using Merge has been that they don’t have to invest time and expensive resources towards building and maintaining HRIS and accounting integrations.
“Maintaining integrations, whether that’s fixing an issue, updating an integration, continually testing any, and so on, can be a nightmare for our engineers. Merge takes this work off our plates, and that's led our engineers to save hundreds of hours every year,” explains Fabian.
He adds more context: “Building and maintaining the integrations we’ve added through Merge in-house would require a full-time developer. Fortunately, that’s not something we have to consider.”
Fabian and his team have also found the HRIS and accounting integrations to be a significant unblock for sales.
We look forward to helping Fabian and his team continue growing BRM in the years ahead.
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