ExpenseOnDemand offers a full-suite expense management software for leading technology companies, like Adobe, Google, Stripe, and Zoom.

To help customers adopt their platform and use it with ease, they needed to implement ERP integrations.

The ERP integrations would allow customers to automatically keep expenses synced bidirectionally between their ERP systems and ExpenseOnDemand. This lets finance teams avoid adding and updating expense data manually in their ERP system, and it’d help them have accurate, up-to-date financial reports and seamless audit trails within their ERP systems.

As ExpenseOnDemand’s team began to build these integrations in-house, they quickly realized that they needed to outsource this work.

“Each platform’s API approaches authentication, pagination, and rate limits differently. Tying to account for these differences across the accounting integrations we wanted to build just wasn’t possible,” explains Sidd Nigam, ExpenseOnDemand’s Director of Product and Strategy.

Their team then began to evaluate unified API providers, and they first compared Merge to Rutter.

“While Rutter provided support, we found that Merge’s team was quicker to respond to our needs. Additionally, Rutter had limited support for custom fields, whereas Merge allowed us to sync all the necessary custom fields, enabling our customers to fully automate their expense management workflows," says Sidd.

They then evaluated Apideck but found that Merge offered more value:

The team at ExpenseOnDemand only needed about a week to build to Merge's Unified API. From there they were able to offer integrations with applications like Microsoft Dynamics 365, NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, and many others.

Here’s how their ERP integrations with Merge work (we’ll use NetSuite as an example):

1. An admin for the ERP system would connect to NetSuite from ExpenseOnDemand, triggering Merge Link (a UI component to authenticate integrations) to appear.

2. Once the admin completes the authentication process, they would finish configuring the NetSuite integration within ExpenseOnDemand, which includes setting expenses to a certain default status in NetSuite, mapping fields and users between the two systems, and more.

3. Once this set up is complete, ExpenseOnDemand can automatically POST expenses—including amounts, memos, and employee details—into the integrated ERP system. In addition, using Merge’s Webhooks, this data can all be synced in real-time. 

ExpenseOnDemand can also fetch employee data from NetSuite (via Merge’s Employees data model), allowing users to map employees in ExpenseOnDemand with contacts in NetSuite. 

From there, ExpenseOnDemand can automate several workflows:

• The hierarchical employee data pulled from NetSuite ensures that submitted expenses are automatically routed to the appropriate approver
  

• As employees' roles or departments change in NetSuite, their corresponding approval workflows and reimbursement limits in ExpenseOnDemand are updated automatically, according to your internal policies

• Updates made within ExpenseOnDemand—such as adjustments to leave balances or expense limits—are synced back into NetSuite, keeping both systems accurate and up to date

Note: ExpenseOnDemand doesn’t route expenses through NetSuite’s approval process.

Since adding Merge’s integrations, ExpenseOnDemand’s customer experience has dramatically improved.

“Our customers no longer have to spend time on adding or updating expense and employee data manually, which would introduce the risk of human errors and delays. As a result, our customers can reconcile expenses quickly, analyze expenses effectively, prevent unauthorized spend, and reimburse employees on time,” explains Sidd.

Sidd goes on to say that “Merge’s integrations have had a huge impact on our customer experience. They’ve enabled us to increase our Net Promoter Score® by 10 points and our customer retention rate by 30%.”

He’s also seen the integrations dramatically influence their sales cycles. 

Last but not least, the integrations have helped their engineers save hundreds of hours. 

“By outsourcing all of our integration development and maintenance to Merge, we’re able to save 100+ engineering hours every month. This has helped our engineers focus on building out and refining our core product features.”

So, what’s next for ExpenseOnDemand?

“We’re planning on working with Merge to add dozens of HRIS integrations. This will help our users automate user provisioning and potentially other critical workflows in our product.”

We look forward to helping ExpenseOnDemand build these HRIS integrations and many others in the years to come.