Parallel is a financial modeling platform that helps founders analyze the financials they care about with ease so that they can make strategic business decisions quickly and effectively.

To help founders immediately use the platform to analyze their burn rate and determine how much runway they have, they needed to integrate with customers’ accounting platforms and sync a broad set of financial data.  

Building these integrations in-house, however, wasn’t an option. 

Renato Villanueva, Parallel’s CEO and co-founder, explains that “Building the accounting integrations ourselves would take months that we couldn’t waste; we were looking to ship a minimal viable product as quickly as possible with accounting integrations.”

After evaluating Merge alongside a few other unified API solutions, including Rutter and Codat, they ultimately landed on Merge.

“Merge has the best reputation in the unified API space. And their multi-category approach to product integrations would enable us to grow with their platform,” explains Renato. 

He adds that, “When testing Merge’s platform during our proof of concept, it was clear that they’d enable us to launch integrations the fastest.”

After building to Merge’s Unified API in just a week, they were able to take a few accounting integrations live—Xero and QuickBooks. Moreover, these integrations use Merge’s Common Models (or normalized data models) for Balance Sheets, Income Statements, and Cash Flow Statements, enabling Parallel to add and sync all of the relevant financial data from customers’ accounting systems.

Here’s a closer look at how these integrations work:

1. Once a user wants to add an integration, they’d log into Parallel, navigate to the settings page, and select either QuickBooks or Xero. This prompts Merge Link, a UI component, to pop up.

2. After a user passes the authentication and authorization flows for an integration, the financial data from their accounting system automatically gets pulled into Parallel. The data can also be resynced whenever the user wants with the click of a button within Parallel.

All the while, Parallel automatically populates key financial models with this data in the Dashboard, which users can tweak via Levers and Hires to run different scenarios in depth (e.g., “If we increase our monthly quota, how will that impact our cash flow?”).

One of the biggest benefits of using Merge, according to Renato, is its time to value.

“Merge enabled us to get an MVP launched in weeks. If we built these integrations in-house or tried using another unified API solution, it would have taken us months.”

Renato and his team also appreciate Merge’s Common Models for accounting, as they enable their team to avoid dealing with each accounting system’s data complexity.

“Accounting systems have thousands of objects and fields, so determining the ones our customers need would be a nightmare. Thankfully, Merge does this on our behalf for Xero and QuickBooks through their Common Models.”

Finally, the accounting integrations are table stakes for helping their team close deals with both founders and finance leaders.

“The accounting integrations we’ve added through Merge are fueling our 30% month over month growth in new business ARR.  And given the value these integrations bring to our platform, the credibility they add to our company, and how easily they can be leveraged, I expect our growth rate to continue increasing over time."

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

Tyler Slater, Parallel’s co-founder and CTO, offers an answer: 

“We plan on adding HRIS integrations through Merge, which will allow us to add employees’ first and last names, start and end dates, annual salaries, and more to our platform’s Headcount tab. We’ll also keep this data regularly in sync so that users can access up-to-date employee data in the relevant models.”

We can’t wait to support these integrations for their team to help them grow even faster.