Don’t Let Fintech Out-of-the-Box Integrations Hold Your Data Hostage

We’ve all been there. You’re in the middle of a software purchasing cycle, and the product seems amazing. They “integrate” with everything you use. “It’s a simple point and click process,” says every Fintech SaaS salesperson. It seems like a dream. A month (or two) after go-live you realize that you’re in an integration nightmare scenario. What was supposed to be “easy” turns out to be inadequate and sloppy connections.

Out-of-the-box connecters for many Fintech SaaS products are a one-size-fits-all approach to integrations. You need simple connections for it to “work”. Unfortunately, that’s an unrealistic expectation for many organizations and how their systems are set-up to operate. You’ve been duped because the integration never ends up functioning the way it needs to. In fact, it barely meets the minimum requirements necessary to connect. At the end of the day, you are left using an application that doesn’t provide the data you need – not to mention, you’ve wasted a lot of time and money in the process.

Four Reasons Why Out-of-the-Box Integrations Don’t Always Work

1. Integrations don’t exist between all your tools – sure you might be able to connect Salesforce to Sage Intacct, however your life is more complicated than that. You’re using two, three, or seven SaaS tools that need to pass data between each other.
2. Integrations exist; however, they don’t pass the data you need – the integration works flawlessly, but you need to pass more data than what it is built for. The out-of-the-box integration may only be integrating a portion of your data such as the individual transactions, but you will still need the metadata (Ex: Customers, Products, Projects, etc) to flow between your integrated systems.
3. Integrations don’t play well together — there’s always one SaaS product that doesn’t play well with others. Do you exclude it? Or find a better way to incorporate it? This shifts your decision-making process away from the core function and purpose of the software to now focus on the technical backend of the tool. Shouldn’t you be choosing a software because of how user-friendly and effective it is at addressing your need?
4. Integrations don’t often scale – As your business grows and changes, out-of-the-box integrations often fail to scale due to their rigidity and lack of flexibility.

Ignoring and overlooking the complexities involved can lead to weeks (or months) of manually uploading data from system to system. There must be a better way. Living in a half-integrated world is time consuming and frustrating when you were sold on the out-of-the-box connecting “integration”.

A Use Case for More

I’m sure that you have your war stories to tell about integrations gone bad. However, here’s a real-life business example from one of our nonprofit customers. They needed to automate moving transaction data from QuickBooks to Adaptive. Yes, the out-of-the-box integration existed however, there needed to be an integration in place that would facilitate moving the data out of QuickBooks, performing transformations to meet data requirements within Adaptive. For example, they needed mapping, flipping signs and pivoting, then loading the data without errors into Adaptive. That’s a lot to ask of with an out-of-the-box “integration” connection.

Business operations can be messy and complicated. You need a solution that can handle custom integrations and transformations.

By integrating QuickBooks to Adaptive Insights via a Fintech iPaaS integration, they have been able to:

• Push Balance Sheet and Income Statement actuals to Adaptive
• Automate transaction data movement between both applications
• Automate revenue reports for management
• Easily track monthly targets in real-time
• Decrease opportunity for errors 100%
• Increase time savings
• Decrease monthly workload
• Provide timely and accurate visibility for key stakeholders

“I stick with DataBlend because the tool is invaluable. Every morning, I run data from the prior day around admissions, membership sales, gift ship sales, event rentals, seasonal camps and I enter all that data in QuickBooks. Then I run the DataBlend tool to move all that data into Adaptive. Now, all of our managers who watch our revenue on a day-to-day basis can run the Adaptive reports they need easily.”

What Does an iPaaS Out-of-the-Box Integration from DataBlend Look Like?

While an out-of-the-box solution “might” work well for some companies and systems, others require a different solution. There’s a difference between an out-of-the-box integration and a vetted, pre-configured, turnkey solution that has been rigorously tested by thousands of finance professionals, such as CFOs, Directors of Finance, Controllers, and FP&A specialists.

According to Gartner, iPaaS is “a suite of cloud services enabling development, execution, and governance of integration flows connecting any combination of on-premises and cloud-based processes, services, applications, and data within individual or across multiple organizations.” In layman's terms, iPaaS tools connect multiple business systems, so information can be shared quickly and easily without high-maintenance, manual data entry, or one-off integrations.

Unlike other providers in the iPaaS space, DataBlend focuses on integrating the everyday applications used by finance and accounting teams, such as ADP, HubSpot, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, Sage, Salesforce, SugarCRM, Workday Adaptive Planning, and many more. We work with any application, whether cloud-based, on-prem or via SFTP. You don’t have to worry about the workflows you rely on to deliver accurate and timely reports and you don’t have to waste a second integrating your financial application stack.