Following its divestment from Intuit in 2016, Quick Base established itself as the world’s #1 no-code application development platform for business users. Trusted by half of the Fortune 100, thousands of companies around the globe use the Quick Base platform to create business apps that match their processes exactly, from CRMs to finance apps and everything in between. The company’s customers include Google, Kayak, Southwest, Columbia, and UBM.
As Quick Base accelerated revenue growth and rapidly expanded its business, it became even more critical for all teams across the organization to collaborate more effectively, increase efficiency, and improve decision-making with instant access to the accurate data they need, when they need it.
To accomplish these objectives, the company developed and continues to enhance a comprehensive suite of Quick Base apps to run its business-critical processes. From sales and marketing to finance, HR, legal, IT, and more, Quick Base empowers the people closest to the work to create apps that match their exact processes and drive business and operational improvements.
Quick Base has worked closely with Workato to connect these apps to NetSuite, Marketo, and other SaaS platforms and automate tasks and processes across these systems. Workato’s integration and automation tool, which is powerful, flexible, and easily accessible to business professionals, has enabled Quick Base to:
- Save its accounting team two full days of work per month
- Reduce new employee onboarding time from 5 hours to 1.5 hours
- Integrate Quick Base apps with other apps in less than an hour
- And more!
Building a Base for Business
As an independent company, the company began to evaluate new tools to simplify the connections between Quick Base apps and other systems in their organization to improve the flow of information. “When we decided to evaluate our options, I spoke with our product department, who had been doing some analysis on integration platforms that they could partner with. They recommended Workato,” says Ryan Murray, a Senior Application Developer at Quick Base.
After building a few simple recipes on the Workato platform in collaboration with a consulting partner, Murray says, he saw clear value in the product: “Once we saw the platform’s capabilities, our heads were spinning with ideas of where we could use it.”
Finance
Saving 2 Days of Work Per Month by Streamlining Accounts Payable
As with most companies, accounts payable (AP) is a key part of Quick Base’s accounting infrastructure. To track finances, the accounting team uses a Quick Base app that matches their procure-to-pay (P2P) process in conjunction with NetSuite. The Quick Base P2P app is responsible for the company’s entire procure-to-pay process, and NetSuite is the accounting system used for bookkeeping.
Quick Base worked with VeilSun, a Quick Base Solution Provider that also specializes in Workato integrations, to design an automated workflow between Quick Base and NetSuite using several Workato recipes. “The integration created an AP subledger,” explains Stefan Capobianco, Accounting Manager at Quick Base. “Now we don’t have to manually book AP every month. Once we enter a bill into P2P, it creates a corresponding bill in NetSuite and posts it to AP. It stays there until it’s paid.”
The most immediate benefit of the integration, Capobianco says, was that it completely eliminated the need to manually book AP every month. “There’s a huge efficiency bonus,” he says. “With this real-time AP sync, we can run our AP Aging report any time so we have better insight into our financial liabilities. We can also better track vendor spend with a consistent, real-time snapshot of our payments to vendors. That’s good from a reporting perspective; it takes 30 seconds to run a report versus hours to do it manually.”
Ultimately, using Workato to integrate NetSuite and Quick Base saves the accounting team at Quick Base two full days of work every month.
Human Resources
Creating a Robust HR Ecosystem for 3x Faster Employee Onboarding
Keeping track of current employees—and welcoming new ones—is a key function for any business. At Quick Base, the HR team uses a central Quick Base app that houses employee and contractor info. This app is the source of truth about employees, and information from it must frequently flow into several other apps that were created on the Quick Base platform.
Some of these apps are crucial to core HR processes, such as the New Hire Onboarding app. New hires use this app to track a checklist of items during the onboarding process, including reminders to sign-up for benefits, shadowing the Care and Sales teams during calls with customers, and completing in-house product training programs.
The HR app ecosystem also includes the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) app, which tracks one-to-one employee meetings with managers. The app also tracks company values, as well as company-wide, departmental, and personal objectives and KPIs for scheduled reviews and provides 360° feedback for managers. They also use Quick Base to manage other HR programs including their Joy Division and Quick Base Cares programs, which the company uses to plan employee events and volunteer opportunities.
Quick Base used Workato to connect data and processes across all of these apps into one HR ecosystem. “I created 10-15 Workato recipes to connect apps ranging from tiny to business critical,” explains Daniel Callahan, an app developer at Quick Base.
With the combination of Quick Base and Workato, he says, the provisioning process for new employees is now automatic: “IT can grant app access as soon as the employee is active [in the HR app] so they can be productive as soon as they start.”
The onboarding workflow also reduces the amount of labor the IT team must devote to onboarding every new employee. “It used to take the IT team five hours to onboard just one employee,” Callahan says. “Now it takes 1.5 hours.”
Sales and Support
Effectively Compensating Sales and Customer Success Staff with a Custom CRM
At Quick Base, the sales and customer success teams are crucial to delivering its product to customers. To reflect the role these teams play in acquiring and retaining customers, sales reps’ and customer success managers’ compensation plans include commissions and bonuses based on performance.
Because closing deals and retaining customers are team efforts, Quick Base wanted to credit business development staff, managers, and senior leadership along with individual account executives. Quick Base used Workato to help automate the process for properly crediting everyone involved in the sales cycle and calculating commissions. “Now reps can see where they stand in terms of their quota every morning,” comments Timothy Famolare, Manager of FP&A. “With Workato, reps, managers, and senior leadership members have real-time visibility inside of QuickBase.”
Quick Base also used Workato to help make the company’s new customer success team bonus plan easy to implement. “We recently rolled out a new bonus plan for the Customer Success Management (CSM) team,” Famolare says. “I’m not an engineer by any means, but I built all of the integrations myself. Because the CSM plan is a similar build, I was able to spin up the integration in about an hour.”
Ultimately, the instant visibility results in less back-and-forth between Famolare and the rest of the sales team, which saves valuable time. “It’s greatly reduced the number of questions the sales team sends me. There are fewer emails and less back-and-forth,” he says.
In addition to these scenarios, Quick Base uses Workato for several other important sales workflows. For example, when a sales rep adds an activity to an opportunity, Workato will change the opportunity’s status in CRM to “In Progress.” Workato also automatically assigns sales accounts to the correct rep based on company size and location. These automations allow sales staff to work as efficiently as possible.
DevOps
Faster Issue Resolution with Automatic Bug Escalation Between CRM and JIRA
Quick Base proactively monitors product related issues and works to address them quickly to ensure customer satisfaction. To help simplify issue identification and resolution, Quick Base uses Workato to automatically escalate issues between their Quick Base CRM solution and Atlassian’s JIRA. Whenever a customer creates a case, a record is automatically added to the CRM application.
The support team investigates the issue, assigns the case a functional area, and creates an escalation in Quick Base. Quick Base evaluates the functional area and assigns the issue to a Product team. That triggers a Workato recipe in real time, and based on the team the issue has been assigned to, Workato automatically posts an issue to the appropriate JIRA board.
“This has strengthened the hand-off between the support team and the product development team,” comments Murray. “And, being a customer-obsessed organization, it also allows us to quickly address customer issues.”
Customer Ops
Enabling Better Business Insights and Improving Retention
Quick Base also uses Workato to supplement key business processes with data from a range of apps across their organization through integration. “For example, the process of attributing marketing tactics to opportunities isn’t very linear, since a prospect or customer can interact with many pieces of content over the course of the deal,” Murray explains. “We want to make sure we capture that, so we use Workato to help us split those up and add records to Quick Base.”
This automated data augmentation is especially helpful when it comes to expanding relationships with customers and increasing customer retention, both of which are processes that require a lot of information housed in many different apps and systems. To make this information easily available to the right teams, Murray says, the company uses Workato to move it into the right app.
“For example, we pull in usage data from our product into our CRM to see what customers are using, how many users they’ve purchased, and how many users are actually accessing their applications,” he explains. “If anyone goes over their allotted usage, we’ll create an opportunity for our sales team to follow up on.”
This easy data integration makes reporting exceptionally simple as well. “We use Workato to pull data out of one Quick Base app and use it in another QuickBase app for reporting,” says Murray. “We’ll pull all our support surveys out of Quick Base, do some data analysis, and attach them to monthly or yearly records, for example. By integrating all our systems, Workato has provided us with a lot of insights into how our business runs.”
Tackling A Wider Range of Integration Projects with Workato
The combination of Quick Base and Workato has enabled employees across the organization to address a wider variety of integration and automation projects—even if the employees aren’t technical specialists or long-time Workato users. Workato empowers those closest to the work to improve their processes, a trait Quick Base closely identifies with as a highly customizable app building platform for business professionals.
Famolare credits the platform’s low learning curve with allowing him to build robust integrations without an engineering background. “Even though I stumbled a bit with the first sales compensation use case, I figured it out with a little help. The second use case—for the CSM team—I rolled out in about an hour,” he notes.
Callahan, an app developer who helped create several HR workflows, echoes this sentiment. “Workato is, first of all, easy to use,” he says. “I’d never used Workato prior to my role at Quick Base, but I was able to create complex recipes within 2-3 weeks.”
He adds that the process of creating and implementing recipes is exceptionally fast. ”For the NetSuite integration, we used a NetSuite sandbox and P2P app copy to test the recipes,” he notes. “One of the biggest benefits of using Workato was that when we were ready to go live with the recipes, we could just point the recipes to the right NetSuite and P2P instances; we didn’t have to recreate the recipes. The easiest part of the project was going from the sandbox to live, which is really rare. Usually that’s the most difficult step!”
Murray explains that, from his perspective as Senior App Developer, Workato has cut down on the integration backlog and opened up time to do more. “With Workato we can do integrations and automations at a much faster pace. Business analysts are able to get in there and get their hands dirty. It chips away at the backlog [of integrations], which can pile up over time if you’re not on top of it or unable to move quickly. Workato is the perfect partner for that.”
He also credits Workato with saving his company valuable time. “Normally, an integration could take any experienced developer weeks to do. Workato empowers the low-code or the no-code developer to get in there and just get something done quickly.”
