Order to Cash Automation: Fintelligent Makes Data Reporting Mobile with Intacct and Workato

Order to Cash is the set of business processes that involve receiving and fulfilling customer requests for goods or services, and automating these processes can save incredible amounts of time and money. Nick Fedele, who is the director in charge of running Fintelligent’s technology platform, knows the importance of automation as he is not only a CPA, but is also in charge of selecting the technology vendors they use and doing all their integration work. Fintelligent is a company that runs financial operations for small and midsized businesses, many of which do not have any internal finance or accounting staff and are typically companies in consumer package goods, eCommerce, or professional services.

“Without Workato integrating our systems, we have to manually import data and too often it is days or weeks old. This leads to issues at the executive level for our clients due to a lack of visibility – a lot of times issues aren’t raised until it’s become too late. We got a lot of feedback from CEOs and founders saying, ‘If I had known we weren’t on target with our sales I could have done X, Y, or Z,’” explained Nick. “Now we have visibility in a timely fashion and this empowers our clients’ executive leadership to make better informed decisions more quickly.”

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Real Visibility by Connecting BrickFTP with Intacct

A huge plus for Nick is getting rid of manual data entry. “Earlier this year we knew we needed to implement Intacct. We were spending way too much time manually importing files using a lot of batch transactions. It was too much human intervention and the manual labor that’s involved in trying to manipulate data to get information that makes sense was painful,” lamented Nick.

“On a weekly basis, Friday nights at Midnight, we would get a CSV file that we would have to heavily manipulate in order to get data in a format that was importable. Then we would manually set up and run the import. Not only did it take somebody X number of hours to prepare the import and run it, but it was also such a heavily manual task that we could only do it once a week. Which means if something sold on Monday, nobody knew about it until the next Monday. Conversely something that wasn’t sold also isn’t known until the following Monday.”

Now, Nick achieves full visibility for his clients by comprehensively connecting BrickFTP with the accounting app Intacct. “Intacct is the system of record and we’re pulling information from different operational systems that cover different portions of the business and bringing them into Intacct as our source of truth,” said Nick. “That’s why it’s really important our integration platform can manipulate our data and put it seamlessly into Intacct.”

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Nick uses BrickFTP as a repository for sales orders and invoices, then two Workato recipes bring the sales orders and invoices into Intacct.

Syncing A Large Volume of Shopify Transactions with Intacct

Nick is now working on using Workato to integrate Intacct and Shopify. His Shopify integration needs to handle 10,000 transactions a month.
“When I began looking for Shopify integration solutions, people told us to do batches which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having the systems integrated. Even outside of Shopify, the ability to get line items and actual order level data like Workato allows is huge,” said Nick.

A More Mobile, Automated Order to Cash System

“Workato saves us 6 to 7 hours a week, which is 28 hours a month I can use to focus on higher value services,” said Nick. The integration between BrickFTP and Intacct not only saves Nick from manual imports each week, but also gives his clients a real time view of their financials.

“The automation of data from BrickFTP to Intacct has reduced lag time in data availability, created less human error, and provided availability on mobile – flat out better and more in depth data… I could go on and on!” said Nick. “We no longer need to wait for somebody to be in front of a PC to import. The executives at our client companies no longer need to wait for an excel report.  Many of them are on the road a lot and now they have real-time mobile dashboards they can view. The fact that they can be at the airport or in the car and can see sales that are up-to-date in real-time is incredible.”

The integration is a win-win for Nick and his clients in terms of ROI as well. When a new client comes to Fintelligent with an order visibility issue, Nick will be able to quickly use Workato to resolve it. Since many SMBs have similar processes, Nick can replicate the same integrations with minor tweaks for new clients. This will take implementation time down significantly and keep all his integrations on one platform.

“Workato and Intacct together have automated a lot of our processes. Where we used to have to manually pull reports and reformat to generate the style of report we wanted to present, now Intacct does the reporting and Workato makes sure the data is there for Intacct to manipulate,” said Nick. “It enables us to be more efficient and provides a higher return on investment of our time.”

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About the author
Kristine Colosimo
Kristine oversees Workato's content and works with awesome apps like DocuSign, Zendesk, SurveyMonkey etc. on great automation content.