How Velankani can go-to-market 4x faster with Integration Labs

Introduction

Velankani Group, headquartered in Bangalore, is a diversified conglomerate with a presence in multiple industries, including Information Systems and Technology, Electronics, Infrastructure Development, Hospitality, Renewable Energies and Sustainability.

With a global workforce spread across three continents, Velankani Group believes in the power of vertical integration and delivers competitive solutions to customers worldwide. Managing accounting across its subsidiaries for its centralised finance team presented a significant challenge due to the volume of invoices and the manual processing involved, which prompted the need for an automated solution.

Velankani’s software team needed to build an automated AP/AR and auditing product that connected to multiple accounting systems, called XtractAutomation. The product would be used both by Velankani’s internal finance team and also be taken to the market. Velankani leveraged Integration Labs' Unified Accounting API to build an automated AP/AR and auditing solution integrated with 15+ accounting systems.

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Summary

The integration of Integration Labs' Unified Accounting API led to significant improvements:

• Integrating with Integration Labs took 2 days instead of wasting over 3 months to build integrations in-house
• Go-to-market 4x faster because of Integration Labs
• Using Integration Labs saves Velankani developers 40 hours per month in integration maintenance
• Using Integration Labs saves the Velankani finance team 200 hours per month in manual invoice processing
• With Integration Labs, Velankani can onboard a new customer (a new company with specific accounting software) in under 6 minutes
• A solution they can use both internally and also take to market, with endless capacity to scale and add new integrations at the click of a button

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Problem

With multiple subsidiaries and a deluge of invoices, the finance team was caught in an endless cycle of manual processing before using Integration Labs. Rupal Jadeja, Product Manager at Velankani, knew they needed to build a product that automates the AP/AR process.

“The sheer number of invoices we had to process and the resources needed were a challenge.”

- Rupal Jadeja, Product Manager

The in-house finance team faces up to 2000 invoices per month. Juggling up to 200 to 300 invoices daily during busy weeks, the manual workload was not just cumbersome but riddled with risks of errors and fraud.

Rupal describes the cumbersome process the finance team faced: "Before this process was put in place, we were manually processing 200 to 300 invoices daily." This manual approach involved cross-checking and verifying vendor invoices against the purchase orders and the goods received or service received notes and then manually creating bills for each invoice in the underlying accounts. This manual process was inefficient, error-prone, and a significant resource drain. For the business, time meant a loss in productivity, as a team of full-time staff were stuck doing mundane, manual work. Further, it prevented real-time insight into both the individual entity’s and the overall group’s financial health.

"Initially, we wanted to solve the internal accounting for Velankani; we wanted to automate our AP and AR process,” noted Rupal, “and then make it available in the market”. The team needed a solution that could automate this cumbersome process and provide a clear view of any company’s financial health, regardless of the underlying accounting software they used.

However, they did not want to spend months building integrations for multiple accounting software, as this involves months learning each platform’s documentation, mapping the necessary data models, setting up API configurations and normalizing the data, which can take weeks if not months. If the accounting system is an on-premise product, the difficulty compounds.

“If we had to manually build API integrations, it would have been a nightmare.”

- Rupal Jadeja, Product Manager

Rupal knew the answer was using API integrations to connect their product to multiple accounting systems but couldn’t dedicate months of developer resources to build them in-house.

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Solution

Since the team knew they needed to automate invoice processing, they developed a three-way matching software that automates the verification of vendor invoices against the corresponding purchase orders and goods received notes and services received notes, respectively.

"We wanted to automate the AP and AR process... If everything matches according to our algorithm, we use APIs to create the bill in the right accounts for each subsidy," Rupal explained. The team knew they couldn’t build or maintain integrations in-house and chose Integration Labs as their Unified API provider due to Integration Labs' unbeatable level of support and the region-specific accounting integrations RootFi offers, including Tally.

“It's a great product just because of the ease of use for people like our team who build solutions. It helped get us up and running quickly. Of course, the real-time assistance from Integration Labs was much appreciated.”

- Rupal Jadeja, Product Manager

As they built the invoice verification and front-end components, they connected the back end of their solution to Integration Labs' Unified API. “Onboarding was very smooth,” she stated, as Integration Labs provides a dedicated engineer to assist with the process. Rupal’s team was able to integrate with Integration Labs in 2 days rather than spend over 3 months building integrations in-house. “We really didn't have to do much- everything was handled by Integration Labs, and wherever we were stuck, there was somebody from RootFi available to assist.” Rupal continued.

“The best feature was the fact that we could automate processing for all our companies using a single platform.”

- Rupal Jadeja, Product Manager

The Integration Labs team also assisted in building our complex API calls for custom fields.

“All of the fields that we needed were unique due to our complex entity structure. We had a lot of different requirements in terms of the data fields and the APIs. Integration Labs really helped in customising and developing those specifically for our use case.”

- Rupal Jadeja, Product Manager

The team leverages Integration Labs' Unified Accounting API to connect their product to multiple accounting systems. Once the algorithm matches invoices, purchase orders, and goods received notes, Integration Labs' APIs can automate bill creation in their respective accounts, regardless of the underlying accounting system.

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Results

Integrating Integration Labs' solution into their internal automated AP/AR was just the start of a partnership that’s already paying off for the finance team. When asked how long it took to see results, Rupal quickly replied, “Immediately, right when we were done integrating. It was almost real-time because that’s what RootFi’s Unified API is geared towards.” Rupal’s team was able to integrate with RootFi in 2 days rather than spend over 3 months building integrations in-house.

Implementing Integration Labs' Unified Accounting API has had significant benefits for multiple stakeholders, including the developers, the finance team, their many vendors, and the upper management of the company. For the finance team, there are significant savings in time and ensuring accuracy. They saved over 200 hours per month by avoiding manual invoice processing and were able to redirect two full-time employees to more significant tasks.

“The fact that we could reassign those resources to other pressing tasks instead of manually verifying invoices, purchase orders and goods received details helped us massively.”

- Rupal Jadeja, Product Manager

The finance team can also strengthen Velankani’s relationships with its vendors, “since it's automated, nobody has to waste time creating bills in the accounting software, and it definitely helps get the payments out in time,” Rupal explained.

The Velankani team was able to redirect the resources of 2 full-time developers for more productive work rather than building and maintaining integrations in-house. The developers save close to 70% of their time maintaining integrations by leveraging Integration Labs.

Since the headache of building and maintaining integrations was taken care of by Integration Labs, Rupal’s team could also build a dashboard for upper management, giving them “a bird's eye view of all of the transactions”, which helps them understand the entities’ financial health in real-time and speed up strategy. As a bonus, this connected dashboard saves the finance team even more time from extracting data from the accounting systems to manually build individual reports.

The automated AP/AR solution has also impacted the company’s bottom line. By diverting both developer and finance resources away from integration maintenance and manual processing, respectively, Velankani saves over 54% of what they could have spent without Integration Labs.

Rupal’s team is excited about the future of the product they have built with Integration Labs. Integration Labs' Unified API allows XtractAutomation to launch 4x faster than if they were to build integrations in-house.

“What we’re looking to do is not just use the solution internally for Velankani. We are looking to take it to market because it is a good product and a lot of financial services companies will be able to benefit from it,”

- Rupal Jadeja, Product Manager

Rupal’s team uses Integration Labs' Unified Accounting API to offer a solution that is integrated with many popular accounting systems, like Zoho Books, Quickbooks, Tally and 12+ accounting systems. With RootFi, they can onboard a new customer in under 6 minutes.

Rupal states that Integration Labs “gives us the ability to integrate with multiple accounting software, which broadens our offerings and lets us scale immediately- we can onboard more clients given the wide range of accounting software that Integration Labs supports.” Integration Labs' wide coverage means Velankani can offer companies across the globe the automated AP/AR product they deserve.