Superior Integrations Win 

Why every spend management product needs to build a scalable 

integrations ecosystem? 

Why Integrations? 
 
Enterprise processes are complex. They take a lot of time and effort to be instituted and 
streamlined. Enterprises have dozens of processes for multiple activities that have evolved over 
the years. Process setting is a painful task especially because of the multiple touchpoints, 
stakeholders and systems involved.  
 
While some of the advanced geographies are flourished with multiple point-solutions aimed at 
solving a particular process/need, trust deficit and slow moving geographics still have all-in-one 
solutions (think SAP) that offer multiple solutions bundled in the same product. Point solutions 
may provide a better customer and user experience compared to all-in-one solutions but this 
improved UX comes at an additional cost as well. With more products, there’s a need for 
multiple integrations as well for data to seamlessly flow between these products. 
 
While integrations are critical for all sorts of enterprise products, building superior and hassle 
free integration is more so important in domains where quality self-serve products are 
abundant -- thanks to the low switching costs in such cases. Products like SAP are very difficult 
to replace despite them offer subpar experience primarily because of the sunk costs in project 
implementation and high stakes involved in experimenting with another provider. It, thus, 
becomes a necessity for the products not only to provide integration support for these 
incumbents but also keep challenging them at every sales opportunity.  
 

What Integrations? 
 
Typically every employee’s lifecycle at an organisation begins the employee on-boarding. This 
is when employee details are first captured in any system of the organisation -- this particular 
once being an HRMS solution.  
 
Lifecycle of every employee at the organisation also typically ends with an HRMS solution, 
either same or a different one, offering exit management functionalities.  
 
Between these two ends, there are multiple processes and touchpoints for the employee and 
other stakeholders. This includes project management systems (e.g. JIRA, Asana), messaging 
systems (e.g Slack), travel management systems (e.g. Tripit), expense management systems 
(e.g. Expensify, Airbase), accounting systems (e.g Tally, Quickbooks), etc. Every product needs 
to figure out where it fits in the employee lifecycle and the process flow, and subsequently 
evaluate integrations to be built out.  
 
For instance, the following integrations might make sense for an expense management 
product. 
 
● HRMS integration 
○ To auto-create user profiles on the expense product 
○ To fetch attendance details for processing allowances 
● Corporate cards integration 
○ To fetch corporate card expenses for reporting 
● TMC integration 
○ To fetch flight rates for trip approvals 
○ To provide seamless hotel and flight booking experience 
● Slack integration 
○ To notify the employees and approvers on a real time basis for new requests, 
comments 
● Accounting integrations 
○ To post approved expenses in relevant ledgers in the accounting system being 
used by the company.  
 

Accounting Integrations 
 
Let’s now pick up one of these integration use cases and expand on it a bit. There are typically 
3 types of expenses any business has: 
 
1. Salaries - These are the compensation and benefits offered to the employees 
2. Vendor Payments - These are the payments for different products and services availed 
by the company. This includes payments for aws invoices, sketch licenses, office rent, 
payment for office supplies etc.  
3. Employee Expenses - These are the expenses employees make on behalf of the 
company. Expenses done by a sales team traveling out of town for pitching to a 
prospect is a common example of such expenses.  
 
There are different products trying to capture markets for these different types of expense. The 
common underlying theme for all these products, is that they help organisations be on top of 
these expenses in terms of relevant internal approval, limits and checks, and eventual payments 
to the actual beneficiary (e.g. an employee or a vendor or the organisation itself, as the case 
may be). 
 
Once the payment is approved and processed, it should reflect in the company's books. This is 
where the use case of accounting integration arises. There are dozens of accounting softwares 
out there. Quickbooks, SAP, Oracle, Navision, Realbooks and many others are used by 
organisations to manage their account. 
 
All these products follow defined financial accounting standards in terms of Chart of Accounts, 
Journals, General Ledgers, etc. They have provision to enter accounting entries manually for all 
payments or transactions, or import the data using a predefined file format. Importing of is also 
possible using APIs, if the product has technical support for the same.  
 
If we consider the case of an expense management product, for instance, it is used by 
employees to record their business expenses and get them approved. These business expenses 
can be for different purposes e.g. accomodation, travel, food etc. These purposes in the 
expense management world are called expense heads or expense categories.  
 
Once the expenses are approved, they need to be reflected in the company's books which are 
being managed by the accounting systems. Accounting systems talk in terms of accounts and 
ledgers. Different companies organise their chart of account in different manner depending on 
what they find convenient. E.g. accounts can be categorized by operating expense and 
operating revenues. Accounts can further be categorized by departments and functions.  
 
So, there’s now a need to map each employee on the expense product with an account on the 
accounting product. There’s also a need to map the expense heads on the expense product 
with cost categories or cost centers on the accounting product. This mapping is usually done by 
a unique identifier for each account / ledger, also called GL Codes. This needs to be done on the 
expense product side, so that data can be pushed to the accounting system in the expected 
format.  
 

File Based Vs Seamless Integration 

 
Once the accounts have been mapped, the data now needs to be pushed to the accounting 
software. Usually, different softwares accept different file formats for importing data. The 
expense product in this case, needs to configure data files in pre-built excel templates designed 
around the file structure supported by the accounting system and either sharing it with the 
concerned person on a periodic basis on a mail or just automate the file generation and place it 
on a designated folder (e.g. SFTP location) for consumption. If the file is being placed at an 
SFTP destination, the customer can build a small functionality to parse these files and 
inject/upload the data in their accounting systems.  
 
The integration experience can further be improved, if the integration is done in a seamless 
fashion where the admin logged in the expense product can select their accounting software 
from the options listed by the expense products. Upon selecting the accounting software, they 
can securely authenticate (OAuth) their identify and access the accounting system from the 
expense product interface itself. This sort of integration provides a better DIY experience to the 
customer as they can complete the mapping on their own and start exporting expenses to the 
accounting books without any manual intervention.  
 
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Reach out to me if you would like to discuss further on this topic. I am at 
bits.ankit@gmail.com | h
​ ttps://www.linkedin.com/in/a4ankit/​ .