Aleph, an AI-native FP&A platform that connects your data, strategy, and spreadsheets, needed to add HRIS and accounting integrations to their platform.

The accounting integrations would allow users to pull and analyze a broad range of transactional data through Aleph’s spreadsheet add-ins and web-based dashboards, where they can discover timely, actionable financial insights; while the HRIS integrations would enable users to gather employee information, like annual salaries, to report on and forecast headcount spend.

The team at Aleph started to build their core accounting integrations in-house, but they quickly realized that there were numerous accounting and HRIS integrations they needed to build.

Albert Gozzi, the co-founder and CEO at Aleph, explains more:

“Our prospects don’t just use ERPs and HRISs like NetSuite, QuickBooks, and Workday—they use a long-tail of solutions. If we don’t integrate with them, we can’t be competitive in many deals and would give up millions of dollars every year in potential sales.”

They initially tried to address the long-tail by using an “automated data movement platform” but found that the tool wasn’t meeting their integration needs.

“The initial integration platform we invested in didn’t offer timely support and their integrations weren’t as reliable as we needed them to be. We then discovered and tested Merge during a proof of concept and found that Merge’s integrations and post-sales teams were truly best-in-class.”

The team built to Merge’s Unified API within a few days, and from there, they were able to take more than 20 long-tail ERP and HRIS integrations live, including Recruitee, DayForce, Zoho Books, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Here’s how their HRIS and ERP integrations work:

1. A logged in user would visit the Integrations page in the Aleph web app, click on “Add integration”, and then select the integration they want to add. This triggers Merge Link—a UI component that guides users through the steps of setting up an integration—to appear.

2. Once the user authenticates their integration successfully, an initial sync gets performed and the data continues to get resynced every 24 hours. 

• For accounting, individual transactions and their associated data, like transaction type, amount, currency, date, items purchased, and more get added and resynced in Aleph

• For HRIS, employees’ full names, job titles, departments, pay rates, pay periods, pay frequency, hire date, termination date, and more get added and resynced in Aleph

3. Users can leverage the integrated data when building out any of their reports, models, or dashboards, whether that’s related to headcount planning, reviewing expenses in a certain category (e.g., subscription costs), and more. 

For example, here’s how a user can use a NetSuite integration to generate a P&L statement in Google Sheets:

Users can even leverage the integrated data to support Aleph AI—an army of AI agents, analysts, and assistants that automate all the FP&A busywork that stands between them and the high-value strategic work they were hired to do.

For example, Aleph AI can analyze patterns in account classifications from the integrated accounting data to make helpful and timely mapping suggestions in a dashboard—as shown below. 

Note: If users prefer working in apps like Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheets, they can pipe (and continuously resync) the employee and/or financial data into these apps instead. They can go on to build dashboards, analyze the data via Aleph AI, and much more within these apps.

The process of using Merge to not only add but also maintain their long-tail of HRIS and ERP integrations has saved their engineers hundreds of hours.

Albert elaborates on why this is critical to their team:

“By outsourcing integration development and maintenance to Merge, our engineers can focus on building out the core AI features and functionality that differentiates our product and sets us up for long-term success.”

The data from Merge’s integrations also support their AI features in meaningful ways: 

“Merge’s ERP and HRIS integrations are incredibly reliable and allow us to access normalized data, which means the data uses a consistent format and only has the necessary information. This allows our AI agents and assistants to consistently provide helpful recommendations and take precise, error-free actions.” 

Last but not least, Albert and his team have greatly appreciated Merge’s support.

“Everyone on Merge’s post-sales team is extremely knowledgeable of HRIS and accounting integrations and, in the rare case they need to review an issue, they consistently work super quickly to resolve it. We couldn’t imagine a better integration partner.”

We look forward to supporting Aleph and their evolving integration needs over the coming years.