Drivetrain is an AI-native business planning platform designed to accelerate core FP&A workflows like forecasting, budgeting, and reporting for mid-market to enterprise companies.

To work effectively, Drivetrain needs access to a wide range of customer data. This spans everything from business financials to customer data to employee and payroll data. 

“By supporting integrations across categories, Drivetrain can be the single source of truth for finance teams. This means they can just use our platform for all their key tasks, like 3-statement forecasting, headcount planning, and sales and revenue forecasting,” says Praneeth Bandarapu, a product manager at Drivetrain.

To meet this integration need, they used an embedded iPaaS and an ETL platform. But using multiple tools to power their cross-category product integrations didn’t feel sustainable.

“Every time an integration issue cropped up, diagnosing the source required extra investigation. And if we needed to add more custom integrations, there was a good chance we’d need to continue adding to our integration tech stack,” explains Praneeth.

Similar to their product, Drivetrain needed a single source of truth for their integrations.

According to Praneeth:

“Merge’s ability to support all of the integration categories we care about, along with their deep, customizable data coverage, made them the obvious choice for consolidating our integrations.”

Drivetrain added dozens of integrations via Merge within weeks, including Microsoft Dynamics 365, Xero, Workday, and Greenhouse.

Here’s how the integrations work:

1. A logged-in user would select “Connect a datasource” to see all of the integrations they could add.

2. The user would go on to select an integration, which triggers Merge Link, a UI component, to appear.

3. Once an integration is authenticated successfully, an initial sync is performed (re-syncs occur every 24 hours). 

Here’s a look at the data these integrations sync: across key integration categories:

• HRIS integrations: Employees’ full names, departments, start and end dates, compensation, employment statuses, etc.
• ATS integrations: open roles, expected hire dates, hiring statuses across applications, etc. 
• Accounting integrations: general ledger (GL) data, AP and AP data, master data and metadata, etc.

Once this data is synced, finance teams can leverage Drivetrain across their workflows.

For example, users can build customizable financial reports for a board meeting, and at any point, they can see the underlying data from the integrated accounting tool that’s powering the report.

Users can also review their actual and forecasted headcount based on the integrated HRIS and ATS data. And they can then use that information to align on and finalize their headcount plans.

Users can even ask Drive AI (Drivetrain’s AI agent) for quick answers or to perform actions on the user’s behalf. 

For example, a user can ask Drive AI what their 5 most expensive vendors are, and Drive AI can use the integrated vendor data in the customer’s ERP to surface the answer.

By consolidating most of their integrations into Merge, Drivetrain dramatically reduced engineering complexity and time spent on maintenance.

Praneeth explains further:

"We used to spend several hours finding, diagnosing, and addressing a single integration issue. Now that we can just use Merge’s integration observability features to manage most of our integrations, our time to resolve integration-related issues has decreased by 90%."

Equally important, their team has been able to realize significant time and cost savings. According to Praneeth:

“By consolidating our integrations to Merge, we’ve managed to save hundreds of thousands of dollars in subscription costs and tens of hours every year associated with managing vendor relationships.”

The team at Drivetrain also appreciates the Merge team’s level of support:

“Merge’s post-sales team is willing to do whatever it takes for us to be successful, whether that’s jumping in on calls to help our customers troubleshoot specific integration issues or advising our team on the best fields to map when we want to sync data beyond Merge’s Common Models.”

So, what’s next for Drivetrain?

“We’re planning to transition our natively-supported CRM and knowledge base integrations to Merge. This will allow our engineers to save even more time, which they can reallocate towards more important projects.”

We can’t wait to power even more integrations for the leading business planning platform.