How Velankani can go-to-market 4x faster with RootFi'

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 RootFi' 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 RootFi' Unified Accounting API led to significant improvements:

• Integrating with RootFi' took 2 days instead of wasting over 3 months to build integrations in-house
• Go-to-market 4x faster because of RootFi'
• Using RootFi' saves Velankani developers 40 hours per month in integration maintenance
• Using RootFi' saves the Velankani finance team 200 hours per month in manual invoice processing
• With RootFi', 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 RootFi'. 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 RootFi' as their Unified API provider due to RootFi' 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 RootFi' 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 RootFi' Unified API. “Onboarding was very smooth,” she stated, as RootFi' provides a dedicated engineer to assist with the process. Rupal’s team was able to integrate with RootFi' 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 RootFi', 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 RootFi' 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. RootFi' really helped in customising and developing those specifically for our use case.”

- Rupal Jadeja, Product Manager

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

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Results

Integrating RootFi' 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 RootFi' 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 RootFi'.

Since the headache of building and maintaining integrations was taken care of by RootFi', 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 RootFi'.

Rupal’s team is excited about the future of the product they have built with RootFi'. RootFi' 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 RootFi' 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 RootFi' “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 RootFi' supports.” RootFi' wide coverage means Velankani can offer companies across the globe the automated AP/AR product they deserve.