Transforming the ability to access, analyze, and model financial data
With Yazmi Miah, Strategic Finance & Business Operations at Merge
Merge is a unified API that normalizes data across Accounting, HRIS, ATS, CRM, and other core business systems—powering hundreds of customer-facing integrations for thousands of B2B SaaS companies.
As a company built around a data-obsessed product and team, Merge holds an extremely high bar for any tools they bring into their own tech stack.
After thoroughly evaluating the FP&A tool landscape, Merge’s finance team chose Aleph to bring speed and efficiencies to their existing workflows, while building a scalable foundation that could support their tremendous growth.
Challenges before Aleph:
- Forecasting in Excel required manually downloading, consolidating, and reformatting QuickBooks and Salesforce exports, which was too time-consuming and rigid
- Budget owners couldn’t easily adjust their budgets, monitor actuals, or analyze departmental data on demand
- Routine processes such as running different scenarios or doing variance analysis could take hours, or even days, making it hard to answer questions on the fly
- Preparing for board meetings was a heavy lift, taking the finance team's focus away from strategic work for weeks at a time
Our ability to access, analyze, and model our financial data has dramatically improved since implementing Aleph. Aleph has significantly accelerated our workflows—tasks that once took days now only require a few hours.
The solution and results after Aleph:
- Eliminated the cumbersome tasks of working with manual export by using Aleph to ingest cross-system data (with Merge’s APIs, of course!), structure it around finance’s needs, and automate their time-consuming workflows
- The finance team now has the ability to seamlessly switch between Excel for analysis and Google Sheets for working with other departments
- Budgeting is now collaborative, providing budget owners the visibility, control, and accountability they needed—without relying on finance for every request
- Forecasting has gone from slow and rigid to real-time and dynamic, allowing finance to quickly model different scenarios to guide business decisions
- Routine processes that once took hours or days can now be completed in a fraction of the time
When we want to save a new forecast for something like a board meeting, we just push it into an Aleph table. Having a centralized storage system has been really helpful, and something the team has really appreciated.
Merge’s onboarding experience:
One of Merge’s own value propositions is helping product and engineering teams ship integrations in days, not months, and they wanted a similar experience with their FP&A tool.
“We had a fast, smooth implementation process. Everyone on the team was really helpful, always willing to hop on a call to answer questions or walk us through use cases. After going through onboarding, we felt really confident and comfortable in Aleph,” said Yazmi.
But the white glove service didn’t end after onboarding. “The team continues to be really good at supporting us and continuing to teach us new ways to improve or become increasingly efficient.”
Merge’s favorite features and why:
Data drill-downs: From answering questions live during meetings to doing their own ad hoc analysis, the ability to instantly drill down into the underlying data has been a huge unlock for Merge’s finance team and other stakeholders.
“For example, when we’re in a meeting with a budget owner and need to understand why software expenses changed, we can just drill down into it. Being able to do this kind of live analysis has helped us be much more efficient.”
I remember when Amy and I first started using drill-downs, it was like a huge light bulb lit up.
Data mappings: Having the flexibility to map, group, and rename source data has made Merge’s reporting cleaner and analyses easier to understand and work with.
“For example, we use mappings to clean and group QuickBooks account names. Little things like this make our analysis way more dynamic than before, when we had to have multiple columns and references.”
Data-obsessed customers like Merge are a dream to work with. We’re excited to keep pushing the limits with their team to uncover additional efficiencies.
To learn more about Merge, visit merge.dev.
When we want to save a new forecast for something like a board meeting, we just push it into an Aleph table. Having a centralized storage system has been really helpful, and something the team has really appreciated.
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