"Without hotglue, I’d be taking demos with people, they’d tell me what systems they had, and I’d be like, ‘Damn, I don’t have that one’. [...] With hotglue, I can finally just sell Cashboard AI."
About Cashboard
Cashboard AI is an AI analyst for modern finance teams, serving mid-market businesses with $15M+ in revenue. For businesses of that size, critical data is often spread out across a host of different tools like Salesforce, NetSuite, spreadsheets, and more. Cashboard helps busy CFOs unify their data from those systems, leverage AI to map and analyze the data, and build reports that run on autopilot.
In just a few years, Cashboard has rapidly scaled its customer base and feature set. By partnering early with hotglue, Cashboard now offers a wide array of integrations for finance teams, spanning accounting software and ERPs, CRMs, spreadsheets, logistics APIs, and more. But it wasn’t always that easy.
The Problem: Every customer is different
Cashboard founder Julian Rowlands knew the data challenges in FP&A all too well from years as a corporate CFO. “There’s always some other system… the way to scale FP&A has always been to hire execution-focused people to wrangle those systems.”
With that context, the Cashboard team knew integration breadth and depth would be critical, but when they first went out to sell Cashboard, it hit like a brick. Every prospect required a different mix of data sources – one would use Salesforce + NetSuite + ADP, then the next used HubSpot + QuickBooks + Gusto, plus a stash of spreadsheets and a tucked-away SFTP server.
After painstakingly building out a Quickbooks Online integration, Cashboard quickly realized that they needed to try something different: building every integration that the market needed in-house would be “suicide” for a GTM motion.
Finding hotglue
After discussing these challenges within the YCombinator community, the Cashboard team finally found hotglue. They were looking for a tool reliable enough to handle large variable workloads, and flexible enough to support enterprise customers with a wide array of tools. After a quick proof of concept, Cashboard was able to stand up a new, production-ready Quickbooks integration.
The new setup was simple: hotglue just piped data directly into S3, and the Cashboard team could focus on core data mapping and analytics, without worrying about quirky APIs and managing tokens. The engineering team loved how hotglue enabled them to quickly retrieve raw data from tools and build custom transformations within their hotglue ETL pipeline.
With hotglue, integrations became more of a given, and the Cashboard engineers were spending time on what actually mattered. Not only did building integrations get much quicker, but so did maintenance, observability, and onboarding. For Julian’s team, this was a game changer: “We went from having to spend probably months per integration to a couple of days.”
Scaling with hotglue
Cashboard scaled significantly after their first Quickbooks integration. When new integrations came up in demos, the Cashboard team could reach out to hotglue, and there was usually a hotglue connector, or a Singer-compatible open-source connector, ready to use.
This freed up the Cashboard team to spend more time on reporting, and it enabled the sales team to sell to anyone. “By working with hotglue, we’re finally able to serve our entire addressable market, with minimal dev work on our side,” Julian said. “Without hotglue, I’d be taking demos with people, they’d tell me what systems they had, and I’d be like, ‘Damn, I don’t have that one’. Then the sales process would just die.”
Cashboard also found the quick responsiveness of the hotglue team to be a huge asset. With financial data, reliability is critical, so poor third party documentation and vague errors can kill.
“hotglue just has the best support of any company we’ve worked with. We ping you, and you always turn it around super fast.”
What’s next
Julian has big plans for the coming year, as Cashboard continues to automate more and more of the manual work of FP&A. Cashboard envisions a world in the near-future of “Solo CFOs,” where a single CFO can run a world class FP&A function without needing to hire anyone.
For Cashboard, the decision to partner with hotglue on that journey has never been more clear.
“With the breadth of connections that we need, rolling our own integrations would have been suicide. hotglue has been the perfect partner for what we need.”
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