How Oyster launched accounting integrations 6x faster with Codat

New integrations delivered 6x faster

Building with Codat enables Oyster to launch new integrations in weeks, not months.

38% month-on-month adoption growth

Oyster's customers are enthusiastically integrating their accounting software.

Maintenance time cut in half

Codat takes care of ongoing maintenance, optimizations, and edge-case fixes, so Oyster doesn’t have to.

About Oyster

A global employment platform

Oyster is a global employment platform that companies can trust to hire, pay, and retain global talent with confidence and speed. Oyster delivers deep local guidance and people-first experiences across every step of the employment lifecycle to help companies build a thriving global workforce and grow their business.

As companies go global, paying staff accurately and on time across multiple regions becomes complex. Oyster provides a solution; a global payroll platform that ensures compliant, on-time international payments in over 120 currencies and removes the burden of a heavily manual process.

The problem

Integrations are a customer expectation

Oyster’s customers not only expect a seamless payroll experience, they also expect their payroll software to be synced with their accounting platform. This means that when they pay their staff, they can see this data in their accounting system automatically and don’t need to copy information from one system to another.

Accounting integrations are an “out-of-the-box” feature that customers simply expect. As Product Manager, Ryan Newell explains, “the market is demanding it. Competitors have it or are building it. It was something we always knew we needed to do.”

As Ryan and his team started work on Oyster’s accounting integrations, they discovered that delivering this feature was complex. Ben Forrest, the Senior Backend Engineer on the project, notes that even before thinking about integrating with multiple APIs, it is “a relatively complicated thing to build from scratch. An invoice from a payroll system has to be converted into a format that an accounting system recognizes, and then all the asynchronous messaging has to be dealt with.”

The solution

A better way to build integrations

Ryan, Ben, and the rest of the Oyster team came to Codat looking for a better way to build accounting integrations. They knew that Codat could help by providing tried and trusted data models for key accounting data objects like bills and suppliers. Additionally, working with these data models in a standard way across multiple platforms would save them serious time.

“It was a lot quicker than we anticipated. Without Codat it would have been the same effort all over again to deliver Xero after doing QuickBooks Online,” concludes Ben. Being able to get data out and create new records in the general ledger without worrying whether the customer uses Xero, QuickBooks Online, or NetSuite enabled Oyster to build more efficiently.

The results

Integrations loved by SMBs

Oyster's customers are enthusiastically integrating their accounting platforms. Oyster user John Newman, a bookkeeper for Phaidra, explains, "we have employees all over the world, and for bookkeeping that requires separate accounts for wages and expenses. With the integration, something that took me a few hours now takes 15 minutes with no delay to the sync."

Winning new business

The availability of integrations can be a deciding factor in the market for remote hiring solutions, especially where two providers can fulfill a core need. As John from Phaidra explains, “when we were comparing Oyster to another provider, we saw that both could do what we needed, but Oyster had better integrations.”

Set up to scale

With Codat, Oyster can add new integrations in 1/6th of the time it would take to build from scratch. The team can scale integrations confidently knowing that they have a trusted partner in Codat that takes care of ongoing maintenance, optimizations, and edge-case fixes, so Oyster doesn’t have to.

How it works

Oyster users connect their accounting software via Codat in a few simple steps. Oyster then builds an invoice mapped to Codat’s standardized model and gives users the ability to map their data against the chart of accounts, and pull and push data in both directions. Codat handles the syncing of this invoice to the accounting software regardless of the differences between data models.

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