Building Software Solution for Financial Reporting

Customer:

HubSpot — a cloud-based CRM platform designed to drive inbound marketing and sales processes. Through a variety of built-in software solutions, it assists businesses in attracting visitors, converting leads, and retaining customers. HubSpot clients are companies from a variety of industries looking for ways to improve the work of their marketing, sales, and other departments.

Challenges & Project Goals:

The customer was looking to build a consistent and fully automated financial reporting flow that would ensure the seamless and error-free management of the activity of the sales department operating via the HubSpot platform.

The goals and challenges of the project were:

• To achieve a consistent automated financial reporting flow and increase the frequency of reporting to provide the most up-to-date information. Minimize the involvement of manual labor in the process and make the process visible and monitorable by parties involved (Sales/Revenue Ops, Sales department, etc.).
• To solve the challenge of managing large amounts of data for the activity of the sales department’s personnel, e.g., the number of sales, the list of workers, the number of working hours, financial and sales revenue data, etc. Consequently, calculating the amount of compensation to be paid to each worker, generating corresponding financial reports, and getting them back to the HubSpot platform also presented a problem. 
• To address the problem of collecting and aggregating various data from different sources, both internal and external. The data was spread across a bunch of already existing IT system microservices and 3rd party tools from different teams or even departments.
• To deal with the situation that there were a dozen of reports, some of which should be generated every 12 hours, while others, only annually. The reports that served for the calculation of the worker compensation to be paid off took into consideration revenue details, such as discounts, bonuses, etc., as well as a plan of sales for every sales representative. That made the generation of reports extensive and increased the number of variables. 
• The IT system should be able to support the entire flow of report generating and handling automatically.
• The team was trusted to run full-cycle development of the microservice for the automation of data handling. It included stages of planning, developing, testing, releasing, and providing technical support and maintenance. The team was also responsible for modifying already existing solutions and providing technical support and maintenance to them as well.

Solution:

End-to-end development of a microservice that would enable retrieval of data from multiple sources from the HubSpot platform, formation of a report in the form of a table, uploading of it to a third-party tool for financial calculation, and then transferring the results back to HubSpot. Ensure that the system being developed is flexible enough to run distinct phases of the process and ensure the support of the already existing software solutions in the IT system as well as the maintenance and update of the new microservice.

Business Value Delivered:

The Intelliarts team ensured that the IT infrastructure behind the HubSpot platform can now support automated reporting flow. Now generation and transfer of one main and several additional monthly reports to a third-party tool and back to the platform are fully automated. It resulted in 50 hours of manual work saving per month, higher reliability of the reporting flow, and the discovered potential for second-level reporting. It can significantly streamline the management of the sales team activity, which potentially should bring positive financial results.