Freshbooks
First Glance
FreshBooks is one of the largest SaaS accounting
software companies on the market. Founded in 2003, the company develops
all-in-one invoicing and accounting software primarily for small
businesses.
After being approached by Shopify to build natively
integrated accounting software for the platform, FreshBooks jumped at
the opportunity to be the first company to fill that need for Shopify
merchants across all industries. Freshbooks enlisted the help of Sunrise
Integration to execute on all technology requirements and act as their
strategic advisors.
Through a carefully planned discovery process, which
included several iterations, our team delivered a robust application and
scalable integration between FreshBooks and Shopify. We became an
integral part of their team that provided strategic guidance to ensure
they enjoy sustainable growth for the future.
The Challenge
Understanding the complexities and time demands of
building and maintaining a new app, FreshBooks knew they needed a partner with a proven track record of providing powerful data integration and software development solutions.
Given our breadth of experience and expertise,
Sunrise Integration was the perfect choice to build a solution that would enable FreshBooks to:
- grow their platform partnerships
- increase leads and user acquisition
- optimize customer retention and;
- stay ahead of the competition
Beyond the application itself, FreshBooks also
required a foolproof way to successfully “absorb” the product when their teams were ready. Through our Build-Operate-Transfer model, we handed
the solution off to FreshBooks to ensure that their team could use and maintain it without our assistance.
The Solution
Using powerful technologies like Node.js, MySQL and
Google Cloud, our team built a solution that allows small businesses to
integrate order information between Shopify and FreshBooks, merge/map
Shopify data and much more.
In order to deliver a superior final product, we
ensured the process for this project was a hybrid of agile sprint-based
development and waterfall milestone-based collaboration. Our team was
able to work iteratively on the product engineering aspect while
breaking up a project into linear phases in order to meet key
milestones.
But the work wasn’t done just because the solution
was built. We ensured the app and integration would work flawlessly by
putting them through a rigorous QA and integration testing process,
which required a full test installation of the application.
Furthermore, we ensured the smooth handoff of the
solution to FreshBooks by embedding their in-house integrations
developer into our team. Through this partial merger of teams,
FreshBooks will benefit from the proper knowledge transfer, training and
handover of the application’s codebase.
The Outcome
The Sunrise Integration team worked diligently to deliver top-tier software products and client service.
On the first day of the launch, the FreshBooks’ app
was featured in the Shopify App Store. And that’s not all–one month
after launch, 437 Shopify stores downloaded the FreshBooks application
and the number continues to grow at a rapid rate. These impressive
results demonstrated that the goal of being the first provider of
accounting software to Shopify merchants was wholly justified.
We helped scale their app on Google Cloud when it was featured by Shopify App Store and provided support where needed.
Throughout the project, we tested and contributed to
their software development kit (SDK). FreshBooks’ SDK serves as a
code-based toolkit that they can give to any partner in the future to
integrate with their platform. In doing this, we contributed to their
long-term product roadmap and went above and beyond for them to create a
stronger, more fruitful long-term relationship.
The FreshBooks team appreciated our level
of communication and transparency throughout the entire project as
feedback and fixes to roadblocks were addressed quickly and efficiently.
Looking to the Future
FreshBooks’ team enjoyed working with us so much that
we’re providing ongoing consultation around e-commerce product
strategy. We’re proud to be their long-term partner who offers proactive
thought leadership in identifying SaaS integration opportunities as
well as develops those integrations.