How Asure reduced development time from 1 year to 30 days with 90% less resources

Yasmine Rodriguez Wakim, Chief Technology Officer at Asure Software, was in the midst of solving a company crisis. Enterprise customers that had used the reliable and competitively-priced Asure payroll software for years were suddenly ready to trade it in for other applications in the market.

Asure took immediate steps to begin designing a new product that would address its customers’ concerns. However, in the meantime, Yasmine and her team implemented an RPA platform that would do the essential work of carrying over data from legacy systems to an intermediary customer portal. The problem? RPA isn’t an API connection, but rather works with the UI, which led to delays, time-outs, and failings every time a page was down. Building custom APIs was certainly possible, but it would delay solving an urgent problem for much longer.

What’s more, Asure struggled to complete complex internal processes in a timely manner, such as cash reconciliation. Having to switch between multiple systems and manually pull reports left the team 30 days behind schedule, on average. Yasmine knew that Asure needed a new solution.

Luckily, Yasmine didn’t have to look for a solution. Asure had already brought on automation platform Workato to assist in onboarding the company to its new CRM, Salesforce. However, the team quickly realized that Workato could be used far more broadly.

There were two Workato features in particular that stood out to Yasmine: one, the ability to quickly create API connections between platforms, and two, the ease of use in creating Workato recipes, which would allow Yasmine’s team to more closely partner with the business.

The Salesforce implementation was completed in a week—almost a whole year earlier than expected. Then the team got to work with their next automation projects, first, applying it to their intermediary payroll product and, next, automating their cash reconciliation process.

With Workato, Asure had created an automation center of excellence that leveraged both UI and API-based automation to partner with the business in achieving its automation goals.

The biggest impact that Workato has had on Asure has been a mentality shift; now, the team isn’t scared of its technical debt. They can still accelerate their speed to market and deliver the best possible solution for their customers, all with a lower cost of operations.

With Workato, the intermediary portal shows real-time data with dashboards and allows customers to pull reports without directly using legacy technology. That means there’s no back and forth or frustrating delays; all the information that customers need is right at their fingertips.

What’s more, Workato allows Asure to reconcile cash in one place instead of across four different products. The team has reduced required bank accounts from 20 to six, which saves fees. And while the cash reconciliation process has been reduced from 30 days to one day, it will soon become real-time.

Best of all, Yasmine hasn’t had to invest in more resources to complete this work; one of her colleagues, Jermani Martin, the director of automation at Asure, put it best when he said, “With only two resources, we’re able to do the work of maybe 20 developers.”