Canva is an online design and visual communication platform with a mission to empower the world to design anything and publish anywhere. As the fifth most highly valued unicorn company globally, Canva was also named Most Innovative Enterprise company and Best Workplace for Innovators in Fast Company’s 2023 lists.
Operating within a rapidly evolving business environment, Canva needed to empower Canvanauts across the business to automate and integrate, so as to swiftly address specific needs, especially across finance and people teams.
Neil Saunders, who leads Canva’s dedicated Automation Engineering team, recognised that centralising automation development within a single team limits the adoption and scalability of the solution. To support a dynamic company like Canva, a decentralised approach was designed that supports every Canva team to get certified in Workato, allowing them to innovate solutions themselves using low-code automation.
The Automation Engineering team saw a need to scale and by utilising Workato’s GEARS framework, they were able to develop a governance model that empowers these “citizen developers” across Canva’s workforce. This included a structured learning pathway that dramatically grew the pool of recipe builders certified in Workato. This was run alongside an eye-opening adoption campaign to drive awareness in Finance and was further bolstered by dedicated technical one-on-one mentorship for less-technical Canvanauts who were working on more complex and impactful automation projects.
“Workato’s low code solution doesn’t just streamline processes, it lowers the bar of entry for non-engineering business teams, making automation accessible for all. It’s not about coding prowess anymore; it’s about empowering every team member to drive efficiency and innovation.”
–Neil Saunders, Automation Engineering Lead, Canva
Jessica Newton, who built and leads Canva’s Business Platform team within IT, recognised that a one-size-fits-all approach would not work for a company that is as diverse and dynamic as Canva. Jessica and her team of 30 system and data engineers instead prioritised a tiered strategy of tailoring IT services to meet the specific demands of different teams. The goal was to build a unique user experience that Canva’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system could not provide, but to do so in a governed yet scalable manner. Workato was key to this strategy.
Before we dive into how low-code automation and integration empowers Canvanauts to scale their impact, let’s first address the challenges the team had to overcome.
The challenge of a disconnected technology stack
Every month, Canva’s finance team were required to manually map expense transaction data to their ERP, Netsuite, from their expense management system, Navan, due to the unique benefits Canva provided to its employees. There were also deficiencies in how data could be mapped to the right General Ledger codes and inconsistencies in how tax amounts were applied.
Elsewhere, Canva’s financial planning and analysis team required seamless access to Netsuite data for month end reporting however Netsuite did not have native connectors with their planning software, Anaplan.
Furthermore, Canva’s existing CRM integration tool was limited in customisation and struggled to handle the volume and flexibility of data that the Finance team needed to transfer from Salesforce to Netsuite. This required a lot of manual process overlay by IT.
On the quote to cash front, there was an opportunity to help Canva’s customer support teams activate its B2B customers’ product subscriptions based on business customers’ payment status.
Meanwhile, Canva’s People team were limited in specialised skills required to integrate data on Workday, their core Human Resource Information System (HRIS), into other platforms. Moreover, while having a distributed landscape of tools allows Canva to tap into best of breed technology, Canvanuats were being overloaded with too many bespoke tools and the resultant noise of in-system notifications.
Building end-to-end automations
With Canvanauts across business and IT empowered to co-design solutions, Canva now has over 110 automations enabling innovation at scale, especially across Finance and People functions. Here’s a snapshot of what Canva achieved with Workato:
1. Automated Expense Management
Workato automatically ingests data from Navan and combines this with Netsuite’s scripting capabilities to accurately automate how transaction data is mapped (i.e. to the right General Ledger codes) and how tax is determined for expenses monthly.
2. Automated Data Refresh for Month End Reporting
Likewise, Workato automatically refreshes Anaplan with data from Netsuite on a regular basis, so that Canva’s Finance team can access financial data easily and efficiently for month end reporting each month. This is powered by a custom connector easily built using Workato’s API library.
3. Flexible two-way Salesforce to Netsuite integration
Workato also gives Canva full flexibility to push data up and down between Salesforce and Netsuite, removing intense manual process overlays that were required previously, while improving scale and efficiency.
4. Automated subscription activation/deactivation
With Workato, Canva’s business customers get their subscriptions automatically activated or deactivated based on their payment status, saving time for their customer success team while making customers happier.
5. Tightly integrated and automated hiring
Canva also collaborated with Workato to create a new marketplace connector between their Workday HRIS and their new Applicant Tracking System, SmartRecruiters. This enables Canva to tightly integrate and automate multiple stages of the end-to-end hiring process, avoiding the need for highly complex Workday integrations.
6. Automated nudges and centralised notifications
To counteract the noise of multiple in-system notifications, Canva centralises notifications on their collaboration tool, Slack, and uses Workato to drive action directly out of the tools that Canvanauts use every day. To further elevate employee experience, Canva leverages Workato to automatically nudge Canvanuts of important dates like work anniversaries, and reminds them to take leave or rest and recharge if they have not done so in a while.
“Workato has enabled us to make it a shared mission for Business and IT to be able to collaborate to automate and integrate data. In less than two years, we’ve got 110 Canvanauts certified in Workato and we were able to roll out 56 recipes across our order-to-cash, procure-to-pay and hire-to-retire journey.”
–Jessica Newton, Business Platform Lead, Canva
The impact of automation on Canva’s operations
Now, with their automated workflows, Canva is able to create impact across the business by:
- Replacing over 8000 hours of manual work annually
- Successfully closing 100+ vendor assessments in just 1-2 months, eliminating 75 hours of manual labour
- Accurately activating B2B product subscriptions
- Equipping 40+ employees in the finance and people teams with the skills to automate
- Reimbursing expenses in two days instead of two weeks in the past
The future of automation at Canva
Jessica and her team continue to put Canvanauts on a growth journey anchored on Workato’s GEARS Framework, which she describes as a “consistent and proactive way to identify, prioritise and automate processes, starting with those with the biggest impact.”
She adds: “I think the adoption and enablement that [Workato] runs, it’s not really just learning the platform. It’s actually helping people to grow their mindset. If we talk about the growth mindset, the scale mindset, the process mindset – this whole thing is embedded into our people. I think that’s the biggest asset to sustain the growth.”
Canva has now set its sights on supercharging business process management by leveraging the AI capabilities embedded in the Workato platform. This involves using AI to fast track delivery speeds and detect changes proactively.
“Workato allowed us to put innovative technology in the hands of Canvanauts in a governed way, accelerating the impact that can be achieved with our IT team”
–Michael Denari, Global Head of IT, Canva
