Nextdoor, a leading social networking service for neighborhoods, successfully navigated its journey from a startup to IPO by implementing a crucial, multi-department digital transformation.
By leveraging Workato’s orchestration platform alongside Workday, Nextdoor resolved significant challenges across Finance, HR, Analytics, and IT by establishing sustainable system architecture for ongoing growth and efficiency.
| Workato + Workday Impact | ||
|---|---|---|
| 22% Reduction in Month-end Close | 240 Hours Saved Annually | 75% Reduction in Integration Delivery Time |
| Enabled Finance to focus on strategic analysis and planning—not routine reconciliation. | Allowed the team to focus on process improvement, rather than playing catch-up to human error. | Greatly accelerating Nextdoor’s product roadmap and better positioning the company for their initial public offering. |
“The old way of doing things [manual work or custom builds] is time and resource-intensive. Just scoping [figuring out data models] can take 2 months. With Workato, you can build a recipe in about two weeks. Development is now cut down to 1/4 of the time.”
-Padmaja Dasari, CIO
About Nextdoor
Nextdoor is the essential neighborhood network. Neighbors, public agencies, and businesses use Nextdoor to connect around local information that matters in more than 335,000 neighborhoods across 11 countries. Nextdoor builds innovative technology to foster local community, and brands and businesses of all sizes use Nextdoor’s advertising platform to engage with neighborhoods at scale.
The Challenge
In preparing for its IPO, Nextdoor wanted to develop an agile tech environment that could support growing organizational complexity and evolving business objectives—all while connecting and automating key processes across teams and departments.
However, they faced several challenges ahead of this transformation:
- Fragmented Technology Stack: The company relied on diverse, disconnected tools like Coupa, QuickBooks, and Google Sheets without a unified ERP or HRIS, leading to inefficiencies and data silos.
- Limited Engineering Resources: With a lean technical team, Nextdoor needed a low-code/no-code solutions that could empower non-engineers to build and manage complex integrations.
- Scalability and Cohesion: The need for a more scalable, integrated approach was evident, as existing custom APIs and systems were insufficient for the company’s growth objectives.
- Manual Processes: Many crucial business processes, particularly in finance and HR, were manual and time-consuming.
How Workato became Nextdoor’s orchestration powerhouse
Nextdoor chose to implement Workday as its core ERP and HRIS system, partnered with Workato as the orchestration layer to integrate and automate a variety of processes throughout the organization.
- Recipe-based Composition: Workato was chosen for its recipe-based framework, offering flexible, fast, and intuitive implementation across multiple applications—especially important for lean IT teams focused on efficiency.
- Unified Platform: Workato served as the central orchestration layer, integrating and automating various systems such as Salesforce and Workday, enhancing data flow and operational consistency across applications.
- Rapid Delivery: Workato empowered Nextdoor’s team to rapidly prototype and implement solutions, fostering a culture of innovation without the delays associated with traditional development cycles.
“With Workato, it’s faster for me to make a recipe as a proof of concept than to create a system diagram and delegate to a developer. That’s been transformative.”
-Alex Fishler, Head of Business Systems
From Initiative to Action – Orchestrating Workday through Workato
Example 1: Autonomous Revenue Processes
Challenge: Nextdoor’s billing workflow was cumbersome and error-prone, involving manual updates between sales and billing teams. Sales had to inform Finance about new deals through manual communication—which was inefficient, slow, and led to data inconsistencies across platforms.
Solution: By integrating Salesforce (for CRM) and Workday (for ERP) via Workato, Nextdoor automated the entire customer data synchronization process. When a deal closes in Salesforce, Workato processes the data, ensuring customer records are automatically updated or created in Workday. This automation minimizes human error and reduces the time required from hours to just a few seconds, optimizing the billing process significantly.
Example 2: Real-time Recruiting Performance Monitoring
Challenge: With recruiters needing timely insight to measure performance, Nextdoor struggled with data visibility from its recruiting software, Greenhouse, into the HR systems managed in Workday.
Solution: Utilizing Workato and Workday’s Prism Analytics, Nextdoor set up an automated data flow from Greenhouse into Workday. Data on candidates, interviews, and recruiter performance metrics are pulled into Workday, where they are analyzed and displayed in dashboards.
Now, recruiters and HR leaders have instant access to performance data, enabling them to track progress and adjust strategies in real-time.
The best part? Workato’s integration and automation modularity also allows for easy adaptation and scaling as new data requirements emerge.
Nextdoor: Leading the Charge in Operational Efficiency
Nextdoor’s Business Systems team is now leading the charge in operational efficiency across the organization—continuing to reduce costs while simultaneously driving a culture of innovation.
The results of their initial transformation?
- 22% Reduction in Month-end Close: Enabled Finance to focus on strategic analysis and planning—not routine reconciliation.
- 240 Hours Saved Annually: Allowed the team to focus on process improvement, rather than playing catch-up to human error.
- 75% Reduction in Integration Delivery Time: Greatly accelerating Nextdoor’s product roadmap and better positioning the company for their initial public offering.
- Rapid Prototyping: Empowered the team to quickly create of proofs of concept, allowing for rapid testing and adaptation.
- Data Consistency & Silo Removal: Enabled smooth and accurate data transfer across systems like Workday, Salesforce, Looker, ADP and more.
“We’ve developed automations with Workato that just work behind the scenes, saving us hundreds of hours and minimizing errors.”
-Alex Fishler, Head of Business Systems
Conclusion
Nextdoor isn’t stopping here. They’re exploring AI-powered automations, particularly for usage-based billing. As Alex notes, “It’s exciting to see Workato, Workday, ChatGPT all working together to accomplish a job and eliminate a lot of these manual touch points.”
This forward-thinking approach, powered by Workato’s flexibility, positions Nextdoor for continued growth and innovation. The transformation they’ve achieved—from fragmented systems to a cohesive, agile operation—wouldn’t have been possible without Workato’s integration capabilities.
“Workato offers empowerment—allowing us to independently act fast and iterate without cumbersome development cycles. We have yet to find something that Workato can’t tackle.”
-Alex Fishler, Head of Business Systems
As Nextdoor continues to connect neighbors, Workato ensures their internal operations are just as seamlessly connected.
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