Angelina DeLago is the Co-founder and VP of Innovation at Botkeeper, so it’s no surprise that she’s always looking for ways to rethink how they work internally, too.
Botkeeper automates a lot of the pre-accounting tasks and bookkeeping for accounting firms so that they're able to spend more time with their clients and scaling their firms in order to reach their full business potential.
As a growing company, Botkeeper wanted—and needed—to automate a lot of their own daily tasks in order to be more efficient and empower them to serve customers faster. But little fragments of information and tasks lived in different places and they were spending too much time cobbling data together from multiple sources of truth across different tools and platforms.
“Since we were working across multiple systems that don't natively talk to one another, we weren't able to automate a lot of our team’s mundane day-to-day tasks,” Angelina explains. Helping unblock her team so they could work faster and smarter became a priority for Angelina—and led her to Retool.
This is the story of how Angelina used Retool to help her team work the way they want, and connect disparate systems beneath the surface.
Making client management easy
“Client-facing teams aim to make partner deployment and scaling initiatives quick and painless—but without the tools to do so, it was tricky,” explains Angelina. Before, the multiple teams working with a given partner through pre-sales, deployment, and ongoing scaling efforts would be moving through different systems to get the whole picture. Different teams naturally live in different software so bridging the gap and providing each team the same picture—the whole picture—was a huge priority.
Now, they use Retool as an entity management system, helping them to manage partner clients, their status, the services that they're getting, and partner access to product features. They now work seamlessly together, in the same space, and quickly trigger automated workflows with a click of a button.
With Retool, they’re able to:
- Search for partners: The team can quickly search for partners and filter by status—prospect or contracted—and see feature flags for the partner-facing deployment app. They’re also able to see the price, package, and key events in a partner’s lifecycle.
- Take action: Team members can take one-off or bulk actions right from the Retool dashboard, triggering the creation of internal tasks, such as quote generation.
- See key information: For Angelina, the dashboard provides analytics on how quickly partners are scaling, which packages they’re getting, and calculated times for deployment.
Because one of my main focuses is making sure the deployment process is painless and speedy, Retool is critical to help me keep my finger on the pulse and have visibility into how deployments are going.
Automation unlocks innovation
While Botkeeper helps its customers automate away the most tedious parts of bookkeeping, Retool helps the Botkeeper team automate their own back office tasks.
Retool has automated away many hours and lots of headaches for our team.
“By syncing automatically across our internal admin system, HubSpot, and task management tool, information is updated and the minutiae of managing partners is taken care of with no human intervention,” explains Angelina. What’s more, through direct integration with Botkeeper’s other systems, anytime a new client is added, removed, or updated, everything is reflected in all systems via their Retool app.
Plus, with the built-in analytics functionality of Retool, Angelina and her team have more visibility into clients. They can quickly see how partners are scaling, which packages they’re on, and what services they’re getting—all on one page.
And getting Retool up and running was quick, simple, and required little code. “I up-leveled my coding skills with Retool’s support, documentation, and the platform itself, going from running simple queries to building out a full suite of dashboards for my teams to use,” Angelina says.
“I've made a huge impact without needing to interrupt sprint time or our long-term roadmap. Retool has been a huge time-saver by helping us automate a lot of hours away by connecting the dots beneath the surface so we can focus on the work that matters.”
To hear more from Angelina, as well as other SaaS experts from Segment, Neo4j, LeadGenius, and Remitly, check out our SaaS Lightning Demo.