[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Routable (YC S17) - Scale payouts without...
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Launch HN: Routable (YC S17) - Scale payouts without building in-
house tools
Hey HN! I'm Omri and I co-founded Routable (https://routable.com)
with Tom Harel. We are a business payments platform built to make
bill payments and mass payouts fast and seamless, especially as
your company scales. We were in YC's S17 batch, but are doing a
Launch HN now because we recently completed a huge integration with
NetSuite, which will help larger enterprises automate their
business payment workflows. Tom and I started working on Routable
in early 2017. The idea was sparked while we were eating hummus in
Tel Aviv. When we first met up, we had no intention of spending
years of our lives trying to figure out how to make bill payments
and invoicing easier. But we realized after a three hour
conversation that at our two different marketplace companies we had
both spent 40% of our engineering resources on building internal
tooling to pay out sellers, drivers, restaurants, etc. After we
realized we'd experienced the same pain at different startups, we
asked ourselves, "what did we do wrong?" Was there a solution that
worked across finance, engineering, and operations that we were
simply not aware of? To find out, we interviewed over 300 people -
CFOs, VPs of Finance, Heads of Engineering, you name it - to
understand how businesses scaled their business payouts and
invoicing (think: growing from 1,000 payments per month to 400,000+
payments per month). The two main answers we received were: (a)
Like us, they'd spent thousands of hours and engineering dollars to
build an in-house internal tool, on top of processors, and wrote
their own custom integration to an ERP; or (b) they hired an army
of overqualified individuals to run daily data entry across
thousands of bill payments and invoices (which was tedious, not to
mention very expensive). These conversations confirmed what we had
suspected: There was no tool for easy payments that worked across
multiple departments. We realized that what we had built at our
marketplace start-ups could potentially help hundreds of other
companies. In 6 weeks we spun up a Routable MVP and were making
money for customers. Today, we're deployed across some of the
largest marketplaces and gig economy companies. We've focused on
working with engineering and finance departments as much as
possible to save them from building custom in-house solutions. Our
recent integration with NetSuite has been by far the hardest we've
done - especially since we built it on top of a SOAP API and
extended native functionality with SuiteScript - but it was worth
it, because we gained a deep appreciation for how complex
enterprise business payment operations can be. To make sure we "got
it right," we again did plenty of customer development interviews
to best understand what data needs to go into and out of NetSuite,
and made sure to record each interview so we could share their
unique pain points with our engineering team. Before we wrote the
first line of code, we interviewed a bunch of NetSuite users and
learned what was lacking in other NetSuite integrations out there:
tools that only synced in one direction, needing to recreate fields
multiple in different platforms, processes that were breaking
because the workflow had changed in your ERP, but not in your AP
software. The one thing we learned throughout this whole process is
that once you build an integration to an ERP, you're never really
done, so we expect as a team to forever tinker on sending data back
and forth with the goal of continuously improving our integration
and hopefully saving our customers 30 seconds to 10 minutes of work
at a time. Thank you for reading this story - I hope it was
interesting. We'd love to hear your feedback about Routable, your
experiences in this space, and answer any questions you have!
Author : omrim
Score : 51 points
Date : 2021-02-02 18:05 UTC (4 hours ago)
| coltons wrote:
| This team is incredible, we have been following them since 2018.
| NS integration is a HUGE accomplishment. Looking forward to
| seeing you guys again in Austin some day.
| omrim wrote:
| Thanks Colton!!!
|
| NetSuite 2-way sync for business payments was the goal all the
| way and I'm pumped that we can have it available to the public.
| [deleted]
| seddona wrote:
| Looks really useful, looking forward to checking out the NS
| integration.
| omrim wrote:
| Thanks! I'm at omri@routable.com if you want a walk-through
|
| We built support for custom fields on NetSuite - we did the
| research and 99% of our competitors decided not to support it
| because it's a lot of work and hard to maintain.
|
| We have API support for this too.
| leetrout wrote:
| If I were a NS user would you hand me a package of JS scripts to
| upload in to NetSuite? Or is there another mechanism to deliver
| the software? Or do you charge a fee and provide hands on
| service?
|
| From what little exposure I had several years ago SuiteScript
| seemed very powerful but versioning / upgrading with our vendor
| was very painful. It ended with giving providers access and they
| managed the SuiteScript stuff directly.
| omrim wrote:
| Hey! We have a direct integration to NetSuite so all you'd need
| to do is give us the subsidiary ID and then login.
|
| Because we have a two-way sync you wouldn't need to download a
| script or anything more because we took on that workload.
|
| Happy to show how it works :)
| kayhi wrote:
| I'm not this space but is this like bill.com where users can
| schedule payments? I'm assuming it is more advanced but don't
| have experience in this workflow.
| omrim wrote:
| That's correct, but we have an API too so if you need to
| schedule 1M payments we can have you covered and support
| NetSuite (new), QuickBooks Online, and Xero
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