How Agicap boosts cash flow management and pre-accounting with Chift

Agicap is an all-in-one solution for cash management, liquidity planning, supplier invoice management, and cash collection dedicated to SMEs. It emerged from one idea: financial managers face difficulties in gaining clear visibility into cash flows, traditionally managed through manual, time-consuming processes in tools like Excel. Agicap automates data aggregation and reporting using multiple data sources, from bank transactions to invoices and accounting entries.

While their original focus had been on cash flow management, they now offer three products to also cover Accounts Receivables and Accounts Payables management for their users:

• Cash Flow: Cash management and financial planning
• Accounts Receivable Automation : Account receivables (clients) management and client reminders
• Accounts Payable Automation: Account payables (suppliers) management and payments

What started as a strategic tool offering data aggregation, indicators, dashboards, and projections is now also an operational tool handling client reminders, debt recovery, and supplier payments. With such a varied need for information, data integration is now one of the four major departments at Agicap, the other three being dedicated to each product.

Early on, Agicap realized they also needed to offer integrations with external tools. In fact, they built more than 35 integrations in-house. Integrations allow users to pull data from or push data to other software with automated flows, saving a lot of time for their customers. They use two types of data: banking data, which they get from interbanking protocols, and business data such as client or supplier invoices, which they get through integrations with accounting and invoicing tools.

While Agicap wanted to keep building their most important integrations in-house for maximum control, it no longer made sense to allocate so many resources to build and support all integrations:

“Building integrations involves development costs but even higher maintenance costs and it is not in our interest to build and maintain dozens of API used by only a portion of our clients. Strategically it makes more sense to partner with people who are experts.” Nicolas Mille, Product Manager at Agicap.

Convinced by Chift’s value proposition, Agicap partnered with us to handle their integrations with accounting software. Their initial goal was to import their users’ open invoices (supplier and clients) from their respective accounting software into Agicap and gain access to future cash operations.

Thanks to our unified Accounting API, Agicap integrates with all major accounting software such as Pennylane, ACD, Cegid, MyUnisoft, Sage, and Horus.

“We have access with a single integration, to a whole portfolio of integrations that we would have had to build ourselves if we did not work with Chift” Nicolas Mille, Product Manager at Agicap.

Instead of integrating our Accounting API, Agicap opted for a no-code approach that we call a Sync. With this approach, Chift built an integration flow between the client’s API and Chift’s Unified API. This offers a no-code, ready-made flow, eliminating the need for Agicap to handle the integration with our unified Accounting API themselves.

“The setup and integration process is very simple for our clients on each of the accounting software supported by Chift.” Hind Bidal, Product Manager at Agicap.

They considered other, less efficient integration approaches than Chift's Unified APIs:

“We could have used an SFTP approach instead, but it would have required a complex technical implementation, more costs, more friction, more time and resulted in less reliability than an API approach” Nicolas Mille, Product Manager at Agicap.

Since Agicap now also manages payments, their team identified the need to not only pull data from accounting software but also send over pre-accounting data reflecting payments and transfers. Using again our Accounting API, their pre-accounting feature allows clients to prepare their purchase and bank journals directly on Agicap and then send them directly to their accounting software via integrations.

This significantly speeds up the processing time of invoices by the accountant. If a supplier is new, Chift also creates the supplier’s account in the accounting software during import.

“We use Chift as an intermediary between Agicap and the accounting software to facilitate the direct integration of journals, eliminating the need for exports/imports or manual processing.” Hind Bidal, Product Manager at Agicap.

Troubleshooting is made easy thanks to one-click API connection testing (test payload) and real-time monitoring using the dashboard function on Chift’s platform.

“It is easy for our support teams to monitor connections and react fast thanks to the dashboard on Chift’s interface” Hind Bidal, Product Manager at Agicap.

Partnering with Chift, Agicap was able to optimize its integration portfolio and achieve the hybrid approach it needed: a blend of highly custom and evolved in-house integrations and a large portfolio of no-code, low-maintenance integrations thanks to Chift.

This results in:

• Significant time and money saved on out-sourced integrations, which can be spent on core products
• No-code integrations using our ready-made Sync flows
• Truly scalable integrations thanks to our unified Accounting API
• Increase in the addressable market size by supporting more workflows
• More available automations, saving time for your customers and strengthening your offering

“It simply allows us to close more deals as the first thing prospects ask is whether or not they can import data from their accounting software” Nicolas Mille, Product Manager at Agicap.

Agicap's partnership with Chift exemplifies how unified API integrations can allow financial management solutions to efficiently scale their integrations. By leveraging Chift's Accounting APIs, Agicap has reduced operational complexities and provided greater value to its clients through automation.

Thinking about expending through integrations? Book a Demo with our team!