Case Study
How Baton Market Used Rutter To Build Their Quickbooks Desktop Integration to Launch their Product in 2 months
Baton Market's mission is to give every small business owner - and future owner - the insight they need to plan their next big move. Baton is working to make small business ownership attainable for everyone by unlocking reliable data. Owners join Baton to get a free business valuation, a plan for growth with expertise from a network of trusted partners, and support selling their business when time is right.
We spoke with Baton co-founder Jamie Roth about her experience working with her team to find the right vendor to help them build their accounting integrations.
IMPACT SUMMARY
Access to Granular Accounting Data
High Reliability & Connection Success Rate
Long-Term Partner for Fast-Moving Companies
The Problem
Access Accounting Data Across Platforms
Business owners visit the Baton site and will typically search their business in their database to claim their profile and get a business valuation estimate based on their real financial data. In order to build an accurate valuation, Baton asks users to complete a KYC and KYB check, answer a short questionnaire, and share their financial records. Baton wanted to create an easy way for businesses to connect their financial accounting information through a self-serve integration flow to make it easy for any business to get started.Given Baton has limited engineering bandwidth as a startup, their team wanted to look for a third-party universal API provider who could help them connect to multiple accounting platforms like Quickbooks Online, Sage Intact, Freshbooks, NetSuite, and Quickbooks Desktop.
Existing Vendor Had a Low Connection Success Rate & Didn’t Support Quickbooks Desktop Baton had initially started using a different vendor for their Universal API solution in order to access data to help inform their valuation model. When working with the different vendor, the connection rate was very low, with only 30% of connections working and no information provided as to why their connections were failing.In addition, this other vendor also didn’t have an integration for Quickbooks Desktop which was a core integration the Baton team needed. Baton co-founder Jamie shared...
About 50% of the SMB market uses Quickbooks but many of our customers are still using Quickbooks Desktop. Often these users are the same users that are starting to think about retirement and can benefit from our free valuation and support through sales process, so it's critical that we can integrate with their accounting software to serve them.
We were working with different vendor and their connection rate was really low and their price per connection was also very expensive. We wouldn’t be able to scale with it so that wasn’t going to be a long-term partnership for us.
The Solution
Streamlining Commerce Data via One API
The Baton team came across Rutter and was immediately impressed by how easy it was to quickly setup Rutter Link and to get started with various integrations.Jamie and the Baton Market team decided to go with Rutter because Rutter was able to help them not only onboard really quickly but also able to build out Quickbooks Desktop for the Baton Market team to help them launch on time. Jamie shared...
We knew upfront, we didn’t want to build integrations in-house. We have limited resources and we could spend years building these integrations. With a small but mighty engineering team, we want to focus our in-house efforts on building the foundation for our core product, investing in building our data set, and investing in a high-quality user experience.
We also know that it’s not just one accounting integration that we need and that we will want to integrate with a long tail of accounting platforms.
The Impact
Through Rutter’s Accounting API, the Baton Market team is easily able to pull core financial data including balance sheet and P&L financial statement data from the last 3-5 years that becomes core input into their valuation model.
Unlike their previous provider, Rutter’s high connection success rate has made it very easy for Jamie and the Baton Market team to easily access data and reduce the burden on customer support having to followup and understand failed connections.
As the go-to partner for startups and fast-moving companies, Rutter was able to provide Baton Market with an easy setup, a scalable pricing plan, an open Slack Channel for support, and a fast-moving engineering team that is able to help with new platforms core to Baton Market’s SMB market like Quickbooks Desktop.
The Future
Building the Marketplace for Buying & Selling SMBs
Baton’s goal is to build a marketplace that will allow small business buyers and sellers to connect and begin negotiations around a valuation calculated by an objective third party. Baton wants to become the “Zillow for SMB Acquisition”.
In the next year, Baton has exciting plans to continue to build out not just their marketplace for buying and selling but also their service offerings to help business owners also grow and manage their businesses through a network of advisors and partners to tailor to every type of small business owner.
