Sending Financial Data to Salesforce Without the Hassle Thanks to Codat and Amazon AppFlow
JR Beaudoin3 min read
We’ve recently built a secure data pipeline for a customer called Founders First Capital Partners. They needed to automatically load large amounts of financial data into Salesforce, their CRM, in order to make investment decisions. We used Amazon’s managed data integration service — AppFlow — which takes care of creating a secure connection and sending data to Salesforce. To retrieve the data securely from several financial tools, we leveraged Codat. Codat’s single API powers robust integrations to over 29 different financial tools including QuickBooks, Stripe, Plaid and Oracle NetSuite. Codat takes care of all the heavy lifting involved in these integrations — authorization, data standardization,ongoing connectivity — leaving us free to focus on how to best use this data.
The architecture
We designed a simple serverless architecture that fit our needs.
Benefits of using these tools
Why would you do this instead of “simply” writing the connection to the APIs?
- Less code to write. All you have to do is write code that puts data in an S3 bucket and AppFlow will take care of sending it to Salesforce (or any other supported SaaS tool you choose).
- All the usual benefits of serverless and managed services: you only have to focus on the business logic that matters to your use case. AWS ensures your solution is always up and running (with an SLA of 99.9%). There are no software updates or patching to worry about. It scales with your needs.
- Enhanced security: for each SaaS that AppFlow connects to, AWS establishes a secure AWS PrivateLink which is a great security guarantee without any additional effort.
- The standardization of data provided by Codat allowed us to manipulate data from various sources into one consistent data structure, which is a huge time-saver.
Trade-offs of our solution
- AppFlow can sometimes throw error messages that are not very helpful, which can be frustrating. But, just like with other AWS products, their team is open to feedback and continuously improves AppFlow.
- The community adoption of AppFlow still seems to be nascent (based on the number of Stack Overflow discussions on the topic), which is a bit of a shame given how helpful this service is. As a result, it can be a struggle to find resources to help you get up and running.
The combination of Codat with Amazon AppFlow allowed us to load large amounts of critical financial data into Salesforce in a very short amount of time, with minimal development effort. I hope you can also save time by using these amazing tools!
Thanks to Nate Ritter, CTO of Founders First Capital Partners, for giving us the opportunity to work on this small piece of serverless sorcery. Founders First Capital Partners are based in San Diego, CA and support diverse founder-led small businesses and those in low to moderate income areas by providing them with funding and acceleration services.
