How Social Unit optimized client reporting and reduced results inquiries by 60% with Coupler.io

Terminal 1 is a recruitment platform based out of Taiwan. They connect engineers with recruiters, making it easy for both parties to find the right match.

The company relies heavily on the data they analyze to improve their business and provide a better experience to stakeholders. Most of the business data resides in two apps - Airtable and QuickBooks Online. While both offer analytical capabilities, neither quite lived up to the team’s expectations. What’s more, combining data from both apps proved to be challenging too.

In Airtable, Terminal 1 stores and processes the data on their applicants - such as application forms or employment contracts - as well as all the relevant data on businesses they cooperate with. They wanted to use that data to improve their business - find bottlenecks in the processes, better allocate resources, etc. Unfortunately, the limited analytical features of Airtable made the job difficult. The only way to work with that data efficiently was by exporting it into a more capable tool.

In QuickBooks Online, Terminal 1 stores the financial data of the company. The tool is excellent at compiling rich reports but was not particularly good for further processing of that data. Working in Google’s ecosystem, they found exporting reports into Google Sheets more convenient. The team was able to set up QBO to email them every morning with a set of reports, including bulky files such as General Ledger. Then, their admin team would collect the files and import them into Sheets one by one. Despite a bit of automation, it would still mean lots of mundane work.

Since Terminal 1 has separate business entities in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the accounting team works with two different QuickBooks instances. Therefore, it wasn't possible to combine the data for both entities within the platform. The only way to go about this would be by exporting data from both entities into a common destination. With the number of reports exported daily from QuickBooks, the team at Terminal 1 desperately needed to automate that process further.

What’s more, business use cases often require Terminal 1 to blend data from both Airtable and QuickBooks. For example, they frequently share financial reports with partner companies. Exporting such reports from QuickBooks is a good start but isn’t enough because the report is limited - it doesn’t, for example, tell when precisely an invoice was paid. For that, accountants at Terminal 1 needed to look up specific data in Airtable and add that manually to the reports.

Each of these activities and steps created a lot of manual, tedious work for the team. What’s more, it may have led to human errors and inconsistencies that the team couldn’t afford. As a result, they started looking for a way to automate data exports from both Airtable and QuickBooks that would streamline many of their processes.

After trying out severa tools capable of exporting data into Google Sheets, the team at Terminal 1 settled for Coupler.io. To begin with they set up Airtable integration so they could pull the raw data from their database and analyze it in a spreadsheet. The convenient thing was the ability to export data on a custom schedule - in their case fetching the data every morning proved to be the most suitable.

Analysts within the team created individual project dashboards in different Google Sheets. Recruiters can see the summary of candidates at different stages of the process. Sales folk can track their leads while the company management monitors the key metrics of the business. Each of these reports runs on the data automatically imported from Airtable every morning. All happens behind the scenes with zero effort on the team’s side.

What’s more, separate Coupler.io importers collect the relevant data from project dashboards and blend it into one general report encompassing the entire company. It’s easy for the company management to control how things are going. Analysts also have an easy time processing the data they need, without worrying that it may be outdated. The team enjoys their automations and for a very good reason - they save them plenty of time every single day.

Terminal 1 also automated data imports from QuickBooks Online. Now, all important reports are loaded into Google Sheets and refreshed every day, without any manual work. The same happens for the data from different QuickBooks entities - it’s automatically merged together and gives a clear overview of the financials of the company right from the get-go.

Having all data in spreadsheets enabled the team to prepare richer reports too. They can aggregate the information, customize the look of the reports, and enrich them with data from different tabs or even business apps. Merging the data from QuickBooks and Airtable also became much easier. Now, they can pull up particular reports from QuickBooks and connect them with the relevant Airtable data already in Sheets. All that’s left to do is export the ready report from Google Sheets and send it over to the recipient.