We’ve officially launched the monday Apps Framework – a low-code platform that gives teams the ability to quickly create enterprise-grade business apps, or custom and reusable functionalities, on top of monday.com Work OS.
Using the monday Apps Framework, teams create custom building blocks, such as integrations, workflow automations, data visualizations, or dashboard widgets with a lot less coding and in less time than traditional app development.
These building blocks are made instantly available to business users to use in creating beautiful applications in minutes.
In advance of this launch, we invited a few monday.com partners and customers to participate in the beta testing, with an inaugural two-day virtual “Builders Workshop” where they were given the opportunity to build custom apps of their own.
JT’s Cloud was one of the monday.com partners that participated in the workshop. JT’s Cloud is a leading cloud-based software service provider based in Australia, offering solutions including Work OS platforms, which they customize for small to medium-sized businesses.
We had the pleasure of interviewing Managing Director Jack Taylor, and Client Services Manager Mitchell Hudson, to learn about the pain points they wanted to solve for customers through an integration between monday.com and Xero accounting software, and what they plan to build next!
Let’s get started! What challenge were you aiming to solve in building the Xero integration with monday.com?
Mitchell: In speaking with our sales team, they’ve had a lot of requests from our customers for a monday.comintegration with Xero accounting software. Our customers wanted to be able to send data from monday.com to Xero.
The challenge was that our customers use monday.com for all their work and tracking their hours and then they would have to leave monday.com Work OS to manually enter all their hours all over again into their timesheets in Xero. Depending on how much and how often they had to do this process, it wasted a lot of time moving between the two platforms.
And since there wasn’t an existing integration, we’ve actually also lost leads because of it. So we thought this builders workshop would be a great opportunity to build this monday App integration with Xero and solve this very obvious pain point while opening the door to more business opportunities for us.
Tell us about your experience building the app integration. How was it?
Mitchell: This is the first integration with a third party that we’ve done. It was also the first Builders Workshop we’ve been a part of, and we managed to finish building the app in two days.
The documentation that the monday.com team gave us was good in terms of how to create apps. There were good examples to reference, which gave us real-life cases that we could use to duplicate a base framework, and then expand on it to create the integration.
It’s impressive that you managed to build this integration in only two days! How does it compare to other integrations you’ve built?
Mitchell: Other integrations we built took anywhere between a few weeks for something small to a couple of months for something bigger so building this particular integration was definitely much shorter than that.
So how does your new integration actually work?
Mitchell: The integration with Xero allows the user to create contacts, invoices, and timesheets through monday.com Work OS.
With timesheets, for example, once the account admin selects the integration, they go through the authentication process, and then they have five automation recipes to choose from as part of the integration.
So for example, they can set up a workflow automation such that once an item is marked as “done” in monday.com, the person, hours, and date associated with that item – which are indicated in individual columns – are then sent to Xero, creating a new timesheet, or adding it to an existing timesheet, automatically.
And there’s also a “Xero log” in monday.com, where the user is able to see all the integration activity that’s going on like when a timesheet is successfully created, the date and time it was created with the item number that goes along with it.
What key benefits do you see users enjoying with this app integration?
Jack: Now, if you’re using Xero for timesheets and monday.com for doing your work and tracking time, you’ll no longer have to go into Xero manually to convert the time. This integration will automate that entire process for them.
It removes that double handling of the process and saves them time. It’s really an extension of one of the key benefits of monday.com as a platform, allowing machines to do the mundane repetitive work, so humans don’t have to.
Now that you’ve built this extremely useful integration between monday.com and Xero…what’s next?!
Jack: We created five automation recipes with our integration and through our customer testing process, we’re hoping to locate several more pain points between the two products, which we can then continue to build out more amazing recipes. I personally feel that it easily could become a 50-recipe integration very quickly.
What do you see happening six months from now?
Jack: In six months’ time, I see us looking to pull data from Xero into monday.com so making it a reciprocal relationship. That would be equally pretty cool to what we’ve already built. Building out more recipes, tackling more pain points, and really empowering the end-users is our goal with this integration.
What was the biggest takeaway from building within the monday Apps framework?
Jack: The biggest takeaway for me is that monday.com was always quite a powerful platform, particularly with its integrations, automations, and dashboards. But now with the release of monday Apps, it’s just so much more powerful. It empowers the end-user to literally almost do anything.
There’s now a great range of building blocks that users can now add onto monday.com in a way that’s reasonably simple. And if a user has some coding experience, it just takes the capabilities of the platform to a whole other level.
As a solutions consultant, we’re in the business of solving problems for our customers, and monday Apps Framework really empowers us to say yes more often to our clients. We can solve so many more of their pain points and remove a lot of friction for our shared customers.
A big thank you to Jack and Mitchell at JT’s Cloud for speaking with us about building an Xero integration on top of monday.com Work OS. To learn more about monday Apps click here.
Get started