How Collective Provides a Singular Financial Solution to S Corps with Tight

Providing Flexible Accounting and Invoicing Solutions Tailored to S Corps

From the start, Collective’s intention has been to create the ultimate one-stop-shop for S corporations. In pursuit of that goal, Hooman Radfar, Co-Founder and CEO, and Patrick Bragg, Vice President of Product Management, started to vet solutions that would allow Collective to provide accounting and invoicing to niche small businesses, and remove their reliance on QuickBooks Online.

Collective wanted a solution that was:

• Flexible enough to meet the specific, varied needs of S corps
• Agile enough to create a seamless experience without different access points, so members would not be required to use multiple logins

While Collective initially explored using Tight Accounting API, they ultimately chose to partner with Xero, a popular cloud-based accounting software. But after some time, they became frustrated with this option’s lack of flexibility, agility, and control. The software did not operate external-facing APIs or offer any embedded services.

“You can’t programmatically go into popular cloud-based accounting software and perform bank reconciliation. You can’t programmatically go in and perform expense categorization. It limited our capabilities significantly,” said Hooman.

Collective also wanted to maximize their growth potential, while they continued to prioritize their members’ experience.

“We want to bring invoicing services in-house. We want better data about our members’ accounts payable and accounts receivable, so we can provide the most accurate financial reporting. We want to create an additional revenue stream, while charging our members less for these services than they were currently paying—a win for everyone. But we can’t do all of that with popular cloud-based accounting software,” said Patrick.

Less than two years later, Collective resumed their talks with Tight.

“We realized we needed a partner like Tight, whose core business is embedded APIs, so we could speed up the experience for our members. On top of that, Tight is innovative; they have the right blend of product maturity and openness. We had some very niche needs and specific use cases, but the Tight team met them with enthusiasm. They built those capabilities for us before we signed, so we could enter this partnership with confidence,” said Hooman.

Get Up and Running with Tight's White-Labeled UI

To get a working product up as quickly as possible, Collective used Tight's software development kit (SDK) to embed Tight's white-labeled user interface (UI). In doing so, Collective increased their speed to market by at least four months in comparison to developing their own UI. Now, when a new member onboards with Collective, their bookkeeping experience is enabled by Tight, but completely consistent with Collective’s branding.

“The Tight team has been super responsive to all of our requests, which isn’t always a guarantee when you work with a vendor. One of the challenges with this type of project is relying on, and trusting in, a third-party to manage our timelines. It was a learning process for us too. But Tight is great. They respond and act like a large enterprise company,” said Patrick.

Full Integration with the Tight API

Collective plans to complete a full integration with the Tight API by mid-2024. From there, they hope to migrate any remaining members who are still using QuickBooks Online and Xero to Collective’s new customized accounting and invoicing solutions—powered by Tight.

Even Faster Financial Reporting

Because the Tight API provides the most up-to-date data, it will allow Collective to continue automating more of their financial reporting processes. This will not only save time and resources, it will allow Collective’s member relationship managers to deliver multiple monthly financial reports— like cash flow and profit-loss statements—at a much faster rate.

“We really want to scale our business, and for that we needed an API-first product. Tight allows us to drive a better user experience while becoming more profitable,” said Patrick.

Finely-Tuned Tax Reporting

The Collective team is also eager to explore the potential of Tight's tax calculation, filing, and reporting features. They want to continue streamlining their members’ financial experience and ensure every possible tax-saving opportunity is available—at all times.

“We don’t want to just do our members’ taxes; we want to give them continuous updates on where they can save and the trends that we’re seeing. We want to be identifying write-offs they didn’t even realize that they had. Tight is going to allow us to do that, so we’re pretty excited. Not only does it make our business more compelling, it saves our members even more money,” said Patrick.

Overall, Collective is galvanized by all the possibilities they can now create for their members with Tight's help.

“Tight have been excellent partners. There’s an efficiency that we really wanted, and we can garner it through this new platform. We just couldn’t get that with other solutions,” said Hooman.