How Unit and Tight's Partnership Provides Better Financial Management Tools to SMBs

Finding a Flexible Accounting Solution

Unit was looking to partner with an accounting API that could offer the following solutions:

• Robust invoicing that would integrate with a variety of payment processors
• Automatically categorized business expense tracking
• Financial reporting for profit and loss, income, expenses, balance sheets, cash flow statements, and trial balances
• Double entry accounting
• Income tax estimates

And that partner had to fit into the Unit ethos of ease, speed, scale, and success.

“Often, there is a misconception that you have to trade off between simplicity and flexibility. We’re working against the belief that if you want more flexibility, things will automatically become more complicated. Unit does a really great job of making it simple to launch and continue to add banking and lending products to your own platform,” said Shweta.

Unit’s clients had already been reaching out about ways to unlock a better tax experience for their customers. But Unit recognized that access to better accounting features would lead to more transparent financial operations, resulting in more accurate tax calculations and easier filings. Tight's range of features and scalable solutions felt like the best fit.

“Tight’s entire API product can be white-labeled, which makes them stand out. And the team is very responsive. We often speak directly with the CEO and the CTO whenever we need anything, which helps move the process along. It ensures that you’re not only understanding their product, but using it in a way that will make the most sense and be the most effective. We really developed a strong relationship with Tight,” said Shweta.

Both companies always shared mutual customers and felt like they could unlock valuable services through working together. By Spring 2023, Unit moved forward with a Tight partnership.

Partner with Tight and Integrate Their White-Labeled Accounting API

Using Unit’s partner token functionality, Tight integrated their embedded accounting API into Unit’s platform. From a technical perspective, the team was able to work quickly, get everything up and running within a couple of weeks, and offer new accounting features to the first round of Unit customers. The partnership was officially announced in May 2023.

“The Tight team didn’t even have that many questions when they started the project. They were able to figure out what they needed to do, and then they went ahead and did it. We touched on a few pieces, but it was a pretty streamlined process,” said Shweta.

Through the Tight partnership, Unit’s clients can easily embed small business accounting features into their products without dedicated dev resources, as these features are already native to Unit’s platform. Tight's white-labeled UI also provides brand control, so that every UX touchpoint feels like a natural extension of the customer’s platform for the end users.

“A Unit client can leverage any feature that makes sense for their business and their customers. All the required data can be pulled into Tight's API like accounting, reporting, and tracking features. So, rather than having our clients do separate builds to make sure that they can pull the required data, together we’ve already built what they need. And, at the client’s request, all that data can be shared seamlessly between Unit and Tight,” said Shweta.

Onboarding More Mutual Customers and Growing Together

Looking down the road, Shweta only sees more growth for both Unit and Tight as a result of their new partnership.

“What’s been great is that we know there are customers of our prospective clients for whom this combination of accounting features is truly helpful. It really offers those prospective clients what they have been envisioning for the end users in terms of smooth, straightforward access to financial systems. And now, we’ve made it much easier for them to say yes to both Unit and Tight, because we’re working together. It makes the integration so much faster for them,” she said.