Background

Sync Payments is a payment-processing company serving merchants across North America. Their business depends on accurately calculating revenue share, fees, and profitability across dozens of vendors, gateways, and service providers.

Challenge and Current State

Sync Payments relies on accurate monthly billing across a growing network of external vendors. As the business scaled, billing data arrived in different formats and required significant manual effort to prepare for Salesforce.

The lack of automation and centralized data made the process time-consuming, difficult to scale, and limited visibility into revenue and profitability, prompting the need for a more reliable and structured solution.

Fix This for us!

Sync Payments’ challenges could be summarized as follows:

• Monthly files from 15+ vendors required manual downloading, editing, and cleanup

• Salesforce Billing Elements and Monthly Billing Logs depended on manual data uploads

• No centralized warehouse existed to consolidate revenue, expenses, and merchant data

• Leadership lacked a unified view of profitability and vendor performance

• Preparing export files for Salesforce involved extra manual steps and reconciliations

• The monthly billing cycle was not scalable as the merchant base continued to grow

 

Solution

Alphabyte designed and delivered a fully automated Azure-based data platform that ingests vendor files, standardizes revenue and expense logic, and generates Salesforce-ready export files all supported by a centralized SQL data warehouse and Power BI reporting.

Automation was at the core of the solution, with data warehousing and reporting ensuring long-term scalability.

Alphabyte built vendor-specific ingestion pipelines in Azure Data Factory that automatically detect, validate, and process incoming files from all 15+ vendors, removing the need for manual downloads or spreadsheet cleanup.

2. Standardized Data Warehouse in Azure SQL

The new warehouse introduced a clean, auditable structure for all vendor data:

• Staging Layer: Raw vendor files with audit fields

• Transformation Layer: Standardized revenue, net revenue, rev-share, expense logic

• Dimensional Model: Optimized for reporting, Salesforce output, and future scaling

This created a single source of truth for all revenue inputs, expense calculations, merchant performance, and vendor contributions.

 

3. Automated Salesforce Export Logic

Alphabyte automated the generation of Salesforce-ready summary tables, applying the correct revenue-share and net-revenue calculations so that billing files are produced consistently and without manual intervention.

4. Executive & Operational Reporting in Power BI

To give leadership visibility into the entire revenue cycle, Alphabyte refreshed Sync Payments’ reporting model using Power BI:

*This is sample data and does not represent real information.

Reports now use:

• Role-based access (RLS)

• Drill-through analysis

• Executive KPI views

• Filter bookmarks

The result: faster insights, more consistent decision-making, and cleaner reconciliation between Salesforce and vendor sources.

A Success Story

Sync Payments now has a fully automated, scalable system that transforms a complex monthly manual workflow into a reliable, repeatable, and auditable data operation.

Key outcomes include:

• Hours of monthly manual prep eliminated

• Consistent revenue calculations across all 15+ vendor sources

• Automated Salesforce billing exports

• Stronger accuracy and auditability of revenue and expense data

• Unified reporting for executives and account managers

• A platform that supports long-term growth and new vendor onboarding

By replacing fragmented spreadsheets and manual workflows with automation and a modern data foundation, Sync Payments now runs its revenue operations more efficiently and with far greater confidence.

Background

Summit Ledger is a leading Fractional Accounting firm based in Toronto, Ontario. The company provides fractional Accounting and Financial services, with a specialty in Manufacturing and Construction. Founded in 1987, Summit Ledger’s key offerings include, but are not limited to, Bookkeeping, Accounts Payable and Receivable, Strategic Financial Planning, Month-End and Year-End closing.

Challenge and Current State

Ledger faces a significant challenge in streamlining and expediting the process of approving journal entries as part of its clients Month-End process. The current system is characterized by inefficiencies, delays, and a lack of transparency, hindering the ability to maintain accurate financial records and make informed business decisions.

Summit Ledger’s existing process is characterized as follows:

• • • Anywhere between 200-300 Journal Entries require monthly analysis and approval.
    • Financial Analysts compile supporting documentation for each Journal Entry, saved in a designated SharePoint folder.
    • Once complete, the supporting documents are packed together and sent to a Manager for approval in an email.
    • The Manager will then either approve the Journal Entry, or requests clarification or adjustments.

 

Summit Ledger’s existing Journal Entry approval workflow presents several challenges:

• • • The reliance on Email to request Approval has led to several instances of missed requests.
    • The reliance on Email chains makes it difficult to track the status of each Journal Entry.
    • With documents scattered across SharePoint and email, maintaining an audit trail is a challenge.
    • A lack of reporting capability to track important KPIs, such as volume of Journal Entries by category, and Financial Analyst.

 

To this end, Summit Ledger reached out to Alphabyte for an integrated Power Platform solution to streamline the process of managing and approving Month-End Journal Entries.

Primary Objectives

With these challenges in mind, there were a few must-haves features to be incorporated as part of the solution:

1) Streamlined Journal Entry approval process for improved operational visibility and efficiency.

2) A comprehensive audit trail for each journal entry, encompassing all file attachments and revisions.

3) Stringent, role-based security measures to ensure that only designated personnel can access, create, edit, and approve Journal Entries.

4) Automated reports to facilitate trend analysis, forecasting, progress tracking and error detection.

 

Solution

The implemented solution included the following components:

1) A PowerApps Application to transform the manual approval processes into an integrated, digitized, automated processes.

2) A Data Storage Solution leveraging the existing SharePoint environment to house and store all journal entry records along with file attachments.

3) A Power Automate workflow to deliver timely notifications when Journal Entries are ready to be reviewed and omnichannel alerts to enhance accountability.

4) A Power BI Reporting Environment providing instant access to key metrics.

1. PowerApps Application

The PowerApps application serves as a one-stop general hub for both Financial Analysts and Managers to manage all operations pertaining to Journal Entries. Reporting has also been embedded directly into the application so that users are not required to navigate between multiple environments.

2. Power Automate

Power Automate workflows have been integrated into the Power App application enriching it with additional features to streamline operations. Some of these features include:

1) Triggering alerts to Microsoft Teams and Outlook for journal entry approval.

2) Scheduled automated tasks to add new recurring journal entries.

3) Mass export of all journal entries data for audit purposes.

3. Power BI Reporting

A summary Power BI report allows users to understand trends and meticulously review existing journal entry data. By connecting directly to the SharePoint lists where the data is stored, the summary reports can update once every 15 minutes to provide near real-time information.

A Success Story

In a transformative move toward efficiency, Summit Ledger successfully implemented Power Apps to automate its Journal Entry approval process.

Leveraging the intuitive capabilities of Microsoft’s Power Platform, Alphabyte designed and deployed a tailored solution that streamlined Summit Ledger’s approval workflow. Summit Ledger now has the foundation to streamline operations and effectively service its clients.