Wave increases productivity by automating multiple IT processes with BetterCloud

Wave provides small business owners with the tools they need to easily manage their finances. Its platform empowers millions of customers to take control of their accounting, invoicing, expense tracking, and payroll.

For both security and availability, Wave uses SaaS applications for all its internal operations—and app integration delivered by BetterCloud improves efficiency across the entire organization.

Challenge:

The top priority for the IT team at Wave is ensuring each employee has the tools they need to succeed. They handle a variety of tasks, including onboarding new employees, offboarding employees as they leave, and transfers within Wave when users are either promoted or change teams. At each step, Wave’s IT function provides software, hardware, and support for all tools and utilities. 

Wave’s senior IT manager says that the IT team is unusual. “Our IT philosophy is driven by the employee experience. Rather than reporting into our CTO, we answer to our Chief People Officer. We’re driven by our mission to make every employee more efficient through technology.”

The senior IT manager says that the company’s goal to make everyone more efficient was difficult to achieve because each new onboarding was treated like a bespoke event. “If a new engineer joined, we received a separate ticket to provision for Datadog, GitHub, and AWS, just to name a few. The same was true whenever someone left the company. Now that we have BetterCloud, we don’t have to manage so many tickets from so many different people—and we avoid doing the same tasks multiple times.” 

Solution:

Wave leverages BetterCloud to discover and manage SaaS apps, for user lifecycle management (onboarding and offboarding), least privilege access (based on user level), and auditing. After quickly becoming indispensable to the team, Wave’s entire IT team completed BetterCloud’s certification program — an investment in time that has been repaid several times over.

The senior IT manager says that while Wave uses multiple tools to manage its SaaS environment, BetterCloud offers the richest experience. “It’s an essential piece of our strategy because we can easily manage by specific roles and user groups. We’re going to really rely on BetterCloud for a long time.”

A faster onboarding and offboarding experience

Before Wave introduced BetterCloud workflows, onboarding and offboarding was a gigantic chore for Wave’s IT team. Not only did it take an incredible amount of time to respond to so many tickets, but the majority of onboarding and offboarding tasks needed to be completed manually. 

Today, Wave uses BetterCloud to automate its best-in-class onboarding and offboarding processes. The senior IT manager says that the team can grant access to the appropriate resources by placing each person into appropriate groups. He also says that BetterCloud has eliminated many of the blockers that made it difficult for new hires to get up to speed. 

“When I joined the team at Wave, we’d grant appropriate access to each employee by the end of the first week, or occasionally by the beginning of that person’s second week. Now, we can get all of that work done by the end of their first day.”

Wave has seen a similar impact on its ability to handle internal transfers or job promotions. According to the IT manager at Wave, the team can handle multiple changes across multiple employees in just minutes thanks to BetterCloud. 

“BetterCloud can grant users access to the service, grant them permission — depending on the service they need — and there are no mistakes.”

Senior IT Manager, Wave

More efficiency enables more strategic thinking

Now that Wave’s IT team has automated so much of its employee experience, the senior IT manager says that everyone can think more strategically about how to positively impact the business. 

“BetterCloud has given us so much time back and eliminated so much manual work,” he adds. “It has allowed us to put our sights on bigger thoughts and bigger issues.” And the IT manager agrees: “It is so much easier to on and offboard now, so we can focus on other bigger projects. It’s really awesome.”

Automation adds reliability and consistency during office disruption

The sudden shift to home offices during the pandemic was a challenge for everyone. According to the senior IT manager, “BetterCloud was the reason we had a pretty seamless transition to remote work. Wave was already very SaaS-forward. We have nothing local other than our Wi-Fi in the office, so BetterCloud enabled us to take control and better manage all that SaaS.”

BetterCloud also enabled clearer and more consistent communications across the entire organization. “Because we were able to send email notifications to new employees and their managers via BetterCloud, our communication is consistent every single time,” the IT manager says. “Whether it’s a conversation with HR about a new hire or with a manager about an employee’s maternity leave, we can create tickets based off of specific events and take action quickly.”

“There’s a lot of different situations we’ve encountered where BetterCloud saved us a ton of time.”

IT Manager, Wave

Speeding compliance reporting

Because it handles so much financial data on behalf of its customers, Wave is required to be Payment Card Industry (PCI) certified and create a Service Organization Control (SOC) report. This required a lot of tedious and labor-intensive work. Whenever an employee left, one of the most critical pieces of the process required Wave to prove that each employee who left the company no longer had access to sensitive information.

“In the past, we’d take screenshots of each person’s profile in AWS or GitHub,” the senior IT manager says. “In BetterCloud, we’ve set up two collaborative inboxes for successful or failed email notifications. Now when an auditor asks for proof that someone has been removed from our organization, we can just go to that inbox and grab a report.”

Not only has this enabled Wave to stay compliant, but it has dramatically reduced the amount of time required to complete this report. “The PCI reassessment used to take hours,” the senior IT manager says. “This year it was 10 minutes.”

Certification builds team expertise and confidence

BetterCloud recently launched a BetterCloud Administrator Certification so platform experts can showcase their expertise. There have been quite a few individuals who completed the course—but Wave is the first company whose entire IT team is BetterCloud certified. 

According to the IT manager, this has given each person the confidence to understand and execute their IT strategy in BetterCloud. “This is really empowering for everyone and enables us to distribute the workload evenly throughout the entire team,” he adds.

The senior IT manager comments on the process: “It was a great experience going into the certification. I’ve gone into certifications for different vendors, and this is probably the best experience I’ve had.” 

“The PCI reassessment used to take hours. This year it was 10 minutes. It was just, ‘Yep, here’s the PDF.’ Done.”

Senior IT Manager, Wave

Results