Accelerating Innovation with Finch

At CandorIQ, we pull your tech stack into one place and provide real-time insights into headcount and compensation management. Partnering with Finch has been instrumental in delivering on this vision. Finch’s 200+ HRIS and payroll integrations allow us to offer seamless, up-to-date data access, empowering our customers with accurate analytics and strategic planning tools. Thanks to the partnership, we’ve accelerated innovation, launching new products and features that help businesses optimize their people spend, attract top talent, and make data-driven decisions. With faster onboarding and greater connectivity, our customers achieve their goals more efficiently than ever before.

You can find the full case study on Finch’s website or continue reading below:

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CandorIQ’s co-founders had a vision to create something in HR tech that hadn’t existed before: a tool that could combine employee data from disparate sources and compare it against industry benchmarks, geographical insights, and more. But to be truly valuable, the platform would need HRIS and payroll integrations to keep census and pay data up-to-date at all times. 

By turning to Finch instead of building these integrations entirely in house, CandorIQ has saved an estimated $500K a year, which they’ve reinvested into creating an innovative, highly competitive product.

Managing employers’ #1 spend — people

Having run the Product teams at large companies like Checkr and Blend, Haris Ikram knows first-hand how difficult it can be to manage headcount spend and compensation planning. Whenever he wanted to hire an employee or offer a promotion, he found himself resorting to spreadsheets to consolidate data across systems that couldn’t communicate with each other, which he called “very manual and painful” — so he co-founded CandorIQ.

CandorIQ lets employers import data from their HRIS or payroll system, employee engagement tools, benefits platforms, and more to get a holistic view of People Spend across the organization. By combining that data with insights like compensation benchmarks by title, role, and geography, CandorIQ makes it easier for its customers to plan headcount, win and retain top talent, and maintain cost efficiencies.

“Being able to pull employee information from the HRIS or payroll system is foundational to providing the analytics and reporting we offer in the platform,” Haris, the company’s CEO, said. “Customers need this information to be up to date, and uploading a spreadsheet every week just isn’t feasible. That data has to be real-time or near real-time to be useful — that’s the key point.”

CandorIQ differentiates itself with an innovative product

CandorIQ is solving a problem that has impacted organizations of all sizes across all industries, but it’s not reinventing the wheel. Instead, the company is using Finch as its foundation, building novel, differentiated solutions on top of pre-built pathways for census and pay data.

“One of the reasons this is an unsolved problem is because of the lack of integrations historically,” Haris said. “Finch has reduced the barrier of needing to build everything in house, which has made it technically and financially much more viable to solve the types of use cases we want to solve.”

“Finch has reduced the barrier of needing to build everything in house, which has made it technically and financially much more viable to solve the types of use cases we want to solve.”

Because CandorIQ didn’t need to build the HRIS and payroll connections themselves, they’ve been able to innovate faster, introducing an entire new product line and 7+ new features since the company launched in 2023. 

“Part of the value of Finch is that it’s a starting point to pull the base information. Then we can invest our resources on how to get the most value out of it,” Haris said. “Even though Finch is available to anyone in the market, it allows us to invest in solving harder problems that are more unique to us and create differentiation.”

CandorIQ saves $500K in Engineering expenses and 2 weeks of onboarding time

CandorIQ’s co-founders knew from the beginning they’d need HRIS and payroll integrations to power real-time insights, so they started looking for an outsourced solution from the beginning. They quickly settled on Finch for its industry-leading network of 200+ supported providers, which gave them the confidence they could scale their product offerings without a hitch. Finch powers the majority of CandorIQ’s integrations with leading systems of record like Gusto and ADP.

By working with Finch, Haris estimated the company has saved about $500K per year — what it would have cost to hire an in-house team of integration developers.

“It’s really expensive to build these integrations in house. It’s possible, but then you need to raise a lot of capital,” Haris said. “Finch has helped us invest in other parts of the product, the end application, versus the integration infrastructure. So we’re able to support more workflows, more analytics, more use cases for customers, and we’ve also been able to invest in other things, like marketing. It’s just dollars that can be employed elsewhere.” 

CandorIQ’s connectivity with employers’ systems of record has also made signing and onboarding new customers easier. Most employers are live on the platform within a month because they’re able to connect their HRIS and payroll systems themselves in hours or days as opposed to weeks. In total, Haris estimated that Finch has reduced the total onboarding time by up to 2 weeks — a benefit felt by both the customer and the internal support team. 

“Finch helps us to close more customers, and do it faster,” Haris said. “There are some deals that wouldn’t close if we didn’t have those integrations.”