How Pleo accelerated its Go-To-Market with Chift

Pleo needed accounting integrations for its launch in France. By partnering with Chift, their team saved 1800+ hours in development and boosted onboarding speed and customer satisfaction.

As a category leader in spend management, Pleo’s growth strategy depends on seamless integration with customers’ accounting ecosystems to export purchase invoices and supplier data into accounting. For English speaking markets, this means working with a handful of common tools like Xero or QuickBooks. But France presented a very different landscape.

“France is unique in that everything is localized when it comes to finance software. There’s a huge reliance on players like Sage, Cegid, and smaller regional tools that aren’t necessarily used in other parts of Europe.” Ashleigh Auld, Strategic Partner Marketing Manager, Pleo

While these tools are essential for reaching French customers, they come with technical and strategic challenges:

• Obscure or undocumented APIs
• Strict regulatory frameworks
• Diverse regional formats
• Lower market volumes per tool, making in-house development hard to justify

Internally, Pleo estimates it takes 12 to 16 weeks to bring a single accounting integration from initial scoping to commercial readiness. Multiplied across the necessary French platforms, that timeline would have significantly delayed their go-to-market strategy and consumed hundreds of hours of developer time.

To overcome the complexity of integrating with multiple local accounting tools in France, Pleo partnered with Chift to leverage its Unified Accounting API. Instead of Pleo developing and maintaining separate connectors for each platform, Chift built a single connection between Pleo and Chift’s Unified API — instantly unlocking compatibility dozens of accounting software, like Sage, Cegid, and Pennylane.

“Thanks to Chift’s unified API, we delivered 4 finished integrations in less than 4 to 6 weeks. That’s about 10x faster.” Ashleigh Auld, Strategic Partner Marketing Manager, Pleo

The implementation process was intentionally frictionless — both technically and operationally. Pleo simply adds a link to the desired connector in the integrations section of its platform. When a user clicks that link, they’re redirected to Chift’s onboarding flow. Pleo’s OAuth2 allows Chift to identify the Pleo user and creates the consumer, so there's no need to re-enter Pleo credentials. The user just connects the target accounting tool and completes the mapping — often in a matter of minutes.

Each integration is deployed using a dedicated OAuth2 application, giving Pleo granular visibility into usage per connector. This setup makes it easy to monitor performance, adoption, and user behavior across markets, while also simplifying maintenance and support.

“Chift’s white-gloved approach really made it easy. They saved us time on both the product and development sides by bringing expertise we would have had to build in-house.” Anindita Nayak, Ecosystem Partner Manager, Pleo

Beyond the technical layer, Chift brought in-depth product and market knowledge — including pre-built connections, localized best practices, and comprehensive testing support. This enabled Pleo to accelerate every stage of integration: from discovery to deployment to user onboarding.

“We saved ~600 hours per integration with the ability to connect to 1 unified API. That’s 1800 hours saved overall.” Anindita Nayak, Ecosystem Partner Manager, Pleo

By avoiding four separate development tracks and leveraging a unified, scalable system, Pleo turned what could have been a multi-quarter project into a high-speed, high-impact launch — without compromising on quality or user experience.

The Pleo-Chift collaboration wasn’t just faster — it was better. The results extended across technical teams, commercial operations, and end-user experiences:

Go-to-Market speed

What typically took 12–16 weeks per connector was completed for four tools in just 4–6 weeks. That’s a 10x acceleration — allowing Pleo to be “market-ready” in France months ahead of schedule.

Engineering & product effficiency

By avoiding 1800 hours of development, Pleo freed up valuable internal bandwidth for other projects. Their product and dev teams focused on roadmap priorities, while Chift handled the connector infrastructure.

Customer impact

Pleo saw measurable improvements in onboarding and customer satisfaction:

• 22% faster time-to-value for customers using the new integrations versus manual onboarding
• 18% higher NPS during onboarding flows, attributed to the seamless plug-and-play experience

“Time is a currency. We saw 22% faster time to value using the integration versus onboarding manually, and an 18% higher NPS score. That’s huge.” Ashleigh Auld, Strategic Partner Marketing Manager, Pleo

Strategic advantage

Chift didn’t just handle the technical plumbing — it enabled strategic focus. With Chift managing integration maintenance, API evolution, and connector performance, Pleo avoided long-term technical debt and ensured its stack remained reliable and up to date.

The collaboration between Pleo and Chift shows what’s possible when integration becomes a growth enabler — not a bottleneck. What could have been a slow, fragmented entry into the French market became a rapid, high-impact launch backed by measurable user success.

“We’re paying for that expertise and time. And that’s the true value in this relationship.” Ashleigh Auld, Strategic Partner Marketing Manager, Pleo

With Chift, integration was no longer a technical challenge. It became a competitive advantage.

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