Flatfile launches updated data onboarding platform: Flatfile Workspaces now available

Recently, we significantly overhauled Flatfile based on everything we’ve learned from our customers over the past three years. Today, I’m excited to announce the release of Flatfile’s new data onboarding platform, along with Flatfile Workspaces and Flatfile Portal 3.0.

If you want to see the updated product, check out this recorded webinar for an overview

David and I started Flatfile to solve a question we had asked ourselves time and time again: why is it so hard to import data into a software system? This process, which we call data onboarding, is time-consuming and tedious. And the cost of maintaining the status quo is frustrated users, high churn rates, and a missing link to the value of most of the world’s software. Now with hundreds of active customers and years of improving upon Flatfile’s capabilities, I can safely say we’re done paying that exorbitant price.

Previous versions of Flatfile iterated on the speed, ease, and efficiency of data onboarding for hundreds of global customers, tens of thousands of end users, and millions of data sets. Our new platform harnesses those observations into a seamless experience, and one that plugs into every data onboarding workflow.

Where we’ve been, where we’re going

Prior to today, the only way to use Flatfile was via our Flatfile’s data onboarding platform, a drop-in SDK for web applications.

Our new platform combines the best aspects of both products - and some entirely new concepts - into a comprehensive data onboarding solution: whether you’re embedding data import into your SaaS app, running complex onboarding projects with your customers, or somewhere in between.

Flatfile Workspaces

Beginning today, I’m excited to share that Flatfile Workspaces are publicly available. A Flatfile workspace offers a shared view of all data imports with relevant details like versions, status, owners, and validation errors. This ensures your customer has full transparency, while you have full control over data onboarding.

Workspaces are for implementation teams who guide their customers through the data onboarding process. These projects can be simple, one-off requests for data as well as complex, multi-party engagements.

Flatfile Portal 3.0

With Portal 3.0, you can embed Flatfile inside of your product experience and present an elegant data onboarding workflow to your users.

You can deploy Portal 3.0 using our streamlined SDK, and simply choose the type of data you want to collect. Data owners are then guided through an AI-powered data onboarding experience. Once they've reviewed the data, they can then automatically push the valid data into your system.

Flatfile Platform

The Flatfile platform is designed to plug into both product and process. While we retain the concept of integrating Flatfile directly by embedding it, you can also leverage data templates, validation rules, and programmatic Data Hooks® across non-embedded flows. Set it up once, and it works however you need within your organization.

We’ve designed the platform for both scale and security. Our new abstraction layer makes data retrieval and processing over 10x faster than before, and new authentication methods paired with isolated runtime environments ensure data is safe.

An upgrade and an evolution

With this change comes a shift in how we’re approaching the universal challenge of data onboarding. Flatfile serves every organization that accepts data from its customers. The release of Flatfile’s platform with Flatfile Workspaces and Flatfile Portal 3.0 is one step in our continued evolution and you can expect rapid iteration in the next few months.

In the near term, for example, you’ll be able to easily send customers to a Flatfile-hosted landing page where they can securely submit their data. In addition, you can take over where any customer left off, add comments, and assist your data owners (aka your customers) as they walk through the import flow.

Further, you’ll be able to extend Flatfile into whatever data exchange process you want with customers or other third parties, handle custom file types, or pull data via APIs or SFTP. You’ll discover how Flatfile is able to reference external data and handle complex incoming data structures like relational data, arrays that need to be parsed, or lookups against industry standards. Extensibility is baked in. 

The scope of Flatfile’s learning capabilities will also continue to broaden. While intelligent field matching has always been part of our offering, we’ll now integrate what we’ve learned more quickly: not only into mapping decisions, but all parts of the data onboarding flow. From data set identification to validation correction to recommended enrichment, Flatfile is rapidly moving towards a one-click import experience, even in the most complex scenarios.

What’s next 

If you’re an existing Flatfile customer, you’ll find a faster, higher-quality experience with Flatfile’s new data onboarding platform. We’ll be reaching out to you in the following weeks to discuss how to upgrade your account without any disruption to your customers. If you just can’t wait to get started, contact us at sales@flatfile.io.

Regardless of whether you’re an existing customer, newly exploring Flatfile, or simply curious about what we’ve built, check out the Flatfile platform recorded webinar.