Parabola's Blog

Inventory reporting can be painstakingly manual. It's a strategic and operational necessity, but inventory reporting processes are often stuck in spreadsheets.

Watch the pre-recorded webinar to learn how data visualizations in Parabola let you document and centralize your data through custom reports that show your work.

Automating your inventory on hand report — whether you want to break it down by SKU, by 3PL, by parcel size — is easier than you think.

A look at VBA, its alternatives, and if and how retail and e-commerce companies should utilize it to build Excel automations.

If you’re a retailer, it is now more important than ever to get the most out of your 3PL warehouse management systems and partners.

Choosing the right ecommerce warehouse management system for your business can yield cleaner, faster fulfillment and heightened customer satisfaction. The right WMS will also allow you to scale your warehouse operations while saving time and costs.

With the FLOW Awards, Parabola is championing the do-ers who use their ingenuity to keep businesses running — and who go above and beyond to achieve so much more. We’re finally letting operators win.

A walkthrough on how to automate with Excel Macros and how to get even more out of your Excel automation process.

The freight audit process is essential for shippers to cut costs — but it's really complicated. Here is how to make your freight audit less manual and more accurate.

Accounts payable automation benefits teams as much as almost any other corporate function given the chain of command needed for approvals, the repetition of tasks, and the compliance and accuracy needed.

Automating business processes is becoming more essential. RPA and BPA are well-known process automation solutions, but how do you choose the right one?

Parabola raised a $24 million Series B led by OpenView!

Here's how Juice Press built Parabola Flows that ultimately save them 400+ hours/week and $200k+/year.

Teams get the most out of Parabola by using it together, and our goal is to enable efficient and inclusive collaboration on your workflows. So today, we’re announcing a newly revamped published Flow page to make Flows more usable for your entire team.

Learn how Parabola makes it easy to standardize process and reporting, making data accessible to operators and enabling teams to understand their growth levers.

In Parabola, you can pull data from pretty much anywhere — and now you can pull directly from PDFs (and other unstructured data sources) and automatically parse that data using our custom parsing features and AI.

You can now send, parse, and automate PDF data right in Parabola 🙌. Many of our customers have wanted to work with PDFs in their Flows like they do with spreadsheets, CSVs, and Parabola Tables, and today those wishes came true.

Parabola Flows empower non-technical teams to make quick action with structured data from multiple sources, but we know that everyday data is often messy, unstructured, or variable. Imagine if you could automatically use AI to decipher ambiguous and unstructured data, then standardize, enrich, and categorize it for you...

We just released AI transform steps, powered by GPT. Now, Operators can seamlessly use AI in their everyday workflows, enabling those who know their business challenges best to build their own solutions.

Our engineering team decided to see how many features and improvements we could build in just one week. See what we accomplished.

This 90-second video explains how freight teams like Flexport use Parabola to automate their most tedious manual tasks.

See how our Product Design Lead, Alex Couch, uses Parabola in his free time to run statistics on University of Alabama football games.

GPT presents a ton of opportunities to leverage the power of AI in your Flows. Operators can use GPT in Parabola to create reliable solutions without having to know anything about code or machine learning.

Today, we’re thrilled to share a redesigned, super-powered toolbar for your Flows.

Today, we’re making Tables even better with groupings and aggregations. Ditch your old pivot tables in Excel and Sheets! Parabola Tables are now so much easier to create and better to view.

At Parabola, our focus this year was on collaborative features that enable you to work better as a team and show off your work. We built some amazing things together! Here’s a look back at the biggest launches of the year.

Today, we’re thrilled to introduce Table Views. Filter, sort, and style the output of your Flows into interactive reports. Now anyone on your team can experience the power of Parabola.

Flexport uses Parabola to save millions of dollars per year by transforming their Operations Team into high-velocity data engineers. Here’s how they did it, and how your business can do it too.

This post is for sales and rev ops leaders who are being asked to hit a crazy revenue target (shoutout to all the VCs out there) but do so with fewer resources during a recession. I can’t imagine my job without the tools we’ve developed over the last few months so I wanted to share in the hope of adding value (and perhaps even building some pipeline).

The average ERP takes 12 months to set up. Using Parabola, Fulcrum’s Launch team can implement theirs in 12 weeks. Here’s how Parabola enabled Fulcrum to onboard 3x more new customers in a year - without adding any headcount - and how your SaaS company can do it too.

Operators are fueled by ingenuity and determination to make things happen and when businesses confront tough challenges, they turn to Operators.

Today, we’re excited to announce Parabola Tables: a home for the output of your Flows. Flows are already the repository for core processes and logic, and now they are also the repository for the final product – the result of all that work you automated.

Having a strong understanding of your inventory at all times is a must. One of the more crucial times to track this is when your inventory first arrives at your warehouse. Auditing your newly arrived inventory ensures that you are receiving the quantity you’ve ordered and are able to fulfill your customers’ orders.

The Parabola team has been working hard in 2022! So hard that we might have skipped writing a Spring update 😅. But it’s summer now, and we’re looking back at all the things we’ve been building so far this year.

Even if your organization has a really excellent data science and engineering team we think you should still be excited about Parabola. It gives everyone the ability to customize data workflows in a way that's safe. When the workflows are legible between the team everyone starts to get better ideas. And finally, you will save lots of valuable data- and engineering-team time. To illustrate why, let’s look at a simple use case involving inventory.

Excel and Google Sheets are basically payday lenders for operational debt. They offer a quick and dirty solution for basically any operational problem with near-zero repeatability. But they’re taking on debt that will quickly manifest in a handful of forms.

Traditionally, workflows tend to live in a few “analog” locations: spreadsheets, co-workers’ brains, and sometimes literal paper and sticky notes. Let’s talk about why moving workflows into the Browser, instead, is a huge deal!

Even the best plans regarding freight tend to change when the boats hit the water. But that’s no reason you can’t have a complete, real-time view into your in-transit freight — by SKU and by destination, no less. Watch this 5-minute walkthrough to find out how.

In-transit inventory, also known as pipeline inventory, refers to inventory that has been purchased and is en route to a physical store, warehouse, or distribution center. Though this inventory hasn’t been received at a physical location, it is still included as part of a brand’s overall inventory levels.

Inventory forecasting isn’t easy, but Parabola makes this often-complicated process repeatable, understandable, and automate-able. Read more to learn about Inventory Forecasting, and to see a breakdown of a Parabola Flow that automates the process.

By building a Parabola Flow, I’m able to keep my Design team’s browser width breakpoints up-to-date and accurate, giving us consistent confidence that we’re designing for the right screen sizes. This simple automation saves me hours and gives me access to fresh data I otherwise wouldn’t have.

As we look ahead to 2022, we look back on our major investments of 2021: bolstering team collaboration, making Flow building more delightful and powerful, and launching new integrations.

Our CEO, Alex Yaseen, joined Shopify Expert Steve Hutt's eCommerce Fastlane podcast to talk about how Shopify stores such as Volcom, Great Jones, and UMZU are unlocking new levels of productivity through data automation. 

Robert Walker, Vice President of Growth at UMZU, uses Parabola to access the data across all of the different platforms they use, like Shopify, SkuVault, Google Analytics, and bring that data together to make important business decisions.