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Software, web & mobile

Stop typing the same thing into three systems.

Accounting, CRM, stock, suppliers and payments connected properly, so the copy-and-paste job disappears and the numbers finally agree with each other.

The symptom is always the same. An order comes in on the website, and somebody types it into the accounts package, then into a spreadsheet, then tells the warehouse. Part of a real job has quietly become being a human API.

The cost is not just the hours. It is that every retype is a chance to fat-finger a quantity, it is why two systems never quite agree at month end, and it is why nobody trusts the reports enough to act on them.

Most software you already own has an API. The work is not really in calling it - it is in the unglamorous decisions. What happens when one side is down for an hour. What counts as the same customer in two systems that spell them differently. Which system wins when they disagree. Get those wrong and an integration creates more mess than it clears up.

What drives the cost

Quoted per integration against a written scope. What moves it:

  • How many systems, and whether each has a decent API or we are working around it with file exports.
  • One-way or two-way. Two-way is more than twice the work, because both sides can now be wrong.
  • How fresh the data has to be. Overnight is straightforward; within seconds is a different build.
  • Whether years of history need bringing across and reconciling as well as new records.

Very little of the budget goes on the case where everything works. It goes on what happens when a system is down, a record is a duplicate, or two sources disagree - which is exactly the part that gets skipped when this is done cheaply.

What you get

What an integration involves

Connecting what you already own

Accounting, CRM, e-commerce, stock and payment platforms. We would rather join up the tools you pay for than sell you another one.

A decided source of truth

For each piece of data, one system is right and the others follow. Skipping this decision is how you end up with two contradictory customer lists.

Matching and deduplication

Rules for when two records are the same person, written down and agreed, rather than assumed by whoever built it.

Failure handled on purpose

Queues, retries and back-off, so a vendor having a bad afternoon delays your data rather than losing it.

Alerting that reaches a human

If a sync has been failing since Tuesday, you hear it from us, not from a customer asking where their order went.

APIs for your own systems

Where you need other people to connect to you, built and documented properly instead of a one-off endpoint nobody can explain later.

A record of what moves where

A diagram and a written description of every flow. Integrations are invisible until they break, and documentation is how the next person understands them.

How it works

How an integration runs

No engineer turning up unannounced, and no invoice with surprises on it.

  1. 1

    Map what happens today

    Including the human steps. The spreadsheet somebody maintains on a Friday is part of the system whether or not it is on the diagram.

  2. 2

    Agree the rules

    Source of truth, matching rules, one-way or two-way, how often. Boring conversations that prevent expensive surprises.

  3. 3

    Build and run alongside

    The integration runs in parallel with the manual process for a while, so you can compare the two before trusting it.

  4. 4

    Cut over and monitor

    The manual step stops, monitoring starts. We watch it for the first few weeks rather than handing it over and disappearing.

Questions

The things people ask first.

Often, yes - scheduled file exports, a database view, or a supported import format will get you most of the way. It is more brittle than a real API and we will be straight with you about that, because these are the integrations that break when a vendor changes a column heading.

Sometimes, and if it would we will tell you rather than quoting a build. Zapier is good at simple, low-volume, one-way flows. It gets expensive and hard to reason about once you need real error handling, matching logic or volume.

Nothing is lost. Work sits in a queue and retries with back-off until the other end comes back, and if it stays down we alert someone. That behaviour is the difference between an integration you trust and one you check manually every morning.

One way wherever it will do, because it is simpler, cheaper and far easier to reason about when something looks wrong. Two-way is genuinely needed sometimes - it just needs conflict rules agreed up front rather than discovered.

They will, usually with notice and occasionally without. A support arrangement covers keeping up with it. Without one, the first you know is when the data stops moving.

Yes - it is the most common thing we are asked for. Orders, invoices, customers and payments into Xero, QuickBooks or similar, with the matching rules agreed so you are not left reconciling duplicates by hand.

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