Business
Get your systems talking to each other.
Every business tool works well on its own. The cost sits in the gaps between them, and those gaps are currently being filled by your staff.
At a glance
- Website, CRM, accounting, scheduling and field tools
- Existing connectors used where they work
- Custom API work where they do not
- Failures surface instead of going quiet
Integration is usually cheaper than replacement.
When systems do not share data, the usual proposal is to consolidate onto one platform that does everything. That means migration, retraining, and giving up the tools your team is genuinely good at — often to gain a single feature.
Connecting what you already have is generally faster, cheaper and less disruptive. The work is unglamorous: mapping fields correctly, deciding which system is authoritative when two disagree, handling the records that do not match, and making sure a failure is noticed.
What it covers
What integration work involves
- Website to CRM
- Form submissions creating properly formed records, with source and campaign attribution attached rather than lost.
- Accounting and invoicing
- Jobs, quotes and payments flowing between operational systems and accounting without a monthly re-entry exercise.
- Scheduling and dispatch
- Bookings, job assignments and calendars kept in step so the office and the field see the same day.
- Field and mobile tools
- Data captured on site — photos, sign-offs, timesheets — landing in the office systems automatically.
- Custom API work
- Where no off-the-shelf connector exists, or where the one that does maps the wrong fields and cannot be configured.
- Field mapping and deduplication
- Deciding which system wins when records disagree, and handling the near-duplicates that any two-system sync eventually produces.
- Webhooks and event handling
- Real-time reactions to events rather than a nightly batch, where the timing genuinely matters.
- Monitoring and retries
- Transient failures retried automatically, persistent ones raised to a person. Nothing fails quietly for three weeks.
What changes
What changes day to day
- Details entered once, not three times
- Office and field looking at the same information
- Fewer transcription errors in invoices
- Month-end reporting that is already assembled
- Staff time returned to actual work
- Problems visible when they happen
Can you connect any two systems?
In practice, most of them. If a system has an API or supports webhooks, it can usually be connected. The genuine exceptions are older on-premise software with no external interface, where the options are narrower and worth assessing before committing.
What happens when two systems disagree?
That is decided explicitly up front: which system is authoritative for which fields, and what happens to conflicts. Getting this wrong is the most common reason integrations quietly corrupt data over time.
Is this the same as automation?
They overlap. Integration is about data moving correctly between systems; automation is about actions happening without a person. Most projects involve both, and they are usually scoped together.
Will this break when a vendor updates their API?
It can, which is why monitoring is part of the build. A broken connection raises an alert rather than silently dropping records until someone notices a gap in the numbers.
Related
Often needed alongside this
Which two systems do not talk to each other?
Tell us what they are and what gets re-typed between them. That is usually enough to know whether it is a connector, an API build or a process problem.