System Integrations

The problem is rarely the software

Most businesses do not have a software problem. They have a between the software problem. The shop knows one number, the accounts package knows another, and somebody reconciles the difference by hand every week because nobody trusts either.

Integration work is the discipline of making the same number mean the same thing in every system that holds it.

How we approach it

Read the API first, not the brochure. Before we quote, we connect to the systems and find out what they will actually give us. Vendors describe capabilities; APIs have limits. The gap between the two is where projects overrun, so we find it at the start rather than in month three.

Every hop is acknowledged. A record that leaves one system must be provably received by the other. Fire-and-forget looks fine right up until the day it silently is not - and by then nobody knows how long it has been wrong.

Failures surface, they do not accumulate. A rejected record raises something a person will see. A queue that nobody collects is worse than no integration at all, because it reports success while doing nothing.

Nothing writes without a way back. Anything that changes your data can be traced, explained and reversed.

What we connect

Accounting and ERP systems, e-commerce platforms, CRM, payment providers, stock and fulfilment, and the internal spreadsheets that quietly run more of the business than anyone likes to admit.

If a system has an API we will use it. If it does not, we will tell you that plainly rather than build something fragile on top of a screen-scrape and call it an integration.

What good looks like when we are done

The weekly reconciliation stops being a job. Numbers match without anyone checking. When something does go wrong, you find out from the system rather than from a customer.