We connect the systems that today communicate by manual export, plus your own interfaces for your partners. Built with retries, visible queues and reconciliation, not just a request sent and a hope.
In a company that has grown, each system works. What does not work is the space between them, and that space is covered by people copying data from one place to another.
It is work that appears in no report. Nobody has "I copy orders from the platform into the invoicing system" in their job description, but somebody does it every morning. It costs hours daily, produces errors you discover months later, and creates a dangerous dependence on the person who knows exactly how it is done.
Most often you do not need to replace any system. You need them to talk.
The code that moves data from one system to another is written in a day. What takes time, and what decides whether the integration holds, are the situations below, all of them inevitable.
| What happens | What breaks if untreated | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| The other system does not respond | Data is silently lost or your process stalls | Automatic retry with increasing pauses, a persistent queue and an alert. Your system carries on working |
| The same information arrives twice | Duplicate orders, duplicate invoices, wrong stock | Idempotency keys: the same operation sent ten times produces a single result |
| Both sides modify simultaneously | One overwrites the other, without trace | Explicit rules about who owns each field, plus conflict detection |
| The partner limits traffic | Requests are rejected and synchronisation stops | Paced sending below their limit, with a queue that drains gradually |
| Their format changes | The integration breaks abruptly, often at the weekend | Validation on input, an alert on any unexpected field, versioning where possible |
| Data differs between systems | You discover at stocktaking or audit that records are missing | Periodic automatic reconciliation, with a report of the differences |
| Something went wrong three days ago | Nobody can say what was sent and what was received | A complete, searchable log of the exchanges, with the ability to resend |
An integration has to assume the other system will go down, will respond slowly, will send invalid data and will change its format without notice. All of these will happen, it is only a question of when. An integration that assumes everything goes well works immaculately in testing and leaves you without data on exactly the day it matters.
The sales platform with the invoicing system. Stock management with the online store. The customer relationship application with the forms on the website. Payroll with attendance records.
We usually start with the link consuming the most hours of manual work, because that is where the investment is recovered fastest and because that success buys the confidence for the rest.
When your partners, distributors or customers need access to data, a well built API completely replaces the person exporting files on request.
We build it with authentication on individually revocable keys, permissions per key, rate limiting that protects the system, versioning so a change does not break existing integrations, and documentation an outside developer can use without calling you.
Many systems, especially older industry ones, offer no interface at all. In those cases we work with automated file export at intervals, reading from a secondary database, or extraction from structured emails.
These are less elegant solutions, but stable if built with validation and alerting. We tell you clearly which option is robust and which is a crutch, so you can decide knowingly.
The part without which the rest does not matter. An integration that breaks silently is more dangerous than one that does not exist, because you carry on believing the data is correct.
An alert on any repeated failure, a dashboard with the state of every link, automatic reconciliation comparing the two systems and reporting the differences before the accountant discovers them.
It is the question everything else depends on and the one almost nobody asks at the start. If a customer's address exists in three systems and somebody changes it in the second, what happens in the other two?
Without an explicit answer, the integration produces chaos: systems overwrite one another, and after a few months nobody knows which version is correct. With an explicit answer, meaning every field has a single owner, the rest becomes mechanics.
We settle this in writing, field by field, on the important entities, before writing the first line of code. It is an uncomfortable hour long conversation that prevents months of data cleaning.
There is almost always a way: automated file export at intervals, reading from a secondary database, or, as a last resort, automation over their interface. The last option is fragile, because it breaks on any screen change, and we only propose it when there genuinely is no alternative, telling you clearly what risk you are taking on.
Between two and six weeks for a link between two systems, depending on how well the other side's interface is documented and how many special cases your process has. Poor or non-existent documentation on the partner's side is the most frequent cause of delay, and it does not depend on us.
That is the right question, and handling it is half the work. Failed requests are retried automatically, with increasing pauses. What does not get through enters a visible queue rather than disappearing. You get an alert, and your system carries on working instead of stalling because somebody else has a problem.
Yes, and it is often more valuable than it sounds. A well built API means partners integrate themselves, without somebody on your side exporting files by hand. We build it with authentication on revocable keys, rate limiting, versioning and documentation an outside developer can use without calling you.
Through automatic reconciliation, not through trust. We periodically compare what exists in the two systems and report the differences. Without that step, an integration can silently lose records for months, and it is usually discovered at stocktaking or at audit, meaning at the worst possible moment.
The answer to that question is usually also the list of integrations worth building, in the right order.