How to stop copying data between systems by hand

Somewhere in most businesses there is a person whose morning starts with copying information from one screen into another. Orders from the website into the accounts package. Customer details from an email into the CRM. A delivery note into the stock system. Every day, by hand, because the two systems have never been introduced.

It feels like part of the job, and in a sense it is: somebody has to do it, so it gets done. But it is slow, it is dull, and it is exactly where mistakes get in. Here is how to stop it, what it usually costs, and how to tell whether it is worth doing at all.

First, measure the copying#

Before anybody talks about software, write down three numbers.

How long it takes. Not a guess. Time it on an ordinary day. Forty minutes a morning is more than a hundred and fifty hours a year, which is the number you will want when you compare a quote against doing nothing.

How often it goes wrong. A digit transposed, an order missed, a customer entered twice. Most businesses do not count these because each one is small and gets fixed quietly. Count them for a fortnight.

What a mistake costs when it gets through. An invoice at the wrong price, a parcel to the old address, a stock figure that triggers an order you did not need.

If all three are small, the honest answer may be to leave it. Copying that takes ten minutes a week and never goes wrong is not a problem worth paying to solve.

What "connecting" actually means#

Getting two systems to pass information between themselves is called an integration, and it is usually smaller than people fear.

Most modern business software, accounts packages, shop platforms, CRMs, booking systems, publishes a way for other software to read from it and write to it. A connection is a small program that sits between two of them, picks up a record when it appears in one, reshapes it into the form the other expects, and puts it there. Then it does the same thing again, every time, without anybody touching it.

That is the whole idea. The work is in the detail: what counts as "the same customer" in both systems, what happens when a record changes after it has been sent, and what should happen when one of the two is briefly unavailable.

The three questions that set the price#

Do both systems allow it? Most do. Some older or very cheap systems do not, and then the job becomes reading an export file on a schedule rather than talking to the system directly. That still works, it is less immediate.

Which way does it go? One direction, website to accounts, is the common case and the cheapest. Both directions, where a change in either system has to appear in the other, is genuinely harder, because you now have to decide which one wins when they disagree.

How messy is the existing data? If the same customer appears four times in the CRM with slightly different spellings, the connection will faithfully copy the mess. Cleaning it first is often a sensible separate job.

What to ask for#

A connection you can see working. That means somewhere you can look to check that yesterday's orders went across, and a clear message when one did not, rather than finding out at month end.

It should also run under accounts in your name. The credentials that let it read your shop and write to your accounts package should belong to your business, not to the person who built it. If that supplier disappears, the connection should keep running and anybody else should be able to pick it up. You own your accounts, you licence the code, and you can leave whenever you like.

When it is not worth it#

When the copying is small, rare and accurate. When one of the two systems is about to be replaced anyway. And when the real problem is that the process itself is wrong, because automating a bad process makes the bad outcome happen faster.

That last one is common enough to say plainly. Sometimes the right first step is not a connection, it is somebody looking at why the information has to move at all.

What we do#

Connecting systems is ordinary work here, and each connection is a job in its own right rather than a phase of a large project.

You tell us which two systems and what has to move between them. It gets graded by size, and you get a price in writing before anything starts. Nothing begins until you approve it, and if the number is wrong for you, you walk away owing nothing.

If the honest answer is that ten minutes of copying a week is cheaper than any connection, we will tell you that too.

The price changes with the size of the job. The standard never does.