Six systems and a lot of typing
The business grew one tool at a time. A CRM for sales. Xero or Sage for accounts. A job or project system for delivery. A web shop. A stock system. Email marketing. Each was picked because it was good at its job, and each one is.
None of them talk. A new customer is typed into the CRM, then the accounts, then the job system. An address change reaches one of them. Reports need exports from four places pasted into one sheet. Staff spend chunks of the day as human cables between the tools.
Why it grew like this
It is the natural result of buying the best tool for each job at the time it was needed. Nobody at the point of buying the third system asked how it would share customers with the first two.
When integration is attempted, it often happens one urgent link at a time. A Zapier zap here, a plugin there. Each link works on its own. After a while there are a dozen, nobody knows what each does, and a change to one system breaks two others. The business ends up with integration spaghetti instead of manual typing, which is not much of an improvement.
The missing piece is usually a plan: which system owns which information, and what order to connect things in.
There is also a people side. Each system has its own champion, who naturally sees their tool as the centre of the business. Deciding that the accounts package, not the CRM, owns the billing address can feel political. It is much easier to settle once, deliberately, than to fight about it every time a link is built.
What disconnected systems cost
| Area | Day-to-day effect |
|---|---|
| Re-keying | The same data typed into several systems |
| Inconsistency | Different addresses, names and prices in different places |
| Slow handoffs | Work waits while someone copies it to the next system |
| Reporting | Manual stitching of exports, with numbers that disagree |
| Customer experience | Customers asked for details they already gave |
Then there is the question nobody can answer quickly: how is the business doing today? When the answer needs four exports and a spreadsheet, it gets asked less often than it should.
How we connect them, in order
- Map the flows. We list each system, what it holds and where people copy information between them. A simple diagram usually makes the worst gap obvious.
- Decide ownership. For customers, products, orders, jobs and invoices, we agree which system is the master. Everything else takes a copy.
- Pick the first link. We start with the connection that removes the most retyping or causes the most errors, often CRM to accounts, or web shop to stock.
- Build it to share. Connections use shared IDs and a common way of describing a customer or product, so the second and third links reuse the first rather than inventing their own.
- Choose the right tool. Simple flows go in Make, n8n or Zapier. Where several systems need the same data, we use a small integration hub on AWS or Azure that the systems publish to and read from.
- Watch it. Every connection logs what it did and alerts a person if it fails, with one place to see the health of all of them.
We also say where not to connect. Some systems are better replaced than linked, and sometimes two tools that overlap should become one.
After the first few links
A new customer is entered once and appears where it is needed. A won deal becomes an invoice and a job without a person copying it. The weekly report pulls from connected data rather than four exports.
Each new system you add later has a clear place to plug in, because the ownership rules and shared IDs already exist.
You also get a single page that shows whether each connection is healthy. When something fails, one person is told and the failed records are waiting to be retried, rather than someone noticing a week later that the accounts are missing a batch of customers.
Does this describe you?
- The same customer is typed into three or more systems
- Reports mean exporting from several tools into one sheet
- You have a handful of Zapier or plugin links nobody fully understands
- Details differ between systems and nobody knows which is right
- Adding a new tool feels like adding a new chore