Connecting your tools
An order arrives by email, someone copies it into a spreadsheet, someone else types it again into accounting. The same data three times, three chances to get it wrong. Connecting the tools you already own costs less than buying one more.
Double entry is rarely laziness. It comes from software bought at different times, by different people, none of it aware that the others exist. The catalogue lives in one place, stock levels in a second, invoices in a third, and a human being does the joining because they are the only one who speaks all three languages.
Through an interface, or through a flow engine
We put that link in their place. Where your software exposes a programming interface, an API, we connect one directly to the other. Where it does not, or where the data has to be reshaped along the way, we install a flow engine that listens, formats and passes on. We work mainly with n8n: its code is open, it can be hosted wherever you want including your own server, and self-hosted it charges nothing per task executed. Make and Zapier remain options when one of your tools speaks only to them.
The work starts with a map of what moves, because half the job is deciding which system has authority. If a price exists in two places, one of them must be the reference and the other must follow. That choice is made at the outset, not once the two have drifted apart.
What we commonly connect
- A website or shop and the management software that holds the catalogue.
- Orders and accounting, through to an invoice issued without re-entry.
- The site's forms and the customer file, with no copying and pasting.
- Stock levels between the physical shop and the online one.
- A catalogue and the marketplaces or comparison sites that want it.
- Alerts: what fails has to be visible, on the channel you actually read.
A visible failure beats an assumed success
That last point is the one people neglect and the one that decides everything. A silent connection that stops on a Friday evening is discovered on the Tuesday, when the figures no longer add up. Every flow we build says when it last ran and warns when it fails. A visible failure is worth more than an assumed success.
You keep the keys
We lock nothing in. The connections are built on open tools, documented, and you keep the credentials. Taking over, or handing the work to someone else, does not require our agreement.
If you do not yet know what to connect first, the audit establishes the list and the order. If the connection has to decide for itself what to do rather than follow a fixed rule, that is the territory of agents.