Systems integration that passes work between systems, not people
Your systems pass the work to each other, so nobody retypes it. Built in your accounts and monitored after.
How many people is your structure spending on moving information?
Five answers. It returns the share of the week a system could be holding, in people rather than hours.
How many people does this cover?
The team whose week you are thinking about, not the whole company.
How much of their week is routine?
Work that follows the same steps every time, where a checklist would do.
How many systems hold the same record?
Count the places one customer or job exists. Spreadsheets and inboxes count.
Is there one system everyone treats as the truth?
Not the one that should be. The one people check.
What does one person cost a year, all in?
Salary plus everything on top. A rough number is fine.
The answer
Answer the five
What it costs a year
Do this next
Show the numbers
Before anything gets bought
Want someone to look at where the information stops?
We reply within one business day.
Then: Now decide whether to connect those systems or replace them →
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When systems do not talk, a person becomes the integration, and it is usually the most expensive job nobody budgets for. We pick which system owns each record, connect where work stops, and remove the retyping.
Is it a fit?
Retyping
The same record is typed into two systems because nothing carries it across.
Truth
When two systems disagree, people already know which to believe, and it is not the official one.
Silence
A failed sync is noticed by a customer before it is noticed by you.
What you get
One owner per record
Every customer, job and invoice gets exactly one system that owns it, and everything else reads from that.
Only the connections that matter
Not everything wired to everything, which is how integration projects become permanent.
The retyping goes
Re-entry is the tax and it is invisible because it is spread across everyone.
What the roles become
When the routine work sits with the systems, the jobs change shape.
The person who is the integration
Every growing company has one. They know the deal in the CRM has to be typed into the accounting system by Thursday, and that the date in the spreadsheet is the real one whatever the software says. None of it is written down because none of it needs to be while they are there. They are not slow. They are load bearing, and the business finds out how much only when they take two weeks off.
Then the connections, and only some of them. Wiring everything to everything is how a project stops having an end. What matters is the small number of places where work stops and waits for a person to move it, connected properly and monitored, so that when a sync fails at two in the morning somebody knows before the customer does. Everything else can stay manual, and a fair amount of it should.
Questions we get
Do we have to replace our systems?
Usually the opposite. Most companies already own more capability than they use, and the gap is between the tools rather than inside them.
Replacing software is the most expensive way to answer a question you have not asked yet. The first pass is always what you have, what it already does, and what is being done by hand between the pieces.
How do you decide which system owns a record?
Whichever one the work naturally starts in, and whichever one people already trust when the two disagree.
It is less about features than about habit. If everyone quietly checks the spreadsheet before believing the CRM, the spreadsheet is already the source of truth and the honest move is either to make that official or to fix why the CRM is not trusted.
What about all the spreadsheets?
Some of them are the problem and some of them are the documentation. Worth telling apart before deleting anything.
A spreadsheet that exists because a system cannot do something is a requirement written in the only language available at the time. It usually describes the fix better than any specification would.
How long before anything changes?
The measurement takes about two weeks and produces numbers you can act on with or without us. The first connection usually follows within a few weeks of that.
Anyone quoting a date before seeing how the work moves is quoting a guess. The sequence matters more than the speed: measure, decide the owner, connect, then remove the manual step, in that order.
See alsodata warehouse and BI CRM build and migration clubs and member systems agent work backend and API development
Before connecting anything, price what the second copy costs a year, split between the re-entry and the hours settling records that disagree.
More in the guides and every answer in one place.
Read next
Whether to replace or connect, where the numbers end up afterwards, and which system should own the customer.
Shaheer leads the work, with engineers, writers, filers and analysts behind him. C-suite operations for a San Francisco AI company, Six Sigma on the process side, Anthropic certified on the Model Context Protocol, ten years across eight industries. See what we have built