Connecting your website, CRM and accounting so nobody copies data by hand

Someone copies each website request into the CRM. Someone else retypes orders from the CRM into the accounting system. Stock levels on the website get updated once a week, if anyone remembers. Each of these takes a couple of minutes, but over a month it adds up to hours, and copying mistakes surface at the worst moment, when a customer is waiting for something that isn’t actually in stock. All of this can be handed over to your systems exchanging data on their own. Here’s how that works and what usually goes wrong.

What usually gets connected

The typical setup goes like this. A request from the website lands in the CRM by itself, and a manager gets notified. When the deal closes, the order goes to the accounting system, which creates an invoice. The payment comes in and the invoice closes itself. Meanwhile stock levels and prices flow from accounting back to the website, so customers see the same thing the warehouse does.

In Russia the accounting side is usually 1C. Other common pieces are amoCRM, Bitrix24, MoySklad, payment providers, email and Telegram. Almost anything with an API, or at least a regular export, can be connected.

When an off-the-shelf connector is enough

Popular pairs of systems have ready-made connectors. If your process is standard and the connector does exactly what you need, use it. It’s faster and cheaper.

Trouble starts when your process isn’t standard. Your 1C setup has been customised, orders have unusual fields, or you have several warehouses or legal entities. The connector doesn’t know about any of that, and data starts going missing along the way. Worse, these exchanges usually fail silently. You find out when a customer calls to ask where their order is.

What a reliable connection needs

A queue with retries. Any system is sometimes unavailable, whether 1C is being updated or the CRM has maintenance. During that time the data should wait in a queue and go through once the system is back.

An exchange log. It shows what was sent and when, and where something failed. Without a log, every problem is a search in the dark.

Alerts. If the exchange breaks, the person responsible hears about it straight away.

And an agreement on which system is in charge of each kind of data. Stock lives in 1C, customer contacts in the CRM, payment status with the payment provider. Skip this step and the systems will start overwriting each other.

What we’ll need from you

Access to a test copy of your accounting system and a contact for the person who looks after it. The exchange almost always needs small changes on that side, and it’s easier to make them with someone who knows your setup. We’ll also need a list of your systems and who is responsible for the data in each.

What it costs

Connecting two systems starts at $700. Each extra system adds work, but if the exchange is designed with room to grow, later connections cost less than the first. Migrating old data, changes on the 1C side and a monitoring dashboard are priced separately. We’ll give you the exact figure after a call, once we’ve looked at your systems.

Where to start

List every place where people move data by hand, and roughly how many times a day it happens. Start with the connection that hurts the most. Usually that’s website requests into the CRM or CRM orders into accounting. Once the first connection is running, it becomes clear what to automate next.