What an integration with your accounting really gives you

Almost every business owner we speak to who has an online shop retypes orders. From the shop into the accounting package, or from email into a quoting program. Usually with the remark that it is only a few minutes per order.

That is true. Only the bill is not in those few minutes.

The cost is in the mistakes

Anyone who types the same thing a hundred times makes a mistake a few times. A digit swapped in an amount, the wrong VAT rate, an address with a typo. You do not notice those mistakes at the time, because the order goes out anyway.

You notice them at the quarterly return, when the turnover in your books does not match what is in your bank account. Then you spend a day tracing where the difference comes from. Or you do not notice them at all, and that is more expensive.

On top of that, retyping is work nobody enjoys. So it gets postponed. In a busy week it does not happen, and then you spend Saturday clearing the backlog.

What an integration does

An integration lets two systems talk to each other directly. An order comes into your shop, and an invoice appears in your accounting by itself, with the right customer, the right lines and the right VAT rate.

If something about the order changes, that carries over. When the customer pays, the invoice is settled. Nobody has to sit in between.

That is the theory. In practice the work is in the details: how do you handle a customer who already exists but is spelled slightly differently, what do you do with shipping costs, and what happens with a return.

What to find out beforehand

The first question is not what it costs, but whether it is possible.

An integration only works if both packages have a way in. That is called an API. Almost every package says it has one, but there is a difference between an API that exists and an API that does what you need. We check that before we promise anything, and sometimes the answer is that it cannot be done.

Also look at what an integration costs per month at your supplier. Some accounting packages charge separately for access to their API, or only include it in a more expensive plan. That amount belongs in the sum, because it runs for as long as the integration does.

When it is worth it

There is no fixed number of orders above which it pays off. It depends on how many steps each order takes and how bad a mistake is.

With ten orders a week that only need retyping, you are better off leaving it. With ten orders a week that also need stock updated, a packing slip made and a customer created, you earn it back within a few months.

We would rather walk through that process with you once before we build anything. Often it turns out that one step causes most of the work, and that fixing only that step gets you a long way.

See what we do when you have an online shop built or improved.