Your systems already have the data. They just don't talk to each other.
Somebody exports a report from QuickBooks every Monday, opens it in Excel, filters it, and pastes rows into the CRM. The service manager re-keys yesterday's field tickets into accounting by hand. A quote goes out as a spreadsheet, and by the time the sale closes there are three versions of it.
You're not short on software. You're short on the wiring between it. We connect the tools you already pay for so the data moves once and stays put, and when a plain no-code tool would do the job we say so instead of selling you a project.
Every integration answers three questions.
- What data moves? Customers, invoices, contacts, orders, stock levels, service tickets, timesheets. The specific fields you care about, not "everything."
- Which way does it move? One way, both ways, or one system holding the truth for a given field. Getting this wrong is how records quietly overwrite each other.
- How often, and what happens when it breaks? Real time, hourly, nightly. And when an API throws an error at 3am, who finds out, and what does the retry do.
Everything else is implementation detail. If whoever you're talking to can't answer those three in plain English, they're selling you a tool rather than an outcome.
Stacks we've wired up.
We work with whatever you already have. The pairings that come up most:
- QuickBooks and Salesforce (customers, invoices, payments)
- QuickBooks and HubSpot (contacts, deals, revenue reporting)
- QuickBooks and e-commerce (Shopify, WooCommerce, custom sites)
- Salesforce and marketing tools (HubSpot, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign)
- Field service apps and accounting (Service Fusion, ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, custom dispatch)
- ERP or inventory systems and your website (real-time stock, order write-back)
- Custom or legacy databases and modern tools (Access, older SQL Server, on-prem apps)
- Payment, shipping, and tax platforms and your order flow
Whatever's on your list, the job is the same: work out what actually needs to move, pick the right transport, and build something you can still trust at 3am.
Zapier, custom, or somewhere in between.
Zapier, Make, n8n. Great when the tools connect natively, the volume is low, the logic is a straight line, and a five minute delay doesn't matter. Cheap, quick, no code to maintain. If this fits you, we'll tell you and save you a project.
Managed platforms like Workato, Boomi, or Celigo. Worth it with many integrations, high volume, or compliance requirements. Real license cost and real implementation effort. Rarely the right answer at small business scale, but it happens.
Custom. The right call when the logic is more than a field map, when one side is a legacy system or an odd API, when the volume is high, or when the business rules living inside the integration are the actual value. Most of our work.
A mix. No-code for the easy parts, custom for the complicated one. Very common, and nothing wrong with it.
The quick test: if your integration has to know your business rules, like taxing the parts but not the labor for a Massachusetts service call, you're past what a no-code tool does well. There's a fuller answer with the volume thresholds in our guide on this.
What breaks, and how we handle it.
Integrations are not a thing you install once. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not supported one.
Auth expires
OAuth tokens time out, and refresh flows break when a vendor changes their auth model. We monitor and rotate before you notice.
APIs change without warning
A field gets renamed, an endpoint gets deprecated, a rate limit drops. We catch it in the alerts and patch it.
Rate limits
Busy days will hit them. A real integration backs off, queues, and retries. A fake one just fails.
Duplicate records
Almost every integration creates duplicates if nobody plans for them. We plan for them.
Data that doesn't match
The customer is "ACME Corp." in one system and "Acme Corporation" in the other. Matching and merge rules matter, and they need to be your rules.
Nobody notices it stopped
The worst one, and the most common. An integration that fails silently is worse than no integration, because you trust it.
Discovery, prototype, cutover, support.
Discovery. Two to four hours with the people who actually use the systems. We map the workflow as it really runs, catch the edge cases nobody wrote down, and pin down what "in sync" means for your business. Fixed price.
Prototype. We build enough to prove the round trip works with your real data. You watch it move end to end before committing to the full build.
Build and cutover. The integration runs alongside whatever manual process it replaces until everyone trusts it. No big-bang switchover.
Support. Monitoring, alerting when something looks wrong, and fixing the break before it becomes your problem.
What it costs and how long it takes.
Small integrations, meaning one or two systems, a straightforward field map, and low volume, land in the low five figures and ship in a few weeks.
Standard integrations with real business rules, retries, monitoring, and a handful of edge cases run into the mid five figures and take a few weeks to a couple of months.
Larger integrations across multiple systems, at high volume, or with a legacy system in the middle, run higher and take a few months. We scope in phases so you're never committed past what you've approved.
We bill against a real spec rather than open-ended hours, and discovery is fixed price. It's worth doing before you commit to anything else, including committing to us.
When we're not the right call.
We'd rather lose the work than take it badly. Some honest cases where you should hire someone else, or nobody:
- The two tools already have a working native integration. Use theirs. We will help you configure it, but you should not pay us to rebuild something the vendor maintains for free.
- You want the cheapest possible one-shot. Zapier or one of the low-code platforms probably fits, and we will tell you so rather than quoting you a project.
- It is a compliance-heavy, enterprise-scale rollout with regulated data. That is not the space we work in. Good firms exist for it and we are happy to point you at one.
Before you call.
How much does a QuickBooks integration cost?
It depends on what's on the other side and how much logic lives in the middle. A straightforward sync into a well-behaved SaaS tool lands in the low five figures. Something with real business rules, or a legacy system on the other end, runs higher. Discovery is fixed price and ends with a real number rather than a range.
What's the difference between Zapier and a custom integration?
Zapier fits when the tools connect natively, the logic is simple, and the volume is low. Custom is the right call when the logic is more than a field map, when one side is legacy or unusual, when the volume is high, or when the business rules inside the integration are the actual value. We wrote a longer answer with the numbers in our guide.
Can you connect a system that doesn't have an API?
Usually yes. Some older systems need us to talk to them at the database level, or read a report they can produce, or watch a folder for a file. None of that is pretty, but it works and it is often the difference between a workable integration and none at all. Discovery tells you which options exist for your specific system.
Who owns the code when we're done?
You do. Source, documentation, and enough of a runbook that another team could take it over if you ever wanted them to. No lock-in.
What happens when the API on one side changes?
We monitor for it. On an ongoing support arrangement we handle the change. If you take it in-house after we build, you will know what to watch for and where the failure points are, because that is part of what we hand over.
Do you charge ongoing fees?
Only if you want ongoing support, and plenty of clients do because integrations genuinely need someone watching them. It is a small monthly, not a platform license, and you can stop it. If you would rather run it yourself, that is a legitimate choice and we will set you up for it.
Most integrations turn into an automation once the systems can talk, and sometimes the honest answer is a custom application instead. See everything we do.
Got two systems that should be talking?
Tell us what they are and what gets re-typed between them. We'll tell you straight whether this is a project or an afternoon.
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