Connecting the stack
How many systems hold a different version of the truth?
Nobody sets out to run six systems that disagree. It happens one sensible decision at a time — a tool for finance, a tool for the client team, a spreadsheet to bridge the gap between them. Each was the right call on its own. The cost arrives later, when a simple question has three different answers.
What it looks like
Everyone has a number. None of them match.
The reconciliation meeting
A recurring hour in the calendar spent working out whose figures are the right ones.
The spreadsheet in the middle
Two systems cannot talk to each other, so someone keeps a spreadsheet between them updated by hand.
Copy, paste, hope
The same information entered into several tools, bringing the usual typos, omissions and mismatches with it.
Nobody owns the answer
A simple question — how many, how much, since when — takes three people and half a day to answer.
How we work
Most of this is decisions, not code.
Connecting systems is usually the easy part. The harder questions are which system should own what, which information has to move, and what should happen when something breaks. Those decisions come first, and then only enough is built to make them stick.
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Map what you actually run
It starts with everything the business actually depends on, including the tools that never made it onto the official list. A spreadsheet quietly holding two systems together counts as a system — usually the most fragile one.
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Decide where the truth lives
For each important piece of information, one system owns it and the others follow. A surprising number of integration problems turn out to be ownership questions that were never settled.
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Build the connections
The systems that need to work together — finance, CRM, documents, internal tools and APIs — connected so information moves without someone carrying it across by hand. Built to fail loudly rather than quietly, so a broken sync is caught the same day.
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Watch it in production
Connections break when a vendor changes something at their end. Monitoring on the ones that matter, and a runbook, so a problem surfaces quickly rather than working its way into reports and decisions.
What you end up with
One answer, and everyone can see it.
- One number, in one place, that people actually trust
- No hand-maintained file holding two systems together
- Problems that surface when they happen, instead of hiding
- New tools that connect to the same source of truth rather than creating another one
Client story
The figures arrive already joined up.
Kerridge & Partners runs several systems across the business — Microsoft’s tools, accounting software, its CRM, and systems for tracking the work. Each does its own job well, but the information needed for reporting was spread across all of them. For a long time the joins between them were people: figures were pulled out of each system by hand and brought together before anyone could use them, which was slow, hard to check, and easy for small inconsistencies to creep into. Those systems now pass data between themselves and the information arrives already joined up. The team no longer assembles the numbers before it can use them, and everyone works from the same underlying information.
Kerridge & Partners
Further reading
The spreadsheet in the middle
Between any two systems that do not talk to each other there is a file. It is doing more work than anyone has credited it with, and it is the best documentation of your process you will ever get.