Microsoft Access Integration & APIs

Somewhere in most businesses there’s a person who types the same figures into two systems. Orders from the database into the accounts package. Delivery addresses from an email into a spreadsheet. Stock counts from a clipboard into Access.

It’s slow, and worse than slow, it’s where the errors come from. The two systems disagree, and nobody knows which one is right.

We connect Access to whatever else you’re running so the number gets entered once. ☎

What we connect it to

Accounting and finance — Sage 50, Sage 200, Xero, QuickBooks. Covered properly below.

Microsoft 365, Exchange and Outlook — quotes, confirmations, statements and reminders sent from the system with the record attached, logged against the customer so anyone can see what went out. Calendar and contact sync where it earns its keep.

Files and documents — drawings, certificates, photos and signed paperwork held against the record. Stored properly outside the database rather than bloating the back end, with version history and an audit trail of who added what.

Barcode and scanning — stock, goods in, picking, asset tracking, plant hire. Handheld scanners, fixed scanners, label printing. We’ll advise on the hardware as well as the software, and we’ve done this across logistics, retail and rental.

SMS and messaging — delivery notifications, appointment reminders, engineer-on-the-way texts, and WhatsApp through the Business API where customers expect it.

Your website and e-commerce — orders in, stock and pricing out, customer accounts kept in step. →web applications for existing systems

Other people’s systems — couriers, suppliers, customer portals, EPOS, payment providers, CRM. If there’s an API we’ll use it. If there isn’t, there’s almost always another way in.

Sage, Xero and QuickBooks

[IMG-2] — Right-aligned. A sync log: records transferred, timestamps, what matched and what didn’t. Unglamorous and exactly right. The thing a finance manager wants to know is whether they’ll be able to see what happened.
Alt:

The usual job: orders or invoices raised in the database, posted into the accounts package without anyone re-keying them, and customer, supplier and nominal data kept in step in both directions.

We work with Sage 50 and Sage 200, Xero and QuickBooks. Older Sage and Mamut installations still turn up and we can still work with them.

What matters more than the connection itself is what happens when something doesn’t match: a customer that exists in one system and not the other, a code that’s changed, a posting that fails. We build that in from the start, with a log you can look at and a way to fix the exception, because that’s what determines whether people trust the integration six months later.

How it’s actually done

There’s no single method, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling one.

• APIs where the other system has one, in both directions, with proper authentication and error handling
• Direct database connections for systems sitting on SQL Server or similar
• Scheduled exchanges overnight or hourly, for data that doesn’t need to be live
• File-based exchange — CSV, XML, fixed-width drops — because plenty of business software still offers nothing else, and it works perfectly well
• Webhooks and triggers where something needs to happen the moment it happens
• Screen-level and document-level automation as a last resort, for systems that genuinely have no other route in

We’ll tell you which applies and what it costs to keep running, not just to build. An integration that needs somebody to babysit it every Monday isn’t finished.

Case Studies