Somewhere in your business, someone types the same information into two systems.
Orders from one place into the accounts package. Delivery details from an email into a spreadsheet. Stock counts from a clipboard into a form. Customer details from the website into the database, by hand, every morning.
It’s slow, and worse than slow it’s where the errors come from — two systems disagree and nobody can say which one is right.
We join them up so the number gets entered once. ☎
Accounts and finance
Orders and invoices raised in your system, posted into the accounts package without rekeying. Customers, suppliers and nominal codes kept in step both ways.
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 is what happens when something doesn’t match — a customer 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 read and a way to fix the exception. That’s what decides whether people still trust it in six months.
Email, Microsoft 365 and Exchange
Sending — quotes, order confirmations, statements, job sheets, service reminders and chase letters, generated from live data and logged against the record so anyone can see what went out and when. SMTP, Microsoft 365 and Exchange, or a provider like Mailgun where volume, deliverability and tracking matter.
Receiving — the half most people never set up. Orders and enquiries arriving by email logged against the customer automatically. Supplier confirmations and remittances filed against the job. Replies threaded onto the original record. Attachments extracted and stored where they belong.
Making sure it arrives — email sent by a system gets filtered harder than email sent by a person. SPF, DKIM and DMARC need to be right, and in most businesses we look at they aren’t, often because nobody realised the database was sending mail at all.
⚠️ If your system has stopped sending email, it’s probably because Microsoft has retired basic authentication for SMTP in Exchange Online. Common, fixable → SQL Server integration
Files and documents
Drawings, certificates, photographs, signed paperwork and correspondence held against the record they belong to.
Stored properly — outside the database rather than bloating it — with controlled access, version history and an audit trail of who added and who opened what. Expiry dates tracked where they matter.
For anything holding personal data, that audit trail is the part your auditors ask about.
Barcode and scanning
[IMG-1] — A scanner in use in a real setting: warehouse, stores, workshop. Not a product shot of a scanner on white. Your best-performing integration content deserves the best image on the page.
Alt: Barcode scanning integrated with a business database
Stock, goods in, picking and dispatch, asset tracking, plant hire, stocktaking and audits.
We’ve delivered integrated barcode solutions across logistics, retail and rental, and the hardware choice matters as much as the software:
- Handheld and fixed scanners, wired or wireless, and rugged devices where the environment demands it
- Phones instead of scanners, which is often the better answer now — the camera is good enough and nobody loses a device they already carry → mobile apps
- Label design and printing — product, location, asset and despatch labels, printed from the system rather than a separate application
- Barcode and QR, including the newer 2D formats where you need more than a number
- What happens when it won’t scan — a damaged label, a missing item, a count that doesn’t match. The exception handling is the difference between a system people use and one they work around.
Most of this work starts the same way: somebody is writing numbers on a clipboard and typing them in later, and about one in fifty is wrong.
SMS and messaging
Delivery notifications, appointment reminders, engineer-on-the-way texts, and two-way messaging where customers reply.
SMS and MMS through the main UK gateways, and WhatsApp through the Business API where that’s where your customers already are. Replies come back into the system and sit against the record rather than on somebody’s phone.
Your website, CMS and e-commerce
The data in your database is usually the same data customers are ringing up to ask about.
- Website and CMS kept in step — products, pricing, stock, availability, branches, documents
- Web forms straight into the system, so enquiries and bookings land as records rather than emails somebody retypes
- E-commerce — orders in, stock and pricing out, customer accounts consistent in both places
- Surveys and feedback triggered by something happening in the system, with responses logged against the job
- Customer portals, where customers serve themselves → customer portals and self-service
Other people’s systems
Couriers and carriers, payment providers, EPOS, CRM, suppliers’ ordering systems, customers’ purchasing portals, compliance and certification bodies.
- APIs where the other system has one, in both directions, with proper authentication and error handling
- Webhooks, so something happens the moment it happens rather than on the next overnight run
- Scheduled exchange 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
- Screen and document-level automation as a last resort, for systems with genuinely no other route in
We’ll tell you which applies and what it costs to keep running, not just to build.
Integrations that stay built
An integration needing somebody to babysit it every Monday isn’t finished.
- Credentials in a key vault or a managed identity, never in a config file
- Retries and back-off, so a third party being down for ten minutes isn’t an incident
- Failures that alert somebody, rather than failing quietly until month end
- A log a non-technical person can read, and a way to reprocess what failed
- Documented, so you’re not dependent on one person understanding it
→ support
By technology
The approach differs depending on what you’re running:
Microsoft Access integration – SQL Server integration and APIs
Bespoke or inherited system, or not sure what you’ve got? Start here and we’ll work it out → database support
Reporting & Business Intelligence
Once the data's joined up, reporting across all of it.
Find out more...
Reporting & Business Intelligence
Once the data's joined up, reporting across all of it.
Find out more...Case studies
Aire Valley Catering: four mobile apps, an Access business system, and engineers with no signal
Engineers working on customer sites across the UK can't count on having a signal, and the job still has to be recorded. Four production apps across both app stores, an Access and SQL Server business system behind them, and a roadmap that keeps offline working rather than trading it away.
View case study →Recovering audit and customer data across multiple corrupt SQL databases
Several customer databases became damaged and wouldn't open, putting audit records, operational data and customer information at risk of permanent loss. A structured recovery programme rebuilt usable datasets from the corrupt files and returned multiple customer systems to service.
View case study →ACC Worldwide: a faster SQL Server platform, noticed on day one
A business-critical system was working but slow, and staff felt it every day. Work on the SQL Server environment behind it delivered an immediate speed increase, and left ACC's own IT team with the logging and monitoring tools to keep developing it.
View case study →What's being typed in twice?
Tell us which two systems aren't talking and what moves between them. We'll tell you whether it can be joined up, how, and what it costs to keep running.
Send us the details → How we work →