Make two systems talk

What is actually happening

Somebody in your business is the integration.

The appointment gets typed into the scheduling system and then into billing. The quote gets built in one place and re-keyed in another. Two reports disagree and someone reconciles them by hand every Friday. Each of those is a person standing in a gap between two systems, and each of them is why the breakage has never appeared as a ticket, a support case, or a line on any invoice.

It appears as overtime, as errors nobody can trace, and as your evenings.

Every manual workaround is a receipt for a broken seam. Find the retyping and you have found the problem, priced in hours.

How this gets sold elsewhere

Your software vendors will each tell you their side works, and they are usually telling the truth — their export does work, their import does work. Neither of them owns the join.

Automation shops will build you something new, priced per build, and it becomes one more thing nobody owns.

Your IT provider looks after the perimeter: the network, the devices, the backups. The join between two applications is not inside their scope and they will tell you so.

Nobody sells the gap, because a gap is not a product. That is exactly why it is still there.

What we do

We find every place someone types the same thing twice. That is a conversation with the people doing it, not a diagram — the ones that cost the most are usually the ones nobody has ever mentioned.

We count what each one costs: how often, how long, who does it, and which two systems it sits between.

We work out what closing it would take. Sometimes it is a setting nobody switched on. Sometimes it is a connection between two products that both already support it. Sometimes it is a small piece of custom work, and sometimes the honest answer is that it costs less to keep retyping — in which case we say so and you have lost nothing but the question.

We specify it, run the project, and test it with the people who will use it.

Then we count the retyping again.

What you get

The workaround inventory: every place it happens, between which two systems, how often, how long, and what closing it is worth in hours a week.

A recommendation per item, with what it would cost and what it should change.

The join itself, built and tested, for whatever we agree to do.

A written specification for the ones we do not do, so you can hand it to your provider or your vendor and hold them to it.

The before-and-after count.

What we measure

Hours a week of retyping removed. Records that disagree between the two systems, before and after. Where the work has a deadline — a claim, an invoice, a filing — how long it takes to get through, before and after.

An illustrative example — not a client

Illustration, built from a pattern common to businesses running two systems that do not talk, with the arithmetic shown so you can substitute your own numbers.

A practice books an appointment in one system and bills it in another, and the two do not exchange anything. Somebody re-keys about forty appointments a day. At twenty seconds each that is a little over two hours a week — but the re-keying is not the expensive part. The expensive part is the handful that get typed wrong, surface a month later as a rejected claim, and take somebody half a day to chase.

We would count both, and we would tell you which one is worth fixing.

What this is not

Not a new system. We build the join between the two you already have and test it with the people who use it. Where something genuinely new is needed we say so, specify it, and help you choose who builds that.

Not a data migration project.

Not something we then run. Once it works, it belongs to you or to your provider, with the specification in writing.

What this costs

We do not publish a price, and here is the reason rather than an excuse: we would be guessing. Two businesses with the same symptom are frequently a factor of five apart in what the work involves, and a published number would either scare off the smaller one or shortchange the larger one.

What we will commit to:

The quote is fixed before any work starts, and it is a single number, not an hourly rate that grows.

We name it after we have seen the work, not before. Which means the first conversation costs you nothing and commits you to nothing.

If we think something is not worth doing, we say so — including when what you are asking for is the thing we would be paid to do.

Nothing renews automatically. Every engagement has an end.