We live in a connected world — with our apps, devices and things all seamlessly talking to each other. When it comes to business software, the cloud has allowed SMBs to select the best-of-breed but its not uncommon to find yourself using a handful of core systems (CRM, accounting, project management) plus dozens of add-ons.

The Gartner Pace Layered diagram illustrates this.

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Systems of record, are your core systems (such as Xero, Salesforce or WorkflowMax) that are hard to change and handle about 80% of your business processes. This is where your customer and sales records live.

Systems of differentiation include the add-ons and integrations that give you a point of difference. These are often the systems that your customers and staff will interact with daily and represent your brand.

Systems of innovation are where you can really gain competitive advantage by continuously improving, trying new ideas and technologies, automating processes, experimenting with AI.

At EndGame, we build a lot of custom add-ons and integrations to help our customers automate, differentiate and innovate. For example, some work we’ve done recently includes:

• Use Xero’s repeating invoices to track subscriptions, then extract subscription & payment details from Xero to check which subscriptions are active and paid-up
• Take every invoice created in Xero, look up relevant job data from GeoOp and insert this data into the invoice. Create a purchase order in Xero to record the costs associated with the job
• Import trading data from a spreadsheet, summarise it and push it into Xero as sales invoices

When it comes to automating your business processes, there are a few options available to you:

Use systems that are already integrated
Where possible, this is always a good idea. However, often the integration needs your own business logic and you may need to find a custom solution.

Use Zapier or IFTTT
There are some great tools out there which allow you to take data from one system and trigger an event in another system. Its well worth having a play as these are designed to be non-technical and DIY.

Use Podio or SmartSheet
There are some powerful tools available that allow you to customise forms and processes and will often integrate with your core systems. These are great ways to experiment with a new process before custom building it.

Build a custom integration or add-on
A custom integration is typically when you want to connect two systems you are using, whereas an add-on is when you want to extend a system by providing some new functionality, a mobile app, or some other user interface.

Both of these options rely on having one or more systems of record, the core system(s) that your business runs on. The custom integration or add-on, will then use the core system APIs to get and update information.

Custom built software is often not cheap though, so most software developers will use a platform. EndGame’s platform, which we have developed over the last five years and which has been used by hundreds of businesses around the world is Moxy Tracks. Our goal for Moxy Tracks is to be able to provide cost-effective integrations and add-ons to SMBs and to keep them running long-term with very low ongoing support and maintenance costs. Our platform runs small integrations right up to full add-ons — such as loan management system and calendar based timesheets.

If you are considering whether your business could benefit from a custom integration or an add-on, here are some things we’ve learned over the years:

1. Do things manually before you automate them. Once you’ve refined the process, then automate that process.
2. You need to be able to innovate fast and cheap. Often your ideas won’t add value, but you won’t know until you try it.
3. Good support is essential. Your shiny new integration or add-on will run beautifully … until it doesn’t. When the core systems change, or you use them in an unexpected way, then its essential that you can quickly find out what’s gone wrong and get it fixed. We offer various levels of support to ensure you get the help you need.
4. Leverage what’s been done before. We’ve done so many different integrations, that the chances are there is something we can re-purpose for you, saving you the cost of having it built from scratch. Platforms are great for this kind of re-use.

If you’d like to talk to us about your custom integration or add-on, please get in touch.

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