Six systems that work. None of them talking.

It is a joinery problem, and nobody sells joinery

Every vendor sells you their box. Nobody sells the space between the boxes, because it is not a product — it is a build, specific to your combination, and there is no market for it as a shrink-wrapped thing.

So the gap stays. And because it stays, a person fills it, every week, forever. That person is the integration, and they are the most expensive and least reliable one available.

What "they integrate" usually turns out to mean

Every product says it integrates. What that means in practice varies enormously, and the difference is where all the cost lives.

Ask exactly what syncs, in which direction, how often, and what happens when it fails. Three specifics cover most of what we are later asked to remove by hand: do customers sync both ways or only outbound, do part-payments flow back, and do credit notes flow at all.

For the nine systems we have built against, the answers each vendor publishes — limits, webhooks, how an event is verified, what happens when delivery fails — are set out field by field in the capability register, with the gaps marked rather than glossed over.

• One way vs both ways One-way sync means the two systems drift and somebody reconciles them. Very common, rarely disclosed.
• Which records, not "data" Customers, jobs, invoices, payments, credit notes — each is a separate answer and vendors answer in the aggregate.
• How often Real time, hourly, nightly. Nightly is fine for accounting and useless for dispatch.
• Failure behaviour Does it queue and retry, or stop silently? And how would you know? Usually the answer is "when the numbers stop matching".

Why this is cheaper than the alternative

Replacing a system your team knows costs more than the licence you are escaping — retraining, migration, and the six weeks where everything takes twice as long. The connector costs a fraction of that and targets the thing that was actually hurting.

It is also reversible. Change job management systems in two years and you rebuild one connector, not a platform. That optionality is worth more than it sounds, because most businesses do change something within five years and almost none of them plan to. The full argument is on custom vs off-the-shelf.

Platform or purpose-built

Start on a platform. Zapier or n8n will connect two systems in days and, crucially, a non-technical person can open it and see what it is doing.

Move to a purpose-built service when the step count passes about a dozen, when a silent failure would cost real money, or when the volume makes per-task billing bite. Where that line sits is its own page, and which platform is another.

When there is genuinely no way through

It happens. A product with no API, no supported export and a vendor uninterested in helping is a real dead end, and we will tell you that rather than quoting a scraping job that will break in four months.

There is a middle case worth knowing: no public API but a supported export, or a database you own and can read. Workable, meaningfully more fragile, and we will quote it as the ugly option rather than presenting it as equivalent. The checker tells you whether we have built against your systems before.

What we have not measured, and what we would measure for you

There is no reliable published Australian figure for how long the re-typing between your systems takes in a small business, and we are not going to borrow one from a vendor whitepaper to make this page more persuasive. Most numbers you will see quoted for this were produced by companies selling the fix.

What we would do instead is count it on one of your jobs. Follow a single job end to end, note every time a human touches this step, and multiply by what that person costs loaded. That is a real number about your business and it takes an afternoon.

You can run the arithmetic yourself first — the leak calculator uses ABS, Average Weekly Earnings, Australia, May 2026 for the wage default and ATO, Super guarantee, current rate for super, and returns a range rather than a single confident figure. If the range comes back under our minimum engagement, that is a real answer and you should stop there.