Manually re-entering data between systems usually costs far more than it appears to: in staff time, in errors that surface late, and in delays as information moves between teams. If the same data is typed in more than once every week, it is almost always worth calculating what an automated integration would save.
In most companies, somebody moves information between systems by hand: web orders into accounting, customers from email into the CRM, hours from a spreadsheet into payroll. Each entry takes maybe a minute. Added up, it is often a large part of someone's job, and the errors come free.
What manual work really costs
- Time: repeated entry adds up to dozens of hours a month, often spread across several people so nobody sees the full picture.
- Errors: typos surface at month-end, at the customer, or never.
- Delays: information reaches other teams days after it was created, so decisions are made on stale numbers.
- People: your most experienced staff are stuck doing entry work a computer should handle, instead of serving customers or improving the business.
- Fragility: a process that depends on one person remembering to move the data stops when that person goes on holiday or leaves.
A simple calculation
Ten hours of double entry a week is roughly 500 hours a year. Multiply that by your fully loaded staff cost per hour and you have the direct cost of the manual work. It is rarely lower than people expect, and that is before counting the time spent finding and fixing errors.
Then compare it with the cost of the integration. For illustration only, not a quote: a focused connection between two systems with good APIs might take 30 to 80 hours, which comes to roughly ISK 0.5 to 1.4 million at our hourly rate of ISK 17,880 excluding VAT. Older systems, complex rules and many systems at once take longer. An integration that removes a lot of manual work often pays for itself within the first year, before the cost of errors is even counted.
Don't forget operations. An integration is a small system in its own right that needs hosting, monitoring and updates, and that cost belongs in the calculation from the start.
How integrations work
Most modern systems expose APIs, web services that let other systems read and write data. An integration is a connection that moves the data automatically, and it typically works in one of three ways:
- Real-time: when an event happens, such as a new order, the system sends a notification (often called a webhook) and the data moves immediately.
- Scheduled: the integration fetches and sends data at fixed intervals, for example hourly or overnight. That works well where a delay of a few hours doesn't matter.
- Middleware: older systems without APIs can usually be connected through a middle layer that reads and writes whatever the system understands, such as files or direct database access.
Before anything is built, you also need to decide which system owns each piece of information. If a price is updated in both the online store and the accounting system, which one wins? That answer matters more than the technology, because unclear ownership rules lead to systems overwriting each other.
Monitoring is the part that gets forgotten
The most important part, and the most neglected, is monitoring. An unsupervised integration is a bug waiting to happen. Systems change, vendors update their APIs, access keys expire and records arrive in unexpected formats. Without monitoring, the connection fails silently and nobody notices until the numbers don't add up at month-end.
A good integration raises an alert the moment something breaks, logs what was transferred and when, and can retry failed records without creating duplicates. Always ask who receives the alert and who acts on it.
A checklist before you integrate
- List the systems in use and who is responsible for each one.
- Ask your staff which information they type in twice most often, and how much time it takes each week.
- Check whether each system offers an API and whether it is included in the plan you are on.
- Decide which system owns each type of data, such as customers, prices, inventory and payments.
- Define how quickly the data needs to arrive: immediately, within the hour, or by the next day.
- Consider data protection: which personal data moves between systems, who can access it, and where it is hosted.
- Decide who receives alerts when a connection fails and who fixes it.
Where to start
Don't start with the biggest integration, start with the most painful one. It delivers the most relief in the least time and proves the value for the next steps. Common first candidates are web store orders into accounting, time tracking into payroll, and website enquiries into a CRM or helpdesk.
Before building anything, check whether a ready-made connector already exists. Many products offer built-in integrations with common accounting and payroll systems, and then there is no reason to build your own. A custom integration makes sense when no such connector exists, when the existing one falls short, or when your rules are too specific.
Common questions
Can an old system without an API be connected? Usually yes, through middleware that reads and writes data in a format the system understands. It is typically more work and needs closer monitoring, but it is rarely impossible.
Do we need to replace a system to get rid of double entry? Rarely. In most cases it is cheaper and safer to connect the systems you already have than to replace them.
What happens when one of the systems changes? The integration has to adapt. That is why operating and monitoring the connection should be part of the agreement from the start, not something dealt with once it stops working.
Next step
The first step is a simple inventory of systems and manual work, not a big report. Write down what data moves between systems, who moves it and how long it takes. With that list in hand, it quickly becomes clear where an integration will deliver the most.
Novamedia maps data flows like this regularly, and builds and monitors integrations between accounting, online stores, CRMs and custom systems. Focused work can be billed at the hourly rate, and if you need to see the full picture first, our Discovery and planning engagement has a fixed price of ISK 214,560 excluding VAT for 12 hours. Once an integration is live, it can run on an operations plan such as System operations at 59,900 ISK per month, which includes error monitoring and alerts.