A business coach I talked with this fall said one complaint keeps coming up with the owners he works with: something doesn't talk to something else. His latest example was an excavating company. The software they use for their job sites and their employees' hours doesn't connect to QuickBooks.
His read is that a lot of these companies aren't paying for "the big boy software." They've got "a bunch of random ones that fit their industry." So he asked me if there's anything someone who knows APIs can't connect.
Usually that isn't the problem. They're not too big to let us talk to them. It's what they're going to give us access to. I worked on matching emailed receipts to QuickBooks with someone, and we found QuickBooks won't hand over transactions that are still sitting in the bank register. They have to be approved first. Approve twenty, match the ten that have receipts, and you still have ten to work out by hand.
So the first question isn't which software to buy. It's what each app will actually share, and what happens to the pieces that don't line up. As the coach put it, that's where it turns into more work for the CFO or the COO.
Which two of your systems don't talk to each other? If someone is carrying the information between them, that might be worth fixing, and I can help.