API integration so people stop retyping data between systems

Through whatever interface each one already exposes, in order of preference: a documented API, then webhooks, then a scheduled file exchange. The work is rarely the connection itself. It is agreeing which system owns each record, so the two never disagree about the same customer.

Use them when the workflow is simple, low volume, and you can live with it stopping for a day. We use n8n ourselves for exactly that, including the Little Tree Confections pipeline. Build custom when money moves, when volume is high, or when a silent failure would cost you more than the build.

You get told before your customers do, if someone is watching. We pin the version where the vendor supports pinning, and alert when a response's shape changes. The integration then stays under an agreed service level or a documented handover. An unwatched integration will eventually break without anyone noticing.

It can, and it should do so through a narrow, deliberate path rather than direct table access. Direct writes from an outside tool skip your validation and your audit trail, which is fine until the day someone needs to explain a record. We put a service in front of it, with permissions scoped to the specific job.

Keys live in an encrypted store, scoped to the narrowest permission that does the job, and rotatable without a redeploy. They never sit in the codebase. Trading CoPilot stores broker credentials encrypted in Supabase, with per-user row-level security so one account cannot reach another's.

Yes, by deciding which system is the source of truth for each field and making the other one follow. Most disagreements come from both sides being allowed to write the same thing. Once ownership is written down, a daily reconciliation catches drift within a day rather than at the quarter's end.

Cost is driven by how many systems are involved, how good their APIs are, and how bad a silent failure would be for you. A well-documented API with webhooks is straightforward work. A vendor with no API and a nightly file drop is not, and the drivers get named on the free scoping call. Every build starts with a fixed-fee Blueprint: an engineer reads your real systems and writes the plan, with a fixed price for each milestone rather than a guess. The fee is credited in full against the build, and if the plan isn't one you'd act on, you don't pay for it.

Either we do, under an agreed service level, or your team does after a documented handover. The first 2 months of support and maintenance are free, with every build. Pick at the start rather than after the first outage. Enterprises usually want the alerts routed into their own monitoring, and we set that up instead of running a parallel one.