Systems and API Integration Services
Your ERP, CRM, accounting, HR and online systems should behave like one platform, not a set of islands connected by copy and paste. Timeline Digital designs and builds the APIs, middleware and synchronization jobs that move data between your systems automatically, keep it consistent, and tell someone when something goes wrong.
What a finished integration gives you
- One agreed source of truth for each type of record
- Data that moves between systems without anyone retyping it
- Failures that queue, retry and alert instead of losing records
- Documentation and runbooks your own team owns
- Monitored connections, not silent background jobs
What problems does systems integration solve?
Most integration projects start with the same three symptoms. If any of them sound familiar, disconnected systems are costing you time and accuracy every day.
Double data entry
The same customer, order or invoice is typed into two or three systems by hand. It costs staff hours every day, and every retyped record is a chance to introduce an error that someone later has to find and fix.
Mismatched records
The CRM says one thing, the ERP says another, and accounting has a third version. When systems drift apart, nobody trusts any of them, and month-end becomes an exercise in reconciling spreadsheets instead of running the business.
Delayed reporting
Management reports wait for someone to export, merge and clean data from several places. Decisions get made on numbers that were true last week. Integration puts current figures in one place without the manual assembly step.
The common thread is manual handoffs. Every place a person moves data between systems is a place where work slows down and errors creep in. Integration removes those handoffs one flow at a time, starting with the ones that hurt most.
Which integration pattern fits your situation?
There is no single right way to connect systems. The pattern depends on how fresh the data must be, how reliable each system is, and what its interfaces allow. In plain terms, these are the four we use most.
| Pattern | When it fits | Tradeoffs |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time API calls | Data must be current the moment it changes: stock levels shown on a store, payment confirmations, order status a customer is watching. | Both systems must be reachable at the same time, so failures need retry logic, and there are more live connections to monitor. |
| Scheduled batch synchronization | Data that can be minutes or hours old without harm: nightly accounting postings, daily HR updates, reporting extracts. | Data is only as fresh as the last run, large batches need a processing window, and a failed run must be detected and rerun. |
| Middleware and message queues | Several systems exchanging data, spiky volumes, or systems that must keep working while another one is down. | One more component to host and monitor, and more design work up front. Delivery is near real time rather than instant. |
| File exchange over SFTP | Older systems and some government or banking portals that only accept structured files on a schedule. | The slowest option, and file format changes on either side must be caught by validation before bad data spreads. |
Most real projects mix patterns: real-time calls where freshness matters, batch jobs for accounting and reporting, and a queue in the middle where several systems need to survive each other's downtime. We recommend a pattern per data flow, not one pattern for everything.
Which systems does Timeline Digital commonly connect?
Integration work spans whatever your business actually runs on. These are the categories that come up most often.
ERP platforms
Inventory, procurement, finance and manufacturing modules connected to the systems around them, so the ERP stays the operational backbone instead of an island.
CRM systems
Customer and deal data flowing between sales tools and the systems that fulfil, invoice and support those customers.
Accounting software
Invoices, payments and journal entries posted automatically from operational systems, so the books reflect activity without re-keying.
HR and payroll systems
Employee records, attendance and leave data synchronized between HR platforms, payroll and the ERP that budgets for them.
Payment gateways
Card, wallet and bank payment providers wired into stores, portals and back-office systems, with confirmations reconciled against orders.
Logistics and shipping systems
Courier and freight APIs for label generation, rate lookups and tracking updates fed back into order and customer systems.
Government portals and public-sector systems
Filings, registrations and data exchange with official portals, including the structured formats and approval steps they require.
Public-sector integration carries extra requirements around formats, approvals and data handling. Our experience there includes a public-sector program in Qatar, delivered under those constraints.
Can we build an API for a system that has none?
Yes, and it is often the most valuable part of an integration project. Many businesses depend on an older or custom system that works well internally but offers no way for other software to talk to it. Instead of replacing it, we build a modern API layer on top.
The result is a documented, secured interface that any current or future system can use, so the next integration does not have to reinvent access to the same data.
REST APIs over existing databases
A clean, versioned API in front of the data your legacy system already holds, with access rules that protect the underlying application.
Authentication and access control
API keys or token-based authentication, per-client permissions, and rate limits so one consumer cannot degrade the system for others.
Webhooks and event feeds
Push notifications when records change, so downstream systems react to events instead of polling for changes on a timer.
Documentation for consumers
Endpoint references, example requests and sandbox credentials, so your partners and future vendors can connect without a discovery project.
How do we keep data consistent between systems?
Moving data is the easy part. Keeping two systems in agreement over months of real-world failures, retries and edge cases is where integrations succeed or quietly rot. These practices are built into every integration we deliver.
One system of record per data type
Every record type, customers, prices, stock, invoices, gets a single owning system. Other systems receive copies but never compete to be the source of truth, so there is no ambiguity about which value wins.
Retries with backoff
Temporary failures are normal: a timeout, a rate limit, a brief outage. Failed operations retry automatically at increasing intervals, and only surface to a person when retries are exhausted.
Reconciliation reports
Scheduled jobs compare record counts and key values on both sides of every integration and flag differences. Drift is caught in days, not discovered at year-end.
Failure handling by design
Bad records land in a review queue instead of blocking everything behind them. Duplicates are prevented with unique identifiers. Alerts reach named people, not an unread inbox.
How are integrations tested and documented?
An integration you cannot test or hand over is a liability. Both are deliverables in our projects, not favors added at the end.
Testing before go-live
- Staging environments connected to sandboxes or test instances, never to production first
- Deliberate failure tests: invalid records, duplicates, timeouts and one system offline
- Reconciliation runs on known test data to confirm both sides match exactly
- A pilot or parallel run on real data alongside the existing manual process
Documentation you keep
- An architecture overview showing every connection and the data it carries
- Field mapping tables agreed with your data owners during design
- Runbooks: what to check first when a flow fails, and how to replay records safely
- Monitoring and alert routing, so ownership is clear after handover
How does an integration project run?
Six stages, each with a review point. You see the design before we build, and the pilot results before anything goes live.
01
Systems review
We inventory the systems involved, what APIs or access each one offers, who owns the data in each, and which credentials and approvals are needed to connect.
02
Data mapping
Field-by-field mapping between systems, agreed with the people who use the data. This is where the system of record for each data type is decided.
03
Integration design
Each data flow gets a pattern, real time, batch or queued, plus its failure handling, retry rules and monitoring. You review the design before anything is built.
04
Build in staging
Connectors, transformations and any middleware are built and run against sandboxes or test instances, never against your live data first.
05
Testing and pilot
Happy paths, deliberate failures and reconciliation checks on known test data, followed by a pilot or parallel run alongside the existing manual process.
06
Go-live and monitoring
Cutover flow by flow rather than all at once, with dashboards, alerts and a documented handover to your team or an ongoing support arrangement.
What determines integration scope and cost?
There is no honest fixed price for integration before the systems have been reviewed, because the systems themselves set the difficulty. What we can do is show you exactly which factors an estimate depends on.
What drives the timeline
- How well documented each system’s API is, and whether a sandbox exists
- The number of systems and distinct data flows in scope
- How quickly vendors and IT teams grant access and approvals
- Whether existing data needs cleanup before it can be synchronized
What drives the cost
- Number of systems connected and flows between them
- Whether an API must be built for a system that lacks one
- Complexity of data transformation and business rules in the middle
- Middleware hosting and the depth of testing the data justifies
What we need from you
- Access and credentials for each system, or an introduction to its vendor
- A data owner per system who can answer mapping questions
- Decisions on the system of record where two systems overlap
- Realistic test data and time to review the pilot results
Risks we plan for
- Undocumented or unstable APIs discovered mid-project
- Rate limits and volume constraints on third-party services
- Historical data too inconsistent to synchronize without cleanup
- Vendor API changes after launch, covered by maintenance
Delivery capacity behind the integrations
Integration projects sit inside a delivery organization that has been building and connecting business systems since 2013.
1,200+
Developers
direct and group-company employees
85+
Management professionals
analysis, QA and delivery
1,500+
Projects delivered
since 2013
860+
Active clients
across sectors
25+
Countries served
remote delivery
Systems and API Integration Questions
APIs, outages, consistency, documentation and maintenance, answered directly.
Yes, in most cases. When a system exposes no API we look for the next most reliable access point: a database we can read safely, scheduled file exports and imports, a reporting layer, or a vendor-supported extension mechanism. Where the platform belongs to you, we can build a proper API on top of it so other systems connect cleanly. Screen-level automation is a last resort because it breaks whenever the interface changes, and we tell you plainly when a system is a poor integration candidate before any work begins.
We treat consistency as a design requirement, not an afterthought. Each record type gets a single system of record, so there is never doubt about which value wins. Synchronization uses unique identifiers to prevent duplicates, retries with backoff to survive temporary failures, and scheduled reconciliation reports that compare both sides and flag mismatches. Conflicts that automatic rules cannot resolve are logged and surfaced to a person, rather than silently overwriting data.
A well designed integration turns an outage into a delay, not data loss. Messages queue while the target system is unreachable and are delivered automatically once it recovers, in the correct order. Retries use increasing intervals so a recovering system is not flooded, and alerts notify your team and ours when a queue grows beyond normal levels. After recovery, reconciliation checks confirm nothing was dropped or duplicated during the outage window.
Yes. Every integration is delivered with documentation your own team or a future vendor can work from: an overview of which systems connect and what data flows between them, field mapping tables, authentication and credential handling notes, error handling behavior, and runbooks describing what to check when something fails. We also document the monitoring in place and who receives which alert, so support never depends on the memory of the people who built it.
Yes. Mixed environments are common: a cloud CRM talking to an on-premise ERP, or a local accounting system feeding an online store. Connectivity is usually established through a secure agent or VPN tunnel, with credentials stored on your side and traffic encrypted in transit. Where a direct connection is not acceptable to your IT policy, scheduled exchanges through a controlled staging area are a workable alternative. Network access and firewall approvals are identified early because they often drive the project timeline.
Testing runs in staging against sandboxes or test instances of the connected systems, never against live production data first. We test the happy path, then deliberately break things: invalid records, duplicate submissions, timeouts, and one system being offline. Reconciliation reports run against known test datasets to confirm counts and values match on both sides. Before go-live we run a pilot or parallel period in which the integration operates on real data while the existing manual process continues, so the results can be compared side by side.
The biggest factors are the quality of each system’s API, the number of systems and data flows involved, and how quickly access is granted. A well documented API with a sandbox connects far more quickly than an older system whose interface has to be investigated or built from scratch. Approvals from third-party vendors and internal IT security reviews often consume more calendar time than the development itself. We give a written estimate after reviewing the actual systems, not before.
Yes, and we recommend it, because integrations depend on systems that keep changing. Vendors update their APIs, retire old versions and change authentication requirements, and any of those changes can break a connection that has run quietly for months. A maintenance arrangement covers monitoring and alerts, applying vendor API changes, investigating failed records, and adjusting mappings as your business processes evolve. Details are on our software maintenance and support page.
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