Five questions to answer before you integrate two business systems 

Connecting two systems sounds simple: when something changes here, update it there. In practice, integrations fail in predictable ways. These five questions catch most of them early.

1. Which system is the source of truth?

For every piece of shared information — a customer's address, a job's status, an invoice total — decide which system owns it. Two-way sync without a clear owner is the most common source of conflicting data.

2. What happens when it fails?

Networks drop, suppliers have outages and data arrives in unexpected shapes. Decide in advance: does the integration retry, queue, alert someone or stop? A failure nobody notices is worse than one that's loud.

3. How will we know it's working?

Plan monitoring from the start. At minimum you want to know when messages fail, when volumes look unusual and when the two systems drift out of agreement.

4. What data actually needs to move?

Move only what the receiving system needs. Minimising data reduces risk, makes the integration easier to reason about and is a core principle of data protection law.

5. Who looks after it?

APIs change and credentials expire. Agree who is responsible for the integration once it's live, and make sure credentials are stored securely — never in spreadsheets or email.

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