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Supplier and customer system integration

Your system talking to theirs, however theirs talks.

Every supplier and customer has their own system and their own way of exchanging data. We connect yours to theirs using whatever they offer: an API, files sent and received on a schedule, EDI or email.

A customer being served at a trade counter
The problem

Every trading partner wants it their way.

One supplier publishes a price file every month. Another has an API. A customer wants order acknowledgements as XML, and somebody else wants a spreadsheet by four o'clock. Each one is a manual job for a person: download, reformat, upload, check.

None of it is difficult. It's constant, and it's the kind of work software should be doing.

What you get

  • Supplier price lists, stock feeds and catalogues loaded into your system on a schedule
  • Purchase orders sent to suppliers, and their acknowledgements read back
  • Customer orders taken in from their systems, with confirmations, despatch notes and invoices sent out
  • APIs where they exist; CSV, XML, Excel and PDF files or email where they don't
  • Marketplaces and web shops connected the same way
  • Anything that doesn't match held for a person, with the reason shown
How it works

How we connect you to a trading partner.

  1. Find out what they offer

    We talk to the supplier or customer's own technical contact and get their API documents, file layouts or sample files.

  2. Map their data to yours

    Their part numbers, account codes and units are matched to yours, with rules for the ones that don't line up.

  3. Test with the other side

    We exchange test data with them until both ends agree, before anything live moves.

  4. Run it and watch it

    It runs on a schedule and reports what it did. When they change their format, we update the link.

From our work

A job like this one.

ManufacturingRetail invoicing

Electronic invoicing to a national retailer.

The problem

A manufacturer raised its invoices to one large retailer by hand. The retailer wanted them as files in its own format.

What we did

As a small fixed-price job, we added a nightly run that sends the day's invoices in the retailer's format, with a start date so nothing already invoiced by hand could go twice.

The result

Quoted, tested with the retailer and sending live invoices inside five weeks. It sits alongside the full EDI order and invoice exchange we've built elsewhere: whichever system a customer or retailer uses, we can make yours talk to it.

All case studies →

Questions

What people ask first.

Based in Derbyshire, working with businesses across Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, the wider East Midlands and the UK.

What if our supplier or customer has no API?

Then we use what they do have. We've connected through file exchange in CSV, XML and Excel, PDFs, email, direct database access and browser automation. If a system can't be reached at all, we'll tell you up front.

How is this different from EDI?

EDI is one formal way of doing it, usually set by a large customer. Plenty of suppliers and customers use something simpler, such as an API or a file drop. We work with whichever they have. There's more on the EDI integration page.

What happens when they change their format?

It happens. The link reports when something stops matching instead of carrying on with bad data, and we update it.

Can you connect more than one partner?

Yes. Each has its own mapping, and the second and third are quicker to add than the first because the groundwork in your system is already done.

What does it cost?

Each job is priced at a no-obligation meeting, once we've seen what's involved. As a guide, it will probably come to less than half of what a traditional software house would quote.

Related work

EDI integration →Sage, Xero and QuickBooks integration →Old VB.NET and Access systems →Vibe-coded app to production →E-commerce websites →Web applications and portals →Desktop applications →Mobile apps for Android and iOS →

Reformatting somebody else's files?

Tell us the problem. We'll tell you what's possible, how long it takes and what it costs.

Start a conversation → See case studies