On 30 September a connection I had built for a client went out of service. It did not break. Its job is now taken over by an e-invoicing provider, and the way the business issues its invoices and receipts is changing.
Now that it has been retired, it is worth telling you what it did. The problem it solved is one that many businesses have, often without having put a name to it.
One transaction, four places
The business delivers goods and collects payment at the door. The driver reaches the customer, the customer pays there and gets their receipt.
Behind that simple moment, the same transaction had to end up in four places. In the business software, WinWay, where the invoice or receipt is issued. In the program that runs the fiscal device. On the card terminal the driver carries, to take the payment. And in myDATA, the Greek tax authority’s platform.
Without a connection, someone would have had to enter the same transaction by hand in more than one place. With it, the user issued the document once in WinWay. Before it could be printed, three things had to happen. First, the fiscal device program was updated, and it sent the amount to collect to the driver’s card terminal. Next, the transaction was sent to myDATA and the tax authority had to respond. Finally, the QR code the authority returned was placed on the document. Only then was it printed, and printed correctly.
If anything went wrong at any step, a message said exactly what was missing, so the user could fill it in and send it again, or contact support. Nobody retyped anything, and nobody printed a document that had not gone through everywhere.
That was all. And as long as it worked, nobody noticed.
How many times is your order written down?
Now, your business. If you have an e-shop, an order’s journey usually looks something like this: it arrives in the e-shop, you enter it into your business software to issue the invoice, and then you type it again into the courier’s system to produce the shipping label. Same name, same address, same phone number, same amounts. Three times: once by the customer, twice by you.
The cost of this habit shows up nowhere, because it never arrives as a charge. But you can work it out yourself in five minutes.
Measure how long it takes each time you retype an order. Multiply by how many times you retype it and by your orders per day. For example: if each retype takes two minutes, you retype each order twice and you have twenty orders a day, then you spend eighty minutes a day typing. That is over an hour. Plug in your own numbers to see your own figure.
Then add what is harder to measure: mistakes. A single wrong digit in the phone number, the wrong house number in the address, an amount on the invoice that does not match the order. Every retype is a new chance for a mistake. And a mistake rarely costs as little as the minute that caused it. It costs a parcel that came back, a credit note, a customer who was kept waiting.
Where to start
You do not need to connect everything at once. It is usually not even worth it.
Start with the step where a mistake costs the most, not necessarily the one that takes the most time. In most businesses it is whatever touches money or the customer: the invoice or receipt, the payment, the delivery address. When you collect payment at the door, the customer sees a mistake on the receipt there and then.
And ask whoever builds the connection: if one step fails, does everything stop before the document reaches the customer, or do you end up with a document that went through in one program but not in the other? In the delivery business I described, nothing was printed unless every step had completed correctly.
Also decide how quickly the information needs to travel. In that delivery business, the fiscal device program was updated instantly, because the customer was waiting at the door. There is no single right speed. Each job needs its own decision, and for an e-shop’s stock that decision has its own traps, which I cover in The last one was sold in the shop. The e-shop is still selling it.
When it is not worth connecting anything
It is not what you expect to hear from someone who builds connections, but it is true: sometimes the keyboard is cheaper.
A connection needs setting up, and then it needs maintaining. Every time one of the programs it joins changes, it has to be adjusted. Every time the rules for issuing invoices and receipts change, it may need rebuilding, or it may give way to something else. That is what happened to the connection I described.
If you have five orders a week and mistakes are rare, the sum from the previous section will probably tell you to leave things as they are, at least for now. If you have twenty a day, the same sum will tell you something very different. What matters is that you do the sum, instead of getting used to the typing as if it were part of the job.
When everything is written once
The connection that was retired did nothing impressive. It did something simple, every day, without anyone thinking about it: it made sure the same transaction was written once. The driver did their job at the door, and the office retyped nothing.
If you retype your orders into more than one program, use the contact form to tell us roughly how many orders you have a day and which programs you enter them into. We will do the sum with you and tell you whether a connection pays off, and where it is worth starting. This work is part of our web applications and integrations service.
The whole picture: this article covers one part of a larger subject. For the whole picture, from choosing a platform to handling returns, see our e-shop guide.
