The hidden job: moving data between your tools
Each tool covers most of one job. The rest, and every hand-off between tools, is done by a person. An order arrives in your online store, someone re-types it into a spreadsheet, someone else creates the invoice in QuickBooks, and a third person emails the customer. Nobody planned it that way. It grew one subscription at a time.
The cost is not only hours. It is the lead that never reached sales, the invoice sent twice, and the month-end close that waits on a spreadsheet that one person understands. Business process automation is the plain fix: decide where the data should start, and let software carry it from there.
What we automate and integrate
These are the jobs small businesses ask us for most often, with the size of each in tokens.
- Accounting. A sale or a paid invoice flowing into QuickBooks without re-entry. An integration like this is 12 tokens.
- Online store. Shopify orders, stock levels and customers synced to your back office, so inventory is right in one place. An integration is 12 tokens.
- Payments. Card or pre-authorized debit payments tied to the invoice, the booking or the subscription they belong to. 12 tokens.
- CRM and leads. Every form, call and email landing in one record so no lead falls between tools. 12 tokens.
- Reports and dashboards. The numbers you now assemble by hand each Friday, produced on their own. A report or dashboard is 6 tokens.
- Small fixes in between. A new field, a changed rule or a renamed status is 1 token.
System integration services versus a no-code connector
Not every job needs us. If a connector such as Zapier moves your data for a few dollars a month and it keeps working, use it. We say that to owners every time it is true.
Custom integration earns its price when a connector falls short: rules that depend on your business, data that must be checked before it moves, volumes that make per-task pricing climb, or a chain of five steps where one failure silently breaks the rest. In those cases a purpose-built integration is cheaper to run and easier to trust, and you own it. It does not depend on a vendor continuing to offer a plan.
How an automation project runs
- 1Map one process end to end
At the kickoff we follow a single job, such as an order from click to cash, and write down every tool, spreadsheet and person it touches. Nothing is charged until this is done.
- 2Pick the most expensive hand-off
We start where the manual work costs the most time or causes the most errors, not where it is easiest to demo.
- 3Build it and run it beside the old way
The first delivery arrives in week 1 after the kickoff. For a short period the automation and your manual process run side by side, so you can compare the results before you trust it.
- 4Switch off the manual step, then the subscription
Once the numbers match, your team stops doing the step by hand. If a tool is no longer needed, you cancel it.
Fix the process before you automate it
Automating a broken process only makes the mistakes faster. Sometimes the right first task is a small change to how your team works, which we will tell you before spending any tokens. If three tools collect the same information, we may recommend dropping two of them, or folding the work into a single internal system rather than wiring them together. If you are weighing a bigger build against buying another tool, custom versus off-the-shelf software lays out when each wins.
What automation costs
Plans are monthly: Starter at $1,270, Growth at $2,290 and Scale at $3,980 CAD, plus GST/HST. As a guide, Growth covers one integration plus two bug fixes and two small changes in a month, and Scale covers three integrations. A common first project is one accounting integration (12 tokens), one report (6 tokens) and a few small changes, which fits inside a single Growth month.
Compare that with an integration quoted by the hour at Toronto agency rates of $130 to $190 CAD. Our guide to custom software cost in Canada explains where those quotes come from. Hosting is included, and you can cancel a monthly plan at any time.
What this looks like in practice: Lomesi
Lomesi works across seven public medical units in Mexico. Instead of a separate tool for each process, we built one platform that holds all their internal processes. Capture works offline and prints the official form, and it went live on the date we promised. After that we built their distribution ERP: orders, purchasing, inventory by lot, invoicing and collections. The principle is the same for a ten-person business: one place where the work happens, and everything else connected to it.
Yours, visible and guaranteed
Integrations run on accounts and keys that belong to you, never to us. You see every task, bug and token in the platform. A bug costs 3 tokens and is fixed until it works, free if it breaks again within 30 days. The first month is guaranteed with a full refund, and the work is done by a senior team in Mexico City on your business hours, under a Canadian contract with APRed. If you want the next step, build the connections into a customer-facing app or a client portal.