Why is it important to ensure the reliability of data?
It’s Monday morning and you ask your operations manager how last week went. They pull one figure from your ERP system. Ten minutes later, your finance team reports a different number from the accounting software, while your sales team has another figure in the CRM.
Decisions are made based on information that turns out to be inaccurate, and by the time the mistake is discovered, the work has already been done, or the order has already been placed.
Multiply that across a growing business, and it becomes a daily drain on time, productivity and confidence. Someone spends an hour every morning copying figures between spreadsheets. A stock report says one thing, the warehouse says another, and nobody notices until an order cannot be fulfilled. Teams begin questioning which numbers they can actually trust instead of focusing on making decisions.
This usually happens because the systems your business depends on, such as your ERP, accounting software, CRM and inventory management system, were never designed to work seamlessly together. As businesses grow, new systems are often introduced to solve individual problems, creating disconnected sources of information that make it increasingly difficult to maintain a single, reliable view of the business.
What’s Actually Causing the Problem?
When we speak with a business owner who’s frustrated with their data, the same causes come up each time.
Disconnected systems. Most small businesses run on a mix of tools for different areas. Each was probably chosen for a good reason at the time. The trouble is that nobody planned for how they would work together, so they don’t.
Manual data movement. Where systems don’t work together, things get more manual. It’s a case of copy-and-pasting different sets of data into one spreadsheet to get everything consolidated. That’s slow, it doesn’t scale, and every manual step increases the chance of small errors and typos. And, in the age of AI data integration, things really don’t have to be this manual.
Outdated systems. Just because you’ve been using a platform for years doesn’t make it the best one for the job. This doesn’t mean you have to abandon current setups to get reliable data outputs, but questioning whether it’s the best tool for the job can only put your business in a stronger position.
No single version of the customer. Picture an e-commerce business selling through its own website, a marketplace like Amazon, and pop-up stores at events. The same shopper ends up as three unconnected identities: an email address on the website, an anonymised buyer ID on the marketplace, and a card payment from the pop-up. Marketing sends a ‘we miss you’ discount to someone who bought last weekend at the pop-up.
Reliability in Practice: What is Good Data?
So you know there’s a problem, but you can’t put your finger on what ‘unreliable’ looks like day-to-day. If you recognise more than a couple of these points, it might be time to review your data and how it’s informing decisions in your business.
- Two reports, two answers. Sales, finance, and operations regularly give you different figures for the same thing.
- Manual copy-and-paste between systems. Someone in your team spends (what could be otherwise more valuable) time each week moving data by hand.
- Delayed decisions while someone “checks the numbers”. Confidence in the data has eroded, meaning it’s double- and triple-checked before it’s used.
- Customer records don’t match. The same customer looks different, or has a different order history, depending on which system you’re in.
- Reports take days to put together. Getting a straight answer to a simple question means lots of waiting, and time spent reporting outweighs time spent actioning.
- People use their own spreadsheets. To combat data unreliability, your team have their own spreadsheets as they don’t trust the dashboards – now you have more than a single source of truth.
Reliable data opposes all of this. Once your team trust the numbers and where they’re derived from, decision-making becomes easier and rooted in confidence.
The Solution: Connecting Your Systems Properly
The fix isn’t a bigger spreadsheet or telling your team to manually ‘check’ every single figure they come across. It’s cloud app integration. Connecting the systems you’re already using so that data flows between them automatically, accurately, and without anyone wasting precious company time.
Cloud integration services for small businesses take the tools you’re already relying on – your ERP, accounting platform, CRM and inventory management system – and connect them so that a sale recorded in one place is reflected everywhere it needs to be, automatically, and the same day.
We’ve helped clients across very different industries with challenges such as these. One SaaS business had customer data spread across eight separate systems, with no way to bring it together into one reliable view of a customer. We built a connected data layer with an automated matching process that resolves every system’s version of a customer to one authoritative record, now achieving 99%+ accuracy, automatically, every day, in the background.
A multinational retail client had a similar problem at a bigger scale: around fifteen disconnected systems covering point of sale, e-commerce, stock, finance, and workforce management. We started small, with an integration between just two of them, giving store managers real-time visibility they’d never had before. Sales now flow straight into the finance system, stock transfers update automatically, and nobody is reconciling spreadsheets at the end of the day.
Where to Start
The Router pattern is not unique to us. Anthropic uses the same How AI You don’t need to connect every system at once. Most successful projects start small, with the two or three systems causing the most friction, and prove the value before expanding. If two reports regularly disagree, if someone is retyping data every week, or if your team has started keeping their own spreadsheets because they don’t trust the dashboard, that’s usually a sign your systems need connecting properly.
