"Our data lives in six places and none of them agree."
CRM, spreadsheet, accounting package, inbox, the booking tool, somebody's head. Each one holds a copy. Every copy drifts. And someone spends their evenings retyping between them. I've fixed this shape in my own business and in clients'. The receipts are below, and one of them you can open right now.
What the mess costs
Every duplicate copy of a record is a small job that never ends. The same customer gets keyed into the CRM, then the invoice tool, then the spreadsheet. When the copies disagree, and in my experience they usually do, the truth becomes whichever tab was open last. Decisions get made on the wrong number. And you're paying monthly for six systems that each hold a fraction of the picture.
This problem, fixed three times
One platform emptied into another, errors counted
My own business ran on an email platform costing £650 a month. I archived 37,160 contacts (9,468 active) into a 1.9 GB local database that's still queryable, imported 9,446 active contacts to the new platform with 0 import errors, and the bill dropped to £73 a month. One weekend. Trapped in an expensive tool because moving feels too risky? That's the exact job I do without drama, and the import log is kept.
Two brands, one CRM, one version of the truth
Skool of Drool runs two live businesses through 35 connections into one CRM database, 10 tables. Nothing gets copied between systems because there's only one system. And you don't have to take my word for it. The site answers for itself: the site publishes its own live health status, open to anyone.
Entered once, signed on its way everywhere else
For a client I keep anonymous (an organisation with a large member network), 4 external platforms pass records between each other automatically, and every message carries a signature proving where it came from. A record is entered once, lands everywhere it needs to be, and nobody has to type it a second time. Anything that turns up without a valid signature gets refused.
Things you can open right now
What I'd tell you not to build
The all-in-one replatform. Ripping out six systems in one go is a year of pain, and half of them are probably fine. The move that works is smaller: find the one join that's eating your evenings, wire it properly, kill the rekeying there first. Sometimes the answer is cancelling a couple of tools, and that's the answer you'll get.
First piece is fixed price, typically £750 to £1,500. Then we extend or stop. How pricing works →