From Manual Chaos to Automated Efficiency

This growing business had 5 critical systems that didn't talk to each other. Customer data lived in Salesforce, orders in their e-commerce platform, accounting in QuickBooks, inventory in a legacy system, and shipping in ShipStation.

Two full-time employees spent their entire day copying data between systems. They processed 200+ orders daily, each requiring manual entry in 3 different platforms. Errors were constant, customers received wrong items, and the team was drowning.

The ripple effects were severe: inventory counts were always wrong because the systems were never in sync. Customers ordered products that were actually out of stock. Invoices went out late because the accounting team waited on shipping confirmations that lived in a different system. And every Friday, someone spent 4 hours reconciling everything manually to find discrepancies.

We built a central integration hub using n8n, an open-source workflow automation platform. Unlike Zapier or Make, n8n can be self-hosted, giving the business full control over their data and no per-task pricing that would explode with their volume.

The architecture was straightforward: webhooks capture events in real-time (new order, inventory change, customer update), trigger the appropriate workflow, transform data to match each system's requirements, and push updates everywhere simultaneously. Every action is logged, errors trigger instant Slack alerts, and automatic retries handle temporary failures.

Here's what the new order flow looks like: An order comes in, n8n immediately creates the customer in Salesforce (or updates existing), syncs inventory levels, generates the invoice in QuickBooks, creates the shipment in ShipStation, and notifies the warehouse team in Slack—all in under 3 seconds. No human involved.

We built 17 automated workflows covering every critical business process. A PostgreSQL database acts as the central source of truth, catching edge cases when systems briefly disagree. The business now runs on real-time data instead of spreadsheet exports and prayer.