The situation
A professional services firm whose project and billing data lived in a separate operations platform. Salesforce held the pipeline; the ops platform held everything that happened after the deal closed. The two had never been connected.
The practical consequence: account managers had no way to see delivery status or outstanding balance on the account record. Before a renewal conversation, someone would export a spreadsheet from the ops system and email it around. That spreadsheet was, inevitably, a few days stale and occasionally wrong.
Discovery before build
The firm had already been quoted for a custom bidirectional sync by another vendor. We spent the first phase of the engagement mapping what data was actually needed, in which direction, and how fresh it had to be.
That mapping changed the answer substantially. Most of what account managers needed was read-only — project status, milestone dates, invoice balance. Almost nothing needed to be written back from Salesforce to the ops platform, and nothing needed to be real-time. A full bidirectional sync would have been solving a problem the firm didn’t have, at several times the cost and with an ongoing maintenance burden.
What we built
- A documented field map covering every field in scope, its source of truth, its direction, its refresh frequency and its transformation rules — signed off by both the ops lead and the sales lead before a line of configuration was written
- A read-focused integration surfacing project and billing data on the Account and Opportunity records, refreshed on a schedule appropriate to how quickly each value actually changes
- A narrow write path for the one genuine case that needed it: closed-won opportunities creating a project shell in the ops platform
- Failure alerting. Sync errors raise a notification to a named owner instead of accumulating silently in a log nobody reads
Outcome
The renewal spreadsheet stopped existing. Account managers see delivery and billing status on the record they were already looking at, and the data is current as of that morning rather than whenever someone last ran an export.
The engagement came in well under the bidirectional quote, mostly because the discovery phase established that the expensive half of the requirement was never actually required. The field map document is the artifact the firm values most — when they change platforms eventually, they’ll know exactly what was connected and why.