THE PATRIOT KID
THE BOOKING SCREEN AND TYPE
THEM INTO THE ACCOUNTS.
IT'S JUST WHAT WE DO.
NOT “NOT LONG” — TIME IT
TOMORROW. THAT NUMBER IS
THE WHOLE ARGUMENT.
× 5 days × 48 weeks
= 80 hours a year
Two working weeks. Every year.
Doing something a computer
does perfectly and for free.
✗ A digit dropped off an invoice
✗ A job entered twice, billed twice
✗ A job missed entirely, billed never
✗ Two systems that disagree, and no way
to know which one is right
Check both products for the other's name first.
2. A connector service.
Monthly fee, no code, good for simple hand-offs.
3. Something written for you.
When the rules are yours and nothing off the
shelf knows them.
TWENTY MINUTES TO SWITCH ON.
I'D BEEN DOING IT BY HAND
FOR THREE YEARS.
the settings page of software
they already own.
⏳ Time It Before You Fix It
Everybody underestimates this job, because it's boring and it happens in the gaps. "Not long" is nearly always fifteen to thirty minutes once you actually hold a stopwatch to it.
So measure it for one week before deciding anything. Write down minutes per day and how many corrections came back. That single number decides everything that follows — and if it turns out to be four minutes a day, the honest answer is leave it alone. Not every annoyance is worth engineering away.
Twenty minutes a day is eighty hours a year. That's what makes a build worth quoting.
🔍 Check What You Already Own
This is the step people skip, and it's free. Open both systems and look for the other one by name — under Integrations, Apps, Connections or Sync.
Booking systems, card readers, accounting packages and shopping carts have spent years building connections to each other. Very often the thing somebody has been doing by hand for three years is a toggle nobody ever looked for, because it was switched on for a competitor's product by default and never revisited.
If it isn't there, the next cheapest step is a connector service — a monthly fee to have one system's new records appear in the other. Fine for a simple hand-off. It struggles the moment the rules get specific: only jobs over $500, only after the deposit clears, and put the job number in the reference.
🛠 When It's Worth Building
Something written for you makes sense when the rules are yours — when the hand-off isn't "copy this row there" but a set of decisions only your business makes.
Two things to insist on, whoever builds it:
- It tells you when it fails. An integration that silently stops is worse than no integration, because you stop checking. It should email somebody the moment it can't do its job.
- You can see what it did. A plain list of what moved and when, so a disagreement between the two systems is answerable.
And keep the manual method written down. Every connection breaks eventually — a password changes, an API is retired — and the business needs to run that morning regardless.
Retyping something every day? Tell Chuck what the two systems are — the first answer is often free.
Got an IT problem worthy of a comic? Tell Chuck about it.