1. Morning: quick audit and an idempotent matching key
Start by running a focused audit of the six fields that usually decide whether a record is the same customer in both systems. Use a small export or a spreadsheet if you don't have middleware yet and spot obvious gaps or conflicting values quickly.
Make one short, shareable cross‑system key (the idempotent matching key) and write it to both systems today. If you can't generate one from existing IDs, create integration_id and set it to a stable value (for example: crm:contact:{crm_id} or acct:customer:{xero_id}). Store that key on contact/customer records so every future sync can match reliably.
Critical fields to check now:
- integration_id / cross-system key
- primary email
- accounting customer/reference ID (Xero/Salesforce/ERP ID)
- billing address or postcode
- VAT/currency or price-related fields
- billing contact flag or contact role
2. Midday: define simple conflict rules, canary records and reconciliation checks
Decide two or three simple rules so the sync never has to guess. Example rules: accounting system wins for invoices and prices; CRM wins for marketing opt‑in and primary email; if both sides change the same field in 1 hour, send to human review. Keep rules short, explicit and documented so any team member can read them.
Create 3–5 canary records (one service customer, one recurring invoice, one prospect) and push them through the full round trip: CRM → accounting → CRM. Run a reconciliation check after each pass: compare integration_id and the six critical fields, log mismatches and count failures. If you spot a repeated mismatch, tighten the rule or add a small normalisation step (e.g. postcode formats, currency symbols) rather than a complex transform.
3. Afternoon: add retries, a dead‑letter path, owners and SLAs
Make the sync resilient: add retry + backoff (a few retries with increasing wait times) and a dead‑letter path that marks the record with an error flag and places it into a simple human review queue (a CRM list, a spreadsheet or a ticket). Don’t try to automate every fix — quarantine uncertain records and let a person resolve them.
Assign owners for the six critical fields and set SLAs for resolution (for example: invoice failures – 4 hours, data mismatches – 24 hours). Write a one‑page runbook with: how to pause the sync, how to inspect the canaries, steps to reprocess a dead‑lettered record and who to call. Link your runbook to your monitoring check (daily reconciliation summary and the canary pass/fail).
If you want a short hands‑on session to make these changes and test them in Fareham or across the South Coast — covering CRM optimisation, CRM data cleanup and simple workflow automation — see our CRM and marketing data optimisation page for practical support. If you'd rather bring someone in to do the day with your team, Optira can help as a practical, delivery‑led partner.