Powering eCommerce Accounting: How SyncTools Automates $20M+ in Annual Transactions

The Client

SyncTools, developed by Satva Solutions, is a cloud-based accounting integration application designed to connect Linnworks—a leading multichannel eCommerce platform—with major accounting systems such as:

• QuickBooks
• Zoho Books
• Xero

SyncTools was created to address a major gap in the Linnworks ecosystem. It helps merchants, retailers, and wholesalers automate and streamline the synchronization of sales orders, purchase orders, and contacts with their preferred accounting software.

The Challenges

Linnworks is a platform that helps merchants sell their products worldwide using the network and reach of Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Magento, Shopify, etc.

It provides software that integrates with 27+ sales channels and 20+ shipping channels. Overall, it’s a complete platform for merchants to sell their products and maintain a centralized inventory.

The key challenge here is that Linnworks is busy managing its platform for adding new sales and shipping channels, but no accounting integrations were available.

So, the SyncTools team decided to make an app for Linnworks that will help Linnworks users keep their sales and purchase orders synchronized with QuickBooks, ZohoBooks, and Xero.

• Satva Solutions took this challenge and made it its mission to solve this hurdle. That led us to create an online app called SyncTools.
• This app is available on Linnworks’ app marketplace, where customers can easily install and use accounting integrations. SyncTools is a subscription-based product.
• Our challenge was that many retailers, wholesalers, and merchants found the app’s pricing high.
• So Satva Solutions worked on optimizing the app’s cloud infrastructure to reduce the cost and pass the benefits on to its customers. On average, a 20 USD price discount was given on each subscription plan.
• Intuit QuickBooks decided to stop supporting OAuth 1.0. In the meantime, we had to upgrade to OAuth 2.0 and ask all the clients to re-authenticate.
• The Xero team also decided the same, and we moved the system to OAuth 2.0 for the Xero connector in 2021.
• Zoho Book provides very limited API calls (2500 per day) per organization. So, if there was a huge volume of orders during the festival season, API calls would fail from Zoho Books’ side.
• So, we had to create a mechanism for sleep and wake-up. Once the daily limit was reached, the system would automatically go to sleep mode until midnight (12 AM).

Project Scope

• Business Analysis
• Web Application Development (Frontend + Backend)
• QuickBooks, Zoho Books, Xero API development
• QA & Testing
• Support & Maintenance

The Solution

The Satva team understood the gap between Linnworks and accounting software.

To remove the manual sync of data from Linnworks to QuickBooks, Zoho Books, and Xero, they introduced a system that automatically synced sales, purchase, and item data every few minutes from Linnworks to accounting software.

Features

• Real-Time Sync
• Fully configurable tool
• Build in error reporting
• Grouped invoices
• Sync filter channel-wise

Architecture diagram

Platform/Technology

• Frontend: Microsoft ASP.NET MVC, jQuery
• HTML/CSS: HTML5, CSS3, SCSS
• Cloud Services: Azure scalable cloud service, blob storage, service bus, scheduled jobs, worker role
• Programming Language: C#

Results

• More than 500 thousand sales orders are already synchronized with accounting systems.
• More than 80 thousand purchase orders are already synchronized with accounting systems
• More than 400 thousand contacts/ customers are already synchronized with accounting systems.
• SyncTools handled business transactions worth 20 million USD a year.
• With the free plan of SyncTools, many startup customers saved hundreds of dollars and saved their time in the manual entry of sales orders in accounting software

Timespan

• 8 months for development
• Ongoing support and maintenance

Available here: synctools