SyncTools.io: Linnworks & QuickBooks - Xero integrator

The Challenge

Linnworks is a platform which helps merchants to sell their products worldwide using the network and reach of amazon, ebay, etsy, magento, shopify etc. It provides software which 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 the company Linnworks is busy managing their platform for adding new sales and shipping channels, but there were no accounting integrations available. So, the SyncTools team decided to make an app for Linnworks which will help Linnworks users to keep their sales & purchase orders synchronized with QuickBooks, ZohoBooks and Xero.

• Satva Solutions took this as a challenge and a mission to solve this hurdle. That led us to create an online app called SyncTools. This app is available on Linnworks app marketplace for customers to easily install and use accounting integrations. SyncTools is a subscription-based product.
• The challenge that we faced was that many retailers, wholesalers, merchants found the pricing of the app high. So Satva Solutions worked on the cloud infrastructure optimization of the app to reduce the cost and pass the benefits to its customers. There was on average a 20 USD price discount that was given on each subscription plan.
• Intuit QuickBooks decided to stop support for 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 Xero connector too in 2021.
• With Zoho Book, it provides very limited API calls (2500 per day) per organization. So, in the case when there was a huge volume of orders during the festival season, API calls would fail from Zoho Books side. So we had to put a mechanism for sleep and wake up and once per day limit was reached, the system would automatically go to sleep mode until midnight 12am.

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. For removing manual sync of data from Linnworks to QuickBooks, Zoho Books, Xero, they introduced a system that automatically synced sales, purchase, items data every few minutes from Linnworks to accounting software.

Architecture Diagram

Platform/Technology

• Frontend: Microsoft Asp.net MVC, jQuery
• HTML/CSS: HTML5, CSS3, SCSS
• Azure scalable cloud service, blog storage, service bus, scheduled jobs, worker role
• Programming language: C#

"Fantastic, this has saved us so much time. This has clearly been engineered by someone who knows the challenges of getting transactions from Linnworks to Xero in a format that is useful for approval and reconcile. It sits in the background, as orders are processed in Linnworks it creates an invoice in Xero with the option to create a payment to the correct bank account for the marketplace. When a PO is marked as dispatched this also creates a PO in Xero with the PO notes. Support is fantastic"

Glenn E

(USA)

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 manual entry of sales orders in accounting software