ERP integration
Your ERP keeps its job. Carrots takes the ordering.
Every distribution project we have seen fail started with a migration. So Carrots does not ask for one. It reads the items, customers and price lists out of the system you already run, and leaves that system as the master of them. Your accountant’s world does not change.
What comes across
Three things, and only three
A trade portal needs less from an ERP than people expect. Getting these right is most of the integration.
Items
Your product master: codes, descriptions, item groups and the pack structure. Only the lines you actually want on a trade catalogue, filtered by whatever flag your ERP already uses to mark them.
Customers
Trade accounts with their codes, addresses and payment terms, so an account in Carrots is the same account your finance team already knows by number.
Price lists
The reference price list behind the catalogue, and the specific list assigned to each account. This is usually the part that decides whether an integration is worth doing at all.
Which way the data flows
One direction, and we will not pretend otherwise
Integration pages are vague about direction because vagueness sells. Here is exactly how it works today, and what is coming.
Your ERP stays the master
Every one of those flows in one direction: out of the ERP and into Carrots. Carrots never edits your item master, your customer records or your price lists. If a price is wrong, it is wrong in the ERP, and fixing it there fixes it here.
Orders live in Carrots today
Orders placed by your customers are captured, priced and invoiced in Carrots, and your team works them in the back office. They are not written back into the ERP automatically. That is a real limitation, it is the question every finance team asks second, and we would rather you knew now.
Order write-back is on the roadmap
Pushing orders into your ERP is committed work that has not been built yet, so nobody has to re-key anything for long. We are not putting a date on it here, because what it takes depends on what your ERP will accept and how your finance process expects documents to arrive. Ask us and we will scope it against your system rather than nod.
Two ways in
A connection, or a file
Both feed the same importer, so nothing depends on which one you start with. Most distributors start with a file and move to a connection once the catalogue has settled.
A live connector
Reads your ERP directly, on demand or on a schedule. Items sync in bulk; accounts and their price lists are pulled as you need them, which matters when the ERP holds tens of thousands of customers and only a few hundred trade with you online.
Best when the data changes often and the ERP exposes it properly.
A file import
The same importer, fed by a CSV instead of a connection. Items keyed on your item code, accounts on your customer code, price lists per item. Nothing about the resulting data is second class: both routes land in exactly the same place.
Best for getting started, for an ERP with no usable API, or as the fallback when a connection is down.
Scoping
Six questions that decide the answer
Ask us to integrate and this is the conversation. All of it is knowable before anybody signs anything, which is the point.
- 1Can it be read at all: an API, a database view, or a scheduled export?
- 2Does it expose customer-specific pricing, or only the base list? This is the one that most often decides the answer.
- 3How are trade accounts identified, and does that code survive into your finance process?
- 4Which flag marks an item as sellable online, and is it maintained?
- 5How many customers and items are we dealing with, and how often do they change?
- 6Is there a test company we can read before we touch the live one?
“It has an API” is not the same as “it has the API we need”
This is the single most common way an ERP integration goes over time and over budget. Almost every ERP can list products. Far fewer will tell you, over an interface, what a specific customer pays for a specific product under their negotiated agreement, which is the thing a trade portal actually needs. We check which one is true before quoting, not after. If the answer is the wrong one, a file import gets you live anyway.
See the connectors that exist today, and their honest statusTell us what you run on
Send us the name and version, and whoever administers it. We will tell you which of the six questions above we can already answer, and which need a call with your ERP partner.