Connecting Your Apps
Using Zapier and Make to stitch your tools together without writing code.
Notes from Randall Harper. Thirty years working alongside owner-operators, executives and boards — companies of all types and sizes — across entertainment & media, hospitality, service based business, lifestyle businesses, financial services, retail and not-for-profit, in Australia, Asia, the United Kingdom and the United States. What follows is the thinking I keep returning to.
Integration is where time hides
Most small businesses bleed hours every week to manual data movement — copying a lead from the website into the CRM, retyping an invoice from one tool into another, updating the same customer record in three different places. A small investment in integration almost always pays back disproportionately, because the savings happen every day, forever.
The two tools worth knowing
Zapier and Make are no-code automation platforms that connect almost any two business apps. Zapier is easier to learn; Make is more powerful and cheaper at scale. Either is enough to handle 90% of small-business integration needs. Start with whichever one your most-used tools have the cleanest integration with.
The integrations that pay back first
- Website enquiry form → CRM contact created → owner notified.
- Quote accepted in proposal tool → job created in field service tool → customer record updated.
- Job marked complete → invoice generated in accounting tool → review request sent.
- New customer added to CRM → added to email marketing list.
- Calendar booking → SMS confirmation sent to customer.
Document every automation
An automation no one understands is a future support disaster. Keep a simple list — what it does, when it fires, what it touches, who set it up. When something breaks, the list is what lets you fix it quickly rather than tracing the workflow from scratch.
Test for failure, not just success
Every automation will eventually fail — an API change, a tool migration, a missing field. Build in failure alerts where possible (Zapier and Make both support this) so you find out about broken automations from a notification, not from a customer complaint. Silent failures are the most expensive ones.
Want this as a PDF?
Tell us where to send it and we'll email you a copy to keep.
The contents of this paper are the opinion of Clear Point Advisory only. Readers should rely on their own judgement and obtain professional advice appropriate to their circumstances.