What Types of Records are Usually Synced?
Contacts 📞 📩
Contacts are a vital part of any business's growth and operation. All communications and sales depend on the information you have about your clients (or potential clients). And if your business takes advantage of more than one business app, having your contacts and their data synced and up to date is crucial.
It's not a good idea to sync contacts manually. And it's practically impossible to sync it manually without missing, overriding or losing any important data. This is why many companies try to automate this process using various tools. Some CRM systems provide built-in integrations with third-party contact apps, but very often those integrations are one-way, manually triggered, or simply not advanced enough to fit your specific needs.
There are some basic data fields that contacts across virtually any business tool have:
- First, middle and last names (sometimes combined into one field).
- Company and job title.
- The primary email address, or the list of email addresses.
- Work phone, home phone, or the list of phone numbers.
- Description or notes (plain text or HTML).
It is important to make sure your sync solution covers as many of the standard fields out of the box, while allowing you to adjust the field mapping or include custom fields.
Click here to see which contact apps can be synced using SyncPenguin.
Meetings and Tasks 🗓️ 📌
Synchronization of meetings, appointments or tasks across various calendars is also very common. In the most popular use case, a customer wants to sync meetings between their work calendar (for example, an Office 365 Outlook calendar) and their private calendar (for example, a Google calendar).
Here are some fields that are usually mapped:
- Meeting subject (or title).
- Start time/end time (or due date in case of tasks).
- Description/invitation (often in HTML format).
- Participants or attendees (as a list of emails and their status).
- Location.
- Recurrence patter if the meeting or task is recurring.
Some advanced calendars support recurring meetings, and it's particularly hard to sync those as they usually have recurrence exceptions, deleted or modified occurrences, which can be in different formats and hard to keep track of.
Click to see which calendar meeting or task apps can be synced using SyncPenguin.
Products and inventory levels 🛒
Products are another vital part of many business operations. If your company sells a lot of products or variations of products, it's important to be able to keep the information about them consistent across your systems, be it an online store like Shopify, or a POS-system like Square.
Some commonly synced data across different business tools include:
- Product name.
- Description.
- SKU.
- Price (list price, cost price, etc).
- Quantity.
Sometimes customer might want to only sync inventory levels (quantities) for existing products.
Click here to see what stores can be synced using SyncPenguin.
Opportunities and Orders 📝
One common use case of syncing is to automatically convert an opportunity into a quote (or a quote into an order) while preserving as much information as possible.
This type of synchronization often needs to be customized to fit the customer's specific needs, as very often they have their own idea of when to convert an opportunity into a quote or an order, as well as how to map the data between the two.
Files 📄🔗
This is probably the easiest type of record to sync (in general). This is because there's basically no need to implement any type of field mapping. Instead, you simply copy a file from one place to another, making sure that the newest version is not overwritten.
Conclusions
As you can see, there are many different types of records that business tools manage, and it's important to be able to sync as much data as possible, regardless of the way and format it is stored in.
SyncPenguin is a tool that provides synchronizations across different business apps. It covers all types of records, not just contacts. This gives you the possibility of organizing your business tools and communication in a way that exactly fits your needs.
Contact us if you'd like to learn how SyncPenguin can improve your business productivity with reliable two-way synchronizations.
