Why we stop at the invoice
There’s a question that comes up in almost every first conversation, usually from the CEO: And the ERP, do you do that too? Our answer is no, and we consider that answer one of our best marks of quality.
The line runs exactly at invoice triggering. Everything up to that point belongs to RevOps and therefore to us: deal won, billing triggered, invoice out, and the payment status flows back into the CRM so sales can see whether the customer pays before selling him the next upgrade. We build that entire stretch, including the integration to Stripe, Chargebee, or whatever does your invoicing. Everything from the journal entry onward is neighboring territory. Accounting, chart of accounts, tax logic, inventory management, stock levels: different country, different language, different specialists.
Why do we insist on this? Because ERP is a world of its own, with its own regulations, its own release cycles, and mistakes that don’t ruin a dashboard but a year-end close. Anyone who wants to seriously master SAP Business One or a homegrown Navision does little else. That’s a full-time field. Not a minor.
And now the uncomfortable observation: the vendor who promises you CRM, marketing automation, BI, AI, and the ERP from a single source typically masters one of those well, two passably, and the rest not at all. The everything promise is a sales argument, not a competence profile. You only find out mid-project, when a subcontractor nobody briefed suddenly shows up for the ERP part, or a junior who’s seeing the module for the first time. You still paid the do-it-all day rate.
A cleanly drawn line is the opposite of that. In the audit we name what’s broken beyond invoice triggering, we see it anyway. Then we define the interface precisely enough that your ERP partner can implement it without asking three times: which fields, which triggers, which format, who is master for which data. That undefined handoff between CRM and ERP is exactly where most midmarket integration projects die. Not on the technology. On the question of who owns which record, which nobody asked beforehand.
A vendor who says out loud what he doesn’t do is also telling you the rest is meant seriously. On the next proposal, ask where the line is. If none comes, that’s your answer.
