A pipeline off third-party SaaS and joined to the finance system

Northrail are a sixty-person engineering consultancy. Their CRM was costing more each year while being used, in practice, for two things: a pipeline list and a contact database.

The more expensive problem was disconnection. Opportunities lived in the CRM, projects and invoicing lived in the ERP, and reconciling the two was a monthly exercise in someone’s spreadsheet.

What we did

We were direct at the scoping call about Twenty’s maturity. Northrail needed a pipeline, contacts and an API — all of which Twenty does well. Had they needed marketing automation or CPQ, we would have advised against it.

Data modelling took the largest share. Northrail sell multi-stage engineering engagements where an opportunity can split into several projects, which is not the model any CRM assumes by default.

We imported four years of pipeline history, contacts and activity with a reconciliation report against the source export.

The integration is where the value landed. Twenty’s GraphQL API is wired to the ERP so that a won opportunity creates the project record directly, with no re-keying and no monthly reconciliation.

The outcome

The per-seat CRM subscription is gone, though the saving was modest and was not the driver.

The monthly reconciliation between pipeline and finance no longer exists as a task, because the two systems now share a record rather than a spreadsheet.

Northrail’s data sits in their own PostgreSQL alongside their operational data, so pipeline and delivery reporting are finally the same report.