Xero, HubSpot, most booking systems and most accounting packages have shipped an integrations page in the last few years, quietly, without anyone at the business necessarily noticing. A lot of the copy-pasting that feels like it needs custom software is actually a settings toggle nobody's found yet.
The thirty-minute check
- 1Open the settings of each tool you're moving data between and look for a menu called Integrations, Apps or Connections.
- 2Search the tool's name alongside the other tool's name — "Xero HubSpot integration" is a search someone else has already made and answered.
- 3Check whether either tool lists on Zapier or Make. A huge number of common connections already exist there, built and maintained by someone else.
- 4If nothing turns up in any of those three places, that's a genuine signal you need something custom — not a guess.
A subscription-priced automation platform is often the right answer for a simple, one-directional connection. It stops being the right answer once the workflow needs a judgement call in the middle — deciding which of three systems a piece of data should go to, or what to do when two records disagree.
When it's actually worth building something
- The connection needs a decision in the middle, not just a data transfer.
- You're already paying monthly for a stack of small automations that are individually simple but collectively fragile, breaking whenever one vendor changes its layout.
- The systems involved genuinely have no existing way to talk to each other, and you've actually checked rather than assumed.
The order matters more than the answer. Check what already exists first, at no cost beyond the half hour it takes — then bring what's left, the part with no existing answer, to someone who builds the connecting piece properly.