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TigerPowerTigerPower 

Integrating sf opportunity and lineItems with external billing system

Hey everyone,

We need to integrate some salesforce data with external billing system. When opportunity stage is set to "Ready to invoice" should an external billing system get data from that opportunity (certain fields) and its opportunityLineItems. We thought that an outbound message would have done the trick, but the billing system does not support WSDL and they don't accept our outbound messages. 

 

What the billing system company has, is a schema sample and .dtd files. So we can process our opportunity and line item data into xml. Still there are lots of question to solve with the integration... 

 

Can you give us some advice or point of views to consider with sf integrations? There are certainly many possibilities to carry on, and some middleware companies offering their sf connectors and services. The "problem" is that there will not be hundreds or even dozens of invoices per month, and the integration monthly cost should be very reasonable.

 

Maybe the best solution for us would be a situation where everything needed for the integration would be build in our salesforce; webservice calls, apex classes and so on. 

 

Or do you have a better idea or solution for us? Let us know what you think, and share with us your thoughts about sf integrations.

 

Best Regards,

TP

 

 

start_sstart_s

Hi TP,

 

I'm not 100% sure if the solution I describe below would suite you. 

 

You have mentioned that  

The "problem" is that there will not be hundreds or even dozens of invoices per month, and the integration monthly cost should be very reasonable.

 

I suggest using Apatar open source data integration tool that will help you join your data and fields from SF opportunity table and SF opportunitylineitens table by opportunity ID. Then you can easily integrate/migrate you data to external  billing system.

 

Apatar's Salesforce connector support SOQL queries and it would be very easy to check every new opportunity with stage which is set to "Ready to invoice", by writing very simple query. Then you may use Apatar Scheduling app to import new opportunities for example every 2 hours.

 

The other thing is that you didn't provide detailed information about your external billing system. Could you please elaborate on it? What is the name of it? Is it desktop or web based application?

 

Anyway, you may contact me directly via email (sergei.l at apatar.com) to discuss details and I will show you a couple of examples what you can do. Will it work for you?

 

Regards,

Sergei

www.apatar.com

www.apatarforge.org