ERP API integration: definition, examples, tools, and more

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are the financial backbone for countless organizations; it’s where organizations manage invoicing, procurement, supply chain operations, analytics, and much more.

Given the critical use cases they support, they more than likely collect and store data that can be invaluable to your product.

This begs the question: What are some ways to integrate ERP systems with your product? 

We’ll tackle this question, but before we do, let’s define ERP integrations both within and beyond the context of using application programming interfaces (APIs).

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What is ERP integration?

It’s the process of connecting your product with clients’ ERP systems via APIs, files, or custom scripts. Once a connection is built through any of these methods, data between your product and a customer’s ERP system can be kept in sync.

What is API ERP integration?

It’s the process of connecting your product with clients’ ERP systems via APIs. Once connected, clients can sync data between their ERP systems and your product in, or near, real-time. 

Related: What is an invoicing API?

Examples of ERP API integration 

Here are some common ERP API integrations:

Note: For every example, we’ll assume your product belongs to a different software category.

Sync invoices between your CRM and clients’ ERP systems

Your clients may, unfortunately, fail to meet deadlines for paying off invoices. Whenever that’s the case, the assigned customer success manager (CSM) needs to be notified on time in order to respond promptly and successfully. 

To help ensure CSMs stay up to date on late payments, you can integrate ERP systems with your CRM and sync accounts and their associated invoices. You can even go a step further by using webhooks to sync the data in real-time as well as build an automation within your CRM where once an invoice is late, a task gets created for the assigned CSM to follow-up.

Include expenses in your business intelligence platform 

As your clients’ employees submit and get reimbursed for expenses at scale, the analysts at these organizations may want to take a closer look at the data to uncover issues and potential cost-saving solutions. 

With this in mind, they can integrate your business intelligence (BI) product with their ERP systems and then build a data flow where expenses (and their associated fields) are periodically synced (e.g. every 5 minutes) with your platform.

Add key documents to your file storage solution 

Your clients’ ERP systems are likely to host a variety of important documents, from purchase orders to balance sheets. To provide a backup for these documents, allow more users to access them (outside of those who have access to your ERP system), and make them easier to find, your clients can add them to your file storage solution.

To facilitate this use case, clients can simply integrate their ERP systems with your file storage platform, sync the applications in real-time via webhooks (to ensure newly-created or updated files are accounted for quickly), and build workflows in your product where, depending on the nature of the file, it gets added to a specific folder.  

Related: Examples of CRM API integration

Benefits of ERP API integration

With these use cases in mind, here are a few of the top benefits of ERP API integration:

Improves your customer experience

Allowing clients to sync data and documents from their ERP system to your product naturally allows clients to realize more value from your solution—whether that’s performing more in-depth analysis, engaging with accounts more effectively, retrieving and using key documents faster, and so on.

These improved customer experiences are likely to translate to higher product usage, which, in turn, should lead to improved customer retention and additional expansion opportunities.

Provides you with a competitive advantage

Implementing product integrations with ERP systems can help your organization stand out in the market—especially when you integrate with more ERP systems and allow clients to sync a broader range of objects and fields than your rivals.

Enables you to expand into new markets and move upmarket

Organizations across regions, industries, and sizes tend to rely on a specific set of ERP systems. For instance, enterprise organizations often rely on NetSuite while a small business may use a tool like Freshbooks.

By offering integrations with the ERP systems your target accounts use, you can gain traction with them more easily and increase your total addressable market (TAM). 

Related: The business benefits of API integration

Challenges of ERP API integration

While ERP API integrations are clearly worth implementing, they present challenges that you’ll need to overcome. 

Difficult to Scale 

Each ERP system offers a unique set of APIs that your team will need to study, build to, and maintain. 

This may not present much of an issue if your team only needs to integrate with one or two ERP systems; however, the reality is that there are likely several integrations your clients and prospects need. In addition, building and maintaining each integration can take your developers countless time, pushing them away from initiatives related to your core product.

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Related: A guide to lead APIs

Hard to troubleshoot integration issues

Integration issues can happen for any number of reasons—whether it’s an API outage, a bad API key, missing permissions, etc. 

Forcing your engineers to pinpoint any integration issue, determine the appropriate solution, and then relay all this information back to clients can cause headaches and take hours out of their day.

ERP API integration best practices

To help you build ERP integrations successfully, you can follow the tips below.

Prioritize ERP integration builds via a scoring framework

You should prioritize the integrations that’ll have the biggest impact on your business relative to the amount of resources required to build and maintain them.

To help suss this out across your ERP integration opportunities, you can score each across a common set of factors—such as the number of customers requesting them, the size of companies that request them, and the level of difficulty in building them—and then compare these scores across the integrations. 

Loop in your go-to-market teams early on 

Your customer-facing ERP integrations are only successful if your customers end up adopting and using them in high-value ways. 

To ensure this happens, you need to enable the following teams while your ERP integration gets built:

• Sales: your sellers need to understand the core value props of the ERP integration, when and how it should get introduced in the selling cycle, how it’s priced, etc.

• Marketing: your marketing team needs to prepare social posts, press releases, emails, and more to both raise awareness of the ERP integration and highlight its use cases

• Support/customer success: your support and CS teams need to understand how to onboard customers onto the integration, how to debug various issues, when to introduce the integration in the customer’s journey, and more

Related: Our best resources for taking your product integrations to market

Decide whether to build or buy your ERP integrations before getting started

Depending on your integration requirements and the internal resources at your disposal, it can make sense to build ERP integrations (i.e., implement and maintain them internally) or buy (i.e., outsource them to a 3rd-party) them.

To help you land on the right approach, it’s worth considering the following criteria: 

• Level of customization: If your ERP integrations need to be highly customized to individual customers' needs, you’ll likely need to implement them in-house 

• Engineering resources: If you can’t afford to allocate significant engineering resources (100+ hours/year) per year to building and maintaining each integration, it likely makes more sense to outsource them

• Core or long-tail integration: If an integration impacts the majority of your users and is core to their experience with your platform, it may make more sense to keep it in-house to better control how it performs; while if an integration isn’t as important, outsourcing it likely makes more sense

Here's a decision tree that can help you land on the best decision for your business:

‍Related: Build vs buy integrations: A guide to making the decision

ERP API integration tools

At this point, you might be wondering which integration approaches let you realize the benefits of ERP integration while avoiding its drawbacks.

To answer this question comprehensively, let’s dive into the most common ways to build ERP integrations:

Related: Common types of payroll integration tools

Native integrations

This approach is simply when your developers build and maintain all of the integrations themselves. 

It inherently offers certain benefits, such as not having to rely on 3rd-parties to manage the integrations. It can also prove sufficient if you only need to build a few ERP integrations that are relatively shallow in scope. 

However, for all the reasons mentioned earlier, this approach likely can’t scale effectively, and it’ll drown your engineers in work that they likely won’t enjoy and won’t be particularly well-suited to perform.

Embedded iPaaS

An embedded integration platform as a service allows you and/or your clients to build and deploy integrations through its workflow builder.

While its pre-built connectors allow for accelerated integration development, the platform itself still requires technical expertise to use. In addition, it only allows you to build one integration at a time, which doesn’t lend itself well to scaling.

Unified APIs

A unified API solution neatly addresses the issue of scalability by letting you access multiple ERP integrations through a single API build. 

However, not all unified API solutions are the same. They often offer vastly different integration management capabilities, integrations, common models, security controls, and more.

Merge, the leading unified API platform, stands out in the unified API space for each dimension referenced above. 

It offers more than a dozen ERP integrations (and quickly growing), a robust set of integrations management features, comprehensive common models—along with the ability to pull in custom objects and fields via features like Field Mapping—, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA certifications, and much more.

Learn more about Merge and see the platform in action by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.

ERP API integration FAQ

In case you have any more questions on ERP integrations, we’ve addressed several more below.

What is an ERP system?

It’s a financial system that lets you perform a host of important functions, from analyzing financial data to processing expenses to generating journal entries. Depending on the vendor, it can also provide additional solutions related to recruiting, payroll management, project management, and more.

Which types of applications frequently integrate with an ERP system?

The applications often fall into the category of a CRM, HRIS, or ticketing system, as these systems often collect data and documents that ERP systems need. With this in mind, applications like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Zendesk, Workday, and BambooHR are often integrated with ERP systems.

When does it make sense to build ERP integrations?

It typically makes sense as soon as you start receiving requests from customers, prospects, or internal go-to-market teams. And in many cases, it makes sense before you start receiving requests, as customer-facing ERP integrations can be a clear way to enhance your platform's value.