A growing services business was running on four disconnected platforms, with manual handoffs and duplicated data at every stage. "Railroad" connected them into a single operating environment — and helped scale the business from $1M in one state to $5M across three.
The Situation
The business ran on good tools — a CRM for sales, a platform for project management, another for time tracking, and an accounting system. The problem was that none of them were connected.
Every stage of a project meant a manual handoff. A deal closed in the CRM had to be re-entered to create a project. Time logged against that project had to be manually reconciled before it could be invoiced. Data was duplicated across systems, which meant it was inconsistent across systems — and nobody had a single view of the project lifecycle from beginning to end.
For a business trying to grow, that's a hard ceiling. Every new client added more manual handling, more room for error, and more administrative drag on the team.
The Build
The solution was a custom integration layer — nicknamed "Railroad" — that connected all four systems and automated the flow of data between them, so the whole project lifecycle ran on rails from lead to invoice.
Connected the sales-to-delivery handoff
A deal won in the CRM automatically created the corresponding project in the project management platform — no re-entry, no dropped details, no lag between sales and delivery starting work.
Linked time tracking to billing
Time logged against projects flowed through to the accounting system, closing the gap between work done and work invoiced — and removing the manual reconciliation that used to slow down billing.
Created one source of truth
With the systems connected, data stopped being duplicated and contradicting itself. Leadership finally had end-to-end visibility of the project lifecycle — where every job sat, in real time.
The Stack
| System | Role in the flow |
|---|---|
| Pipedrive | CRM — where leads and deals were managed |
| Asana | Project management — delivery work, automatically created from won deals |
| Harvest | Time tracking — hours logged against projects |
| Xero | Accounting — invoicing driven by tracked time |
| Integration layer | REST APIs and automation tying the four together into one lifecycle |
The Outcome
The integration didn't just save time — it removed the ceiling on growth. Because the lifecycle was automated and consistent, the business could take on more work across more locations without the administrative load scaling at the same rate. When COVID hit, the same connected systems made the shift to fully remote operation straightforward.
Good tools aren't enough on their own. The value was never in any single platform — it was in connecting them so the business could finally run as one system instead of four.
If your team is re-entering the same data across different platforms, that's friction you can remove — and it's usually the thing quietly capping your growth. An Efficiency Audit finds where it's happening.