Patchworks and Prima
Integration Agency & Consultants
Maintaining accurate financial close and inventory truth becomes a manual burden when sales channels scale faster than your Prima ERP can ingest data. At this point, the operational pressure usually shows up as mismatched stock levels or month-end financial slippage. Our approach uses Patchworks as the data conduit to push orders and customer data into Prima, ensuring your system of record remains accurate. We focus on securing the financial trust boundary so that your team spends less time on manual reconciliation and more time on fulfilment.
Auditing your ERP and integration landscape
Our consulting services swiftly connect Patchworks and Prima using IPaaS and ERP solutions, ensuring your tech ecosystem operates efficiently. Our system audit services are invaluable, providing a thorough review of your Patchworks and Prima integrations, identifying inefficiencies and integration gaps across your IPaaS and ERP landscape. This enables our consultants and your team to take decisive action, optimising processes and supporting smooth operations. With our expertise, you can deliver an outstanding customer experience and keep your technology aligned with business goals.
Solution Design
We design Patchworks and Prima integrations with Prima as the definitive source of truth for financials and inventory. Our architecture prioritises structured financial postings to allow for validation before the ledger closes, ensuring the audit trail remains intact. A core trade-off exists between high-frequency inventory updates and system stability. We typically recommend a scheduled stock sync from Prima to sales channels because real-time pushes can create excessive load during peak trading, risking data timeouts and API throttling. Order ingestion through Patchworks is sequenced to ensure customer record matching occurs before an order is finalised in Prima, preventing orphaned transactions or duplicate accounts. This design ensures the finance team can close month-end accurately while the warehouse team works from a stable, synchronised stock list without the risk of mid-day data drift.
Synchronising transactional data and stock levels
The integration acts as a structured conduit between your sales channels and Prima, with the integration layer managing the transformation logic. Orders flow from the storefront into Prima on a defined schedule, where they are matched against existing company records to ensure financial integrity and prevent duplicate customer creation. Inventory levels are typically pushed from Prima out to sales channels, maintaining one authoritative stock level to prevent overselling. We embed monitoring at every step, ensuring that data which fails validation-such as tax mismatches or missing product codes-is flagged for review before it impacts dispatch or your month-end accounting.
Centralised orchestration and data security standards
IPaaS enables Patchworks and Prima to integrate ERP systems securely and efficiently, supporting real-time data flow and automation. By leveraging IPaaS, Patchworks and Prima benefit from ISO 27001 and SOC 2 and above security accreditations, ensuring data protection. IPaaS platforms simplify complex ERP integrations, reduce manual effort, and provide a centralised, compliant solution, making it easier to manage connections and maintain high security standards.
Monitoring operational exceptions and data drift
A dashboard showing total success can be misleading if data drift is occurring silently. We focus on operational visibility that surfaces why a specific SKU failed to update or why a tax line in a sales order does not match Prima calculation logic. By monitoring specific exceptions instead of just the totals, we catch reconciliation gaps before they compound into financial errors at month-end. Our approach identifies hidden issues like duplicate order IDs or stale inventory buffers, ensuring the data in Prima matches the reality of your storefronts.
Handover for finance and operations teams
Handover ensures finance and operations teams move from implementation to full ownership of the logic. We define clear responsibilities for exception handling: typically with finance owning the reconciliation of order values and tax within Prima, while the ecommerce team monitors sync flags and channel-side alerts. Training covers the specific daily checks required to ensure stock levels match between systems and how to interpret common alerts from the integration layer. Documentation is provided as an operational manual rather than a technical archive, detailing exactly what to do when a stock adjustment or a refund fails to post. This ensures your team can manage the integration as a standard business process.
Post-launch governance and error resolution care
Post-launch, we provide ongoing operational oversight to handle the exceptions that arise during high-volume periods. Support goes beyond technical fixes; we monitor for status drift and ensure that if an order fails to post to Prima, it is identified and resolved before it impacts the financial close. We provide clear escalation and monitoring so your team can focus on operations while we help maintain the integrity of the data between your sales channels and the ERP. This ensures the integration remains a reliable, transparent asset for the business.
Common failures
Inventory latency and overselling
Operational impact: When stock level updates from Prima are slow to push through Patchworks to the ecommerce channel, overselling occurs. This forces the customer service team to cancel Sales Orders and process refunds, damaging customer trust. Incorrect stock availability also complicates fulfilment, as pick lists may contain SKUs that are actually out of stock, causing delays for the warehouse operations team.
Prevention / Action: Define Prima as the single source of truth for inventory. The integration logic within Patchworks should be configured to poll Prima's stock records on a frequent, defined schedule. It is also critical to map each ecommerce warehouse or location to a specific Prima 'Depot' to ensure stock movements are accurately reflected against the correct inventory pool.
Incomplete refund and credit note processing
Operational impact: If a refund processed in an ecommerce channel fails to create a corresponding Credit Note in Prima, the order-to-cash reconciliation breaks. The finance team must then spend significant manual effort matching refunds to original Sales Orders and journals. At scale, this creates delays in the month-end close process and introduces the risk of inaccurate revenue and liability reporting.
Prevention / Action: The integration process must handle the refund as a distinct financial transaction. The data mapping should ensure that a refund event from any sales channel correctly triggers the creation of a unique Credit Note in Prima, linked to the original Sales Order. Establish robust exception handling in Patchworks to flag any refund that fails this process, creating a daily report for the finance team to review and resolve.
Order import failures from non-standard items
Operational impact: Sales Orders containing promotional items, gift messages, or complex bundles often fail to import into Prima if they lack a matching product record. These failed orders become invisible to fulfilment teams until they are manually corrected by operations or customer service staff. This creates a constant backlog of order exceptions, increases handling time, and harms customer experience through dispatch delays.
Prevention / Action: Ensure all items sold, including non-stock or service-based line items, have a corresponding item record in Prima before they are made available online. Where this is not possible, the integration logic should map unrecognised SKUs to a generic 'miscellaneous' item in Prima. This allows the Sales Order to be created while flagging it for manual review, preventing the order from being lost in an error queue.
Frequently asked questions
How do you prevent overselling by ensuring our website stock levels accurately reflect inventory in Prima?
A common failure is syncing an incorrect stock figure to your sales channels. We ensure Patchworks is configured to synchronise Prima's true 'Available' stock, which accounts for inventory already allocated to sales orders but not yet dispatched. This prevents your website from selling stock that is not physically available, avoiding overselling and protecting the customer experience.
Does a refund processed on our e-commerce store automatically create a credit note in Prima?
Typically, no. This is a critical gap that often requires manual work from the finance team. Without a defined workflow, a refund from a system like Shopify or BigCommerce will not create the corresponding credit note in Prima, forcing your team to perform manual data entry and reconciliation. Patchworks can automate this process to ensure financial records remain synchronised and accurate.
Our finance team struggles with month-end close. How will this integration help them trust the numbers?
A key cause of difficult month-end processes is the manual re-keying of sales data from various channels into Prima. By using Patchworks to automate the creation of sales orders, refunds, and customer records in Prima, you establish a reliable and auditable data trail. This consistency removes manual errors and simplifies the bank reconciliation process, giving the finance team confidence in the ERP data.
How does the integration handle orders when we ship from multiple warehouse locations?
This requires careful mapping between your sales channel's location identifiers and the corresponding 'Depot' records in Prima. A common failure is for all orders to be assigned to a default depot, meaning the actual warehouse never receives the fulfilment request. Patchworks ensures each order's location data is correctly mapped so that the sales order is allocated to the correct Prima Depot for picking.
We are concerned this integration will just create more work for our team correcting data errors. How do you prevent this?
This is a valid concern, as a poorly planned integration can create more work than it saves. Our approach focuses on mapping the entire order-to-cash process first, defining logic for handling complex orders, refunds, and customer data between your front-end systems and Prima. By using Patchworks to enforce these business rules automatically, we reduce the need for manual intervention and ensure the integration lessens your team's workload.