4 ways to exchange data with business partners
Data is a key in any organization. Internal data exchange is crucial to optimize processes, revenue, to personalize offerings and much more. Companies also need to become data-driven towards their business partners such as suppliers, customers and other types of partners.
There are many cases where it makes sense to exchange data with partners. For example suppliers can be provided with stock levels, so they can automatically prepare deliveries.
When you are a software or services company, you probably have requests from customers to push certain data to them automatically, or they want you to pull in data. For example your customers might want to receive reports on hours worked.
Exchanging data can be done manually, for example by sending out emails with Excel attachments. Of course it's much better to automate this process to avoid manual repetitive work. Below are 4 different ways to automate data exchange with "external" parties.
Receiving data from external parties
1. Email
Provide a mailbox to a partner and allow them to send emails with file attachments. The attachment could be a CSV file or an Excel file. You can automatically read these emails and import the data from those attachments.
2. Excel
Work with a shared online Excel or Google Sheet file. Your partner can add lines to the file and you can automatically read this file (e.g. every hour or every day) and import the data into a business application or database.
3. SFTP or cloud storage
Ask your partner to "drop" new files on an SFTP server or a cloud storage account (Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft Drive, AWS S3...) and you can read these files on a regular basis. You could have many small files (one per transaction) or one big file per day or per week.
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4. API
Provide an API endpoint to your customer or supplier, and request them to "Post" data to your API. Of course this requires a bit of development on the partner side. Vice versa, if your partner already has an API, you could call that API to pull in new data from them. As a variation, you can also work with webhook events.
Sending data to external parties
1. Email
Automatically send out daily or weekly emails to your partners. You can include reports in the email itself, or attach a report as a PDF file or Excel file.
2. Excel
Work with a shared online Excel or Google Sheet and automatically write new lines to that file. Your partner can view the file online to get the new information.
3. SFTP or cloud storage
Drop files on an SFTP server or cloud storage so that your partner can pick up these files.
4. API
Publish an API endpoint that your partner can consume to get data from you, or vice versa push data to an API from your partner.
Conclusion
Whether you need to receive data from a business partner or you want to share data with a partner, it makes sense to automate this process. There are 4 main technologies to do so: email, online Excel or Google Sheet files, files on cloud storage, or using an API. With Peliqan.io you can easily implement any of these flows. For example, you can easily expose your data to multiple partners and use the channel that works for them. One partner might need a daily email with an Excel file attached, while another partner will want to consume an API. Visit Peliqan.io to find out more and stop spending time on repetitive work.