When you’re trying to grow, the last thing you need is your systems working against each other.
Detectamet’s UK sales and marketing teams was in the process of moving to HubSpot. The challenge? Their core customer and order data still lived in Sage 200. And that’s where the client wanted it to stay.
Two important systems. Two different versions of the customer. No integration. No sync. Too much manual work.
The answer wasn’t another off-the-shelf connector. It was to make the systems talk properly.
Why a Custom API was the right call
Detectamet needed more than a simple plugin. Their Sage 200 data had its own structure, rules and relationships. The integration needed to understand those, reliably sync the right information into HubSpot and give the business room to grow.
An off-the-shelf solution couldn’t do that.
So we built one.
A bespoke API sitting quietly between Sage 200 and HubSpot, doing the heavy lifting in the background.
How we built the integration
We developed a Laravel-based API, hosted on AWS, to pull and process data from Sage 200 before pushing it into HubSpot.
But moving data from A to B was only part of the job.
We built the logic around how that data needed to behave, validating records, mapping fields, checking for duplicates and triggering the right activity inside HubSpot.
What it does:
- Syncs customer, company and order data every day
- Maps Sage 200 fields to the correct HubSpot properties
- Checks for duplicates before creating records
- Triggers lifecycle events to support sales and marketing automation
- Handles errors and logs activity
- Provides an XML fallback for manual uploads when required
It’s not just an integration. It’s infrastructure primed for Detectamet to build on.
What it’s built with
A quick look under the hood:
- Framework: Laravel
- Hosting: AWS
- Source: Sage 200
- Destination: HubSpot — Contacts, Companies and Deals
- Data: JSON by default, XML for manual exports
- Security: Token-based, scoped access
- Maintenance: Scheduled jobs, logging and error reporting
What changed
Once the integration went live, the gap between Sage 200 and HubSpot disappeared.
- No more manual data entry
- Accurate, up-to-date customer records in HubSpot
- Sales could see what customers were ordering and when
- Marketing could personalise activity around real customer behaviour
- Teams spent less time managing spreadsheets and more time using the data
The technology itself is deliberately invisible.
That’s rather the point. Sage keeps doing what Sage does. HubSpot does what HubSpot does. And the API makes sure the right information is where it needs to be.
It wasn’t just an API
The integration was one part of a much bigger transformation.
Alongside the API, we worked with Detectamet to configure and roll out HubSpot across sales and marketing – including lifecycle automation, contact segmentation, email workflows and reporting dashboards.
The CRM gave Detectamet somewhere to bring sales and marketing together.
The API gave it the data to make that useful.
Want to see how we built the CRM around it?
Read the CRM Setup Case Study →
