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As a Teamwork integration partner, SyncHub provides customers with the ability to connect their data from multiple Teamwork projects and plug it into their favorite reporting tool. That means easy access to insights that can power businesses forward. We talked to SyncHub founder, Ben Liebert, to find out more about data accessibility and how you can use SyncHub to get the absolute best from your Teamwork data.
“The last decade has seen a proliferation of cloud services, and now everybody's business is spread across the cloud,” says Ben. “This is cool, but it introduces a new problem around data disparity and accessibility. At the same time, there has been a ‘democratization’ of data visualization tools, such as Power BI and even Excel. Businesses have heaps of data out there, and anyone has the tools to analyze it—you just need something like SyncHub to join the dots and get the data where it's needed.”
Teamwork: So what is data accessibility for the layperson and why does it matter?
Data accessibility is simply a measure of how easy it is for a person to gain access to their data. One important distinction here is the relationship between data and the pre-built reports that SaaS platforms offer, says Ben.
“The latter is not necessarily data in every case—it’s information and therefore can at times have room for error since it’s been filtered through an algorithm or a human. For example, consider a typical 'Sales by Month' report, which shows you sales from January until March. Now consider that your best customer, ACME, left in March and was marked as ‘archived’ in your CRM. A native report may first find ‘all active customers’ and then render sales for these only, omitting all sales for ACME in January and February. But it should really render sales regardless of the customer's status.“
Though it may seem like a contrived example, Ben says he’s seen it in real life. “Developers are only human. In truth, in some scenarios this report is still valid, but the fact is that there sometimes isn’t as much visibility into this filter/decision, and consumers of the report aren’t always going to know better. Conversely, if you have access to the raw data, you can build your own report from the ground-up, with complete transparency of every filter/decision made in compiling your information—because you are doing the filtering, not somebody else.”
Teamwork: What do businesses need to look for in a cloud service if they want to be able to generate reports that provide good data insights?
You need data as granular as possible. Sales down to the millisecond, orders with line item breakdowns, etc. You also need to be able to detect and download changes to this data. It's of little good being able to take a snapshot of your current sales, because tomorrow that report will be out of date.
Teamwork: So how does Teamwork do in terms of data accessibility?
This is where Teamwork is strong, says Ben. “Teamwork's API conforms to most of our data accessibility checkpoints, and therefore customers have access to this raw data if they wish. It's that simple. I can honestly say that the Teamwork API and partner team are exceptionally helpful… to the extent that they have even expanded their API after requests/recommendations by us. To me, this is not just a measure of their ‘support;’ it’s a measure of how seriously they take their API consumers and thus their API, and thus data accessibility.”
Teamwork: What can SyncHub offer Teamwork customers?
“SyncHub can help Teamwork customers answer whatever questions they desire. Not only do we integrate with Teamwork and Desk, but we also integrate with all the other SaaS platforms that businesses are using—HubSpot, Shopify, Xero and many, many more. SyncHub gives you the power to aggregate reports across your entire business. And best of all, you don't need skills any greater than MS Excel (because we integrate with it). But even if Excel is too much, SyncHub can put you in touch with a consultant to help answer the questions you need. We’re proud to be a Teamwork integration partner and we look forward to helping Teamwork customers build reports that enable data driven business decisions.”
Curious to learn more? Find out how SyncHub can help with your reporting, then check out the SyncHub-Teamwork Connector to see how the two work together in action.
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