The Challenge

Modern accounting software is a huge time-saver for small businesses, and QuickBooks is one of the best solutions on the market. Many ShopKeep customers use QuickBooks every day, so it was crucial to have a seamless integration between the two systems.

ShopKeep’s legacy server was built years ago to sync merchants’ financial data from their backend service, BackOffice, to Intuit’s QuickBooks via API. But it wasn’t perfect: ShopKeep struggled with server crashes and feature development was more complicated that it needed to be, requiring frequent attention from customer care.

Simply put, the server wasn’t up to ShopKeep’s standards, and they decided it was time to fix the root cause. They needed a code rescue.

With 60-70% of the cost being to maintain the code after development, Very has always been great working within our existing infrastructure and tooling, which makes for an easy handoff.

Andrew Budd
VP OF ENGINEERING, SHOPKEEP

The Process

The company has a talented team of engineers in New York and Dublin, but like most teams, they had a backlog of projects and competing priorities. Fortunately, their process, tools, and collaborative methods were already well-established and mirrored those we have in place at Very. In fact, it felt as if we were working with an extension of our own team.

We advised – and they agreed – that a refactor was the best course of action. There was a lot of domain knowledge held in the code of both ShopKeep and QuickBooks that we did not want to lose. So, instead of starting from scratch, we focused on restructuring the existing code to produce more stability, enhanced reporting, and zero bugs.

The Results

In the end, our solution provided a clear path forward for ShopKeep’s legacy merchants who were using the old service – because the new service is built to migrate and accommodate all users, old and new. What’s more: ShopKeep’s customers can manage everything themselves – so the power is in the users’ hands, as it should be.