Your organization has spent a lot of time and more than a little money implementing your new CRM. Make sure you keep it running smoothly by reserving a license for a dedicated integration user.

An integration user is a licensed CRM account not tied to a specific employee. It is used specifically to manage integrations between applications, such as the connection between your CRM and your accounting software or your email marketing platform. Routine data transfers take place under this account, including any custom API work you paid to develop during your CRM implementation.

Many companies will assign the integration function to a system admin account or to a power user, but this can be costly, both in terms and risk and expense.

Of course, the downside of maintaining a dedicated integration user license is easy to recognize: You have to pay for it. It’s easy to write off another license as a “nice to have,” when in fact it’s key to eliminating risk and saving your employees’ time and your company money.

Here are the true costs of not maintaining a dedicated integration user license:

1. Eliminate a Single Critical Point of Failure

The only constant is change, and that definitely applies to staff. Employees not only leave for other opportunities, or to spend more time with family, they also change roles or responsibilities, are promoted, or develop unexpected health problems that may keep them out of the office for an extended period—or permanently!

If you do not maintain a dedicated integration user license, anytime a key staff member changes for any reason—or simply updates their password—your business processes may be brought to a halt and an expensive emergency development effort may be required.

Data sources must be established for your key reports. If the user account that established those connections is ended for any reason, or if their password or data permissions otherwise change, those reports will break. What’s worse, that breakage may not be immediately obvious, leading you to share bad or outdated data with clients or senior management.

Similarly, some kinds of automated workflows will also be invalidated if the account that established them changes permissions or goes away. If that is years after your implementation, there may be no one left who remembers how to rebuild them, leaving you with the time and expense of a duplicate development effort that could’ve easily been avoided.

2. Reduce Your Risk of Catastrophic Loss

To get around the above issues, some companies will tie their integration efforts to an admin account. After all, there’s always an admin, right?

While that’s true, by necessity, admin accounts have access to your entire system, including all your sensitive customer data. By giving an integration full admin access, you’re giving that tool the ability to log in as any user, including the business owner. You’re giving it the ability to create or delete users, to delete records, and to reset passwords, which can lock everyone out of the system.

We live in a world where threats from malicious actors are not a fantasy. If any of the third-party applications integrated with your system were ever compromised for any reason, or if those applications simply broke, then tying your integration to your admin account would open up your entire business to fault or attack.

No one wants to send an email to their clients saying “We’re sorry. We didn’t take the necessary precautions to protect your data.” For the modest expense of one additional license, you maintain an extra layer of security between your data and the online threat vectors that are an all-too-real part of doing business in the 21st century.

3. Save Time

Data is constantly changed and updated. That’s part of the value of a CRM—real-time access to the latest information.

In the absence of a dedicated integration user account, it can be very difficult to determine how or why a record was updated. Users often perform batch updates on records as a part of regular cleaning and maintenance. Those updates often trigger integrations with other applications, such as project management software, reporting, or marketing tools.

If an error occurs, or if a record ever requires additional scrutiny (on behalf of an unhappy customer, for example, or as part of an audit), it is almost impossible to identify root cause without a dedicated integration user account. Was the update user- or system-generated? Was it triggered by the integration or by an internal process? If the record was handled improperly, why? It may take hours of additional analysis to uncover, if an answer can ever be found.

It’s Easy

Perhaps the best reason to dedicate one license to an integration user account is that it’s easy to set up and maintain. You simply create a group email address, such as “<zoho@mycompany.com>”, and add internal and external users as necessary. If staff changes, simply remove them from the group and update the password. Simple!

As you can see, the modest cost of maintaining a license for a dedicated integration user account is dwarfed by the cost of not doing it, which is why we strongly recommend integration user licenses to all of our clients.