2.5 Months to 2.5 Days

Jodi spent nearly 20 years as an IT consultant at Dell, working across Exchange, Active Directory, and Microsoft 365. When her son's small construction company needed a better billing system, she took it on herself. His company works exclusively with the U.S. federal government — which means progress payments, not standard invoices. A completely different billing logic, and one that most accounting software doesn't know how to handle.

The back office was broken in a quiet, consistent way. Their accounting software had no concept of construction billing. Every cycle meant manual data entry. Tax season took the accountant four or five times longer than it should have. The business was delivering projects fine — but the paperwork behind it was eating hours that nobody had to spare.

Jodi had already built a real solution inside Microsoft 365: a Power App to handle invoicing, SharePoint lists as the backend, Teams channels organized by customer and project. The architecture was clean. Everything lived in one ecosystem.

Then she switched to Zoho Books — simpler, more affordable, and actually built for small business accounting. The move made sense. But now she had two systems that needed to stay in sync, and no connection between them.

She evaluated her options. Some tools were too limited. Others would've required writing custom webhooks from scratch. She knows Graph API and has been scripting since PowerShell first launched — but that wasn't the point. She didn't want to spend her time building plumbing. She wanted something that already had the connectors she needed.

viaSocket had both — a ready-to-use SharePoint connector and a Zoho Books connector. She signed up for a trial and had her first working flow live within a day.

The setup mapped directly onto the architecture she'd already built. When her son creates an invoice through the Power App, it writes to a SharePoint list. viaSocket watches that list and automatically creates the matching invoice in Zoho Books. Same logic for subcontractor bills — into SharePoint, then mirrored in Zoho without anyone touching it.

When she needed SharePoint actions that weren't yet in viaSocket's connector library, she reached out to support. They turned them around fast enough that it didn't break her momentum.

Her son ran April billing through the new system. Everything worked exactly as it should. Every invoice, every subcontractor bill — into Zoho Books on its own, without a single manual step.

The accountant's workload dropped. The billing cycle that used to drag stopped dragging.

"This solved a problem that had been weighing on us for a long time," Jodi said. "Small business owners spend so many hours on admin work they shouldn't have to do. This just made it go away."

She's already thinking about what to automate next.

If your business is running two systems that don't talk to each other, you don't need a developer. You probably just need the right connectors. Try viaSocket free and build your first flow today.