How it works
Six stages, and two of them are places to walk away
How the work actually runs, what exists at the end of each stage, and where the commercial boundaries sit.
How projects run
Each stage earns the next one
Nobody can price an integration programme honestly from a phone call, so we do not try. The two stages before any real money changes hands are the two designed to tell you not to bother.
First conversation
Free · 45 minutesWhether there is anything here worth doing at all. Sometimes the answer is that your current setup is fine, or that the problem is a process one and no integration will fix it. We say so on the call rather than selling you a review.
You can stop here, and some people should.
Review
Fixed price · planned at three to four weeksEvery system mapped, every path the data takes today written down, and the manual handling costed in hours and errors. You get the target architecture and a sequenced, costed plan — and it is yours to keep whether we build it, your team builds it, or someone else does.
You can stop here, and some people should.
Build
Fixed price, scoped from the reviewBuilt in your own cloud account, defined in infrastructure code, delivered in working increments. The first flow runs in production within weeks, not at the end — so you are checking real behaviour against real partners long before go-live.
Cutover
Included · planned at one to two weeksThe old way and the new way run in parallel, on the same real traffic, until the numbers agree. Then we switch. There is a documented way back at every step, and we do not cut over into a Friday or a peak trading week.
After go-live
Included · the first full trading monthCloser support through the first full trading month, when the edge cases actually show up — the odd purchase order, the partner who changes a format without telling anyone. Every fix becomes a runbook entry instead of knowledge in someone’s head.
Run and support
Monthly fee · thirty days’ noticeMonitoring against your trading hours, change as you add partners and channels, and a console where your own staff resolve data problems without waiting on us. Internally we call this keeping the lights on. Leaving takes 30 days and you keep everything.
Cutover and the weeks after go-live are inside the build price, not billed on top. They are the two stages that get quoted separately and the two where an integration actually fails, so pricing them as extras would put our interests on the wrong side of yours.
What you actually receive
Artefacts, not activities
A list of what a consultant will do is not a deliverable. These are the things that exist at the end of each stage, that you keep, and that another firm could pick up and continue from.
Review
Planned at three to four weeks · fixed price
- A current-state map: every system, every interface, every manual step between them
- The cost of the manual handling, in hours per week and in errors per month
- A target integration architecture, with the trade-offs named rather than hidden
- Architecture decision records — the reasoning kept, so it can be revisited rather than re-argued
- A sequenced, costed plan, each item risk-rated
- A written answer to whether this is worth doing at all
Build
Planned in months · fixed from the review
- Working flows in your own cloud account, first one live within weeks
- All infrastructure as code, in your repository, deployable by your team
- Field mapping held as configuration, not buried in code
- A test pack run against your partners’ real systems before go-live
- An operations console your staff can use without training
- Runbooks written as the work happens, not assembled at the end
Run and support
Ongoing · monthly
- Monitoring aligned to your trading windows and partner cutoffs
- A monthly written report: what ran, what failed, what was changed
- Data errors resolvable by your own staff, without raising anything with us
- New partners and document types added at rates agreed in the support schedule, not re-quoted each time
- A maintained credentials inventory and partner-contact list
- Thirty days’ notice, and everything already in your hands
Before you ask
The questions we get asked first
Three things, priced separately. A fixed-price review that maps your systems and produces a costed plan you keep, whoever builds it. A build, fixed against what the review scoped. Then month-to-month support. No licence and no per-message charge: the infrastructure runs in your own cloud account and you pay that bill directly, at cost. We will not publish a build price, because scope is discovered rather than specified, and a number quoted before seeing your systems is one we would have to renegotiate later.
Once the first flows are running, adding a partner on a document type you already handle is designed to take days rather than weeks: the mapping is configuration and the plumbing exists. A partner with an unfamiliar format, or one that runs its own certification cycle, moves on their timetable rather than ours. That is worth knowing up front rather than in week three. On a new project the first flow runs in production within weeks of the build starting.
You own it. It is built inside your own cloud account, defined as infrastructure code in your repository, and the field mapping is data in your own database rather than a proprietary format on our server. Nothing lapses and nothing stops working if you stop paying us. A hosted integration platform runs your order flow in the vendor’s tenancy, and leaving it means rebuilding every flow somewhere else.
Almost certainly. Each connection is designed against that system’s own interface rather than picked from a list of prebuilt adapters. The question is whether the system has a documented way in: an API, a file exchange, a database view, an export. Nearly all of them do. Where one is genuinely closed we say so early, and the review costs a fraction of finding out later.
Monitoring runs around the clock and retries are automatic, so most overnight failures clear themselves and nothing queued is lost. There is no person answering the phone at 3am. This is a small, senior-led firm, and pretending otherwise is the kind of promise that gets found out at the worst moment. Ownership covers the gap: the system runs in your account, so your team can search by your own order number and fix a data problem without waiting on us. If you need a staffed overnight desk, buy that from a larger provider.
In your own cloud account, in Australia — Sydney by default. Because the account is yours, the residency question has a shorter answer than usual: the data never moves to our infrastructure, because there is no our infrastructure in the path. Every payload is archived in that same account so you can search what a partner actually sent you. We hold no IRAP assessment and no government security certification, and we will say so plainly if that is what you need.
As the person who decides how the systems should fit together, while your team or incumbent keeps running what they run. That works best when the boundary is explicit from the start — who owns which account, who is called when something breaks, which changes need a conversation first. We write that down in the first week. Replacing an incumbent who is doing a reasonable job is rarely the recommendation.
GTSR Solutions is an Australian private company and invoices in AUD with the ABN shown — ABN 54 697 553 870, ACN 697 553 870. Engagements run on a short written services agreement covering scope, price, ownership of the code and accounts, liability, and how either side ends it. Support is month to month with thirty days’ notice. There is no offshore entity and no third party in the contracting chain.
Start with a review, not a proposal
Tell us how the data moves today. If a review is not the right first step, we will say what is.