Integrating Accredo with an online ordering portal — how it actually works

If your business runs on Accredo, you already know its strengths: it's a capable, reliable ERP that many New Zealand distributors and wholesalers have trusted for decades. What it doesn't give you out of the box is a modern online ordering experience for your customers. That's the gap an Accredo e-commerce integration closes — and done properly, it means your customers order themselves online while every product, price, stock level and order stays perfectly in sync with Accredo.

We've built and operated Accredo-integrated ordering platforms for New Zealand food distributors for years — they process real trade orders every day. This is how the integration actually works, and what to watch out for.

What gets synchronised

• Products — your Accredo product file is the source of truth. New products, descriptions, units of measure and pack sizes flow to the portal automatically.
• Customer-specific pricing — this is the heart of B2B. Accredo holds your price books, contract prices and customer groups; the portal shows each customer their price, never a generic one.
• Live stock — stock-on-hand flows from Accredo so customers see availability before they order, which all but eliminates the "sorry, that's out of stock" phone call.
• Orders — when a customer checks out, the order lands in Accredo as a sales order, ready for your normal picking and invoicing run. No re-keying.
• Customers & credit — account status, credit terms and pay-on-account limits respected automatically.

How the connection works technically

Modern Accredo versions expose an API that supports querying and writing data over standard web protocols. A well-built integration runs as a continuous, two-way sync service:

1. The sync service polls or subscribes to changes in Accredo — price updates, stock movements, new products.
2. Changes are pushed to the ordering portal within seconds to minutes, depending on the data type.
3. Orders placed online are validated (pricing, credit, units of measure) and written back into Accredo as sales orders.

The details matter enormously. Two examples from production experience: Accredo's units of measure need careful handling — if a customer orders by the carton but your ERP thinks in singles, you'll ship the wrong quantities; and the integration must recover gracefully when the ERP server is briefly unreachable, queuing orders rather than dropping them. These are exactly the kinds of issues that separate a robust integration from a demo.

What about older setups, or Attaché?

Not every system offers a real-time API. We also run integrations over scheduled file exchange (SFTP) for platforms like Attaché — orders flow out as structured files, products and pricing flow in. It's not as instant as an API, but engineered carefully (duplicate detection, acknowledgements, monitoring) it's dependable enough for production daily ordering.

What it means for your business

• Customers order online at their convenience — including after hours, when your phones are off.
• Your team stops re-keying orders and chasing pricing queries.
• Orders arrive accurate, priced correctly, against the right account.
• Accredo stays the system of record — nothing about your back office has to change.

Integration or replacement?

Some businesses are happy with Accredo and just want online ordering on top — that's integration. Others are ready to consolidate everything onto one platform — ordering, inventory, accounting — and retire the patchwork. The Zeabyte Platform supports both paths: deep real-time Accredo integration, or your own customised ERP built module by module, including accounting. See the systems we integrate.