Integrating Harvest to Pigment via Apple Shortcuts - Part 1
Recently I needed to integrate Harvest Timesheets with Pigment and decided to review some integration options.
Pigment has a lot of inbuilt integrations to ERPs, CRM, HRIS and cloud datawarehouses but Harvest was not one of those inbuilt integrations.
My requirements for that integration was:
I needed Harvest as the source and then Pigment as the target, both via API calls
I did not want to write custom Python or scripting code to do this. Ideally the integration logic and flow had to be readable by a business user.
The integration had to be able to be scheduled, and executed manually
I did not want to pay large fees for what I considered a small integration
So I did a review of options, as there is a lot of cloud integration tools available and its easy to spend a lot of time shifting through them.
At a high level I found the following:
I have worked with Workato and Tray.io at clients to deliver integrations and both were great, but too expensive for my simple use case. For an organisation looking to do automation across their systems these might be a great choice for ease of use.
A quick google or ChatGPT question and it will likely lead you down the route of Zapier.com and Make.com. Both of these solutions have a huge amount of out of the box integrations and have free plans available. In the case of Zapier though you can’t use http calls for your APIs on the free plan and with Make I found it a struggle to convert the API JSON into CSV without being on a paid plan. So sometimes free only get you so far.
There are many other cloud integration as a platform products out there and you could spend days/weeks searching through them all to find the one that hopefully ticks all the requirements.
What I really missed was having access to Onecloud.io which was a great IPaaS solution but sold to Workiva and so you now need to be a Workiva customer to get access: https://newsroom.workiva.com/press-releases/workiva-acquires-ipaas-technology-provider-onecloud-accelerate-digital
Then I remembered 4 years ago I wrote an article on how to integrate with Anaplan API via Apple Shortcuts: https://community.anaplan.com/discussion/91280/integrate-anaplan-with-siri-and-ios-shortcuts
This integration pattern suited all my requirements with it being free to build, free to make API calls and can be scheduled or manually executed.
So join me in Part 2 where I outline how I built an Apple IOS Shortcut to download Harvest timesheet data, convert the JSON to text and then upload to Pigment via API, all without any scripting and easy enough for a business user to understand and run.
Then in Part 3 we will discuss the future of EPM integration and upcoming exciting options.
A sneak peek below of Part 2:
