Integrating your website with your back office system

We recently launched the new Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron (BMYS) website, which provides the usual information you would expect: information about the club, how to become a member, functions, and upcoming events.

But what makes the BMYS website so special is that it communicates with the BMYS membership system to interact with up-to-date and centralised member data.

Integrating with a membership system

The BMYS website is not the club’s membership system - and doesn’t try to be. However it does provide additional and web-accessible features for its members. To do this effectively, the website communicates with the BMYS membership system automatically and seamlessly.

This level of integration keeps the actual membership system as the central source of truth: the membership team can carry out their tasks within the membership system, without worrying about member details being updated on the website - because the integration does that for them automatically. Or is that automagically? Same same, really.

Creating a members-only area

When a member wants to log in to the website, the website queries the membership system to check if the provided user details are allowed - this means that as members are added (or even expired), the authentication responses remains up to date at the moment of attempted login.

The members area gives the BMYS members a place to easily interact with their data in the membership system - they’re able to update their profile details, emergency contacts, and even their car, boat and insurance information.

Extending beyond just a membership integration

While authenticating and updating their profile has provided members with an easy-to-access way to keep their own information up to date, we were also able to extend the website’s functionality beyond what just the membership system can provide.

This includes the ability for the BMYS admin team to keep track of expired insurance and boat registrations, members who are missing vital information, and also the streamlining of online payments for member accounts.

All of these tasks rely on the information from the membership system, and are built with reliability in mind. Reports are fast and efficient to run and filter, online payments are securely handled, and we are able to keep administrators focused on their administration job.

For example, if a payment of an account is successful, but the membership system were to be offline, what do we do with that receipt? The member has already paid, so don’t want them to pay again - but the membership system just doesn’t know it yet. So we store the receipt details locally, and keep trying to call the membership system in the background until it can successfully be posted back - and meanwhile present a note to the member saying that they have a payment that has not yet been posted - so they can be comforted by the knowledge that their payment hasn’t disappeared, never to be seen again.

We approach any integration or custom development with reliability in mind: ensuring that business data remains accurate, access to the data is streamlined, but also with redundancy measures in place in the event of a system being offline.

Always up to date

We planned this integration to ensure the membership system remains the accurate source of truth - that is, if anyone needed to get a member’s current details, they would always be in the membership system.

However to overcome the possibility of an issue or delay with the member details coming across to the website system during the automated process, when a member logs in to change their profile, while we could easily just show the last-saved details from the website, we actually are doing a quick call to the membership system to get the very latest data.

The Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron website takes the amazing power of their membership system, and crafts a bespoke and feature-rich web portal to help the members keep their details up to date with ease and efficiency.

Integrating your website with your back office system - whether it be for members, cinema sessions, shopping, inventory, shipping, you name it - can help make your website do more for your users, and streamline your operation processes, and help reduce manual jobs of copy-and-paste from one system to another. Our development team would love to chat with you about your integration needs, so that we can build something awesome together. Give us a call today and ask for Marty.