Made a lot of progress on an IT Operations/Billing prototype I've been building in Salesforce.
I've now connected multiple external systems through APIs and Named Credentials to pull live IT asset, endpoint, and licensing data into Salesforce. From there, I'm working on reconciling records across systems, mapping assets to the correct billing entities, surfacing exceptions, and generating billing snapshots for reporting.
One of the biggest lessons from building this has been just how important clean source data is.
Getting data into Salesforce through an API is the easy part. The interesting part starts when one system calls a location one thing, another system structures it differently, devices have duplicate or missing information, and Accounting needs everything rolled up to a consistent entity.
Instead of trying to guess or automatically "fix" questionable data, I'm designing the process to reconcile what it can confidently match and surface everything else for review.
That's been a great reminder that good automation isn't just about moving data between systems. It's about understanding the data well enough to know when not to automate a decision.
Still a work in progress, but it's been a fun project combining Salesforce administration, Flow, Apex, API integrations, reconciliation, reporting, and some of my existing IT experience.