MOCO is a cloud software that simplifies project management and & business figures. It was developed specifically for agencies and other project-based service providers and offers project controlling, time tracking, billing, client acquisition, capacity planning, expense management as well as personnel and contact management. This is to give agencies more time to concentrate on the projects themselves and their business.
In principle, this sounds like an all-in-one software. But it is not quite that simple, because different companies have different needs.
MOCO does not map task management and collaboration, for example. But many other applications do: Monday, Trello, Asana, Clickup and Jira. These are specialised in defining and distributing tasks, setting milestones and thus structuring entire projects.
Marketing or accounting is also not part of MOCO. Newsletter tools can, however, be integrated with MOCO or the contact management.
We present examples here and give an insight into how the technical stuff works in the background (spoiler: it's not that complicated).
Let's start with a very simple but nevertheless essential MOCO integration:
In addition to the browser extension that MOCO offers for recording time on tasks in Trello itself, the following workflows are also possible, for example:
For these simple MOCO integrations, it doesn't matter whether you use Trello, Asana, Clickup, Jira, awork or any other PM tool. They can all be connected to MOCO and make your daily work easier.
But how exactly does MOCO integration work?
The key to MOCO integration is API integration. Because both MOCO and all the other software we mention here have a so-called API, an application programming interface. This is an interface that is provided by the software and thus makes it possible for other applications to "dock" to this interface, so to speak. When two of these APIs are successfully connected, we speak of API integration. If you want to learn more about this, here is a blog post on API integration.
This sounds quite technical and usually API integration requires some programming effort and technical knowledge. But only theoretically. Because there have long been applications that do just that: Link APIs together without you having to programme.
These platforms allow you to easily connect the tools you use every day: MOCO, Asana, lexoffice, Slack and thousands more. Using a graphical interface, you select the triggers and define what should happen afterwards, for example: "If a new project is created in MOCO, then automatically create a new board in Trello".
This creates automatic data flows and MOCO integration succeeds even without technical background knowledge. The platforms that do this best are Zapier and Make. They support hundreds and thousands of apps that can be integrated with just a few clicks: including MOCO. That's what makes all the examples in this blogpost possible.
For internal communication, you probably also use an application: Slack, Teams or Google Hangouts. It can be important to inform your team or colleagues about certain events in MOCO.
This can be done, for example, as follows:
You can notify people in Slack when they have been assigned to a project in MOCO. Or you can inform your team in a channel when a lead has been won in MOCO.
Email marketing should be as personal as possible without too much extra work. This is no secret. If you maintain your contacts and leads in MOCO, including various statuses, acquisition levels and labels, then you can easily transfer this information to ActiveCampaign: Not only do you automatically transfer the contact data to ActiveCampaign as soon as a new lead is created in MOCO, but you can also enrich it with valuable information.
You can assign your leads to different campaigns and mailing lists depending on their status or even their day. This way they only receive relevant emails and you ensure the necessary personalisation without spending a lot of time on segmentation.
The same MOCO integration is of course also possible with applications such as Mailchimp, Sendinblue or FreshMail.
Interested clients may be able to book an appointment with you via your website or other touchpoints - through Calendly. When booking an appointment, they already enter relevant data: Name, email address, possibly also preferences or interests. Instead of leaving this data unused, you can automatically transfer it to MOCO at the time of booking.
In this way, you have directly recorded the new lead and will certainly not forget to document important key points before or after the telephone appointment. Thanks to this MOCO integration, you'll never miss a lead again.
MOCO's strength lies in specialising in what the software is good at: Providing an overview of projects, pipelines, accounts and forecasts. Moco does not want to be an all-in-one software and in our eyes that is a good thing.
But instead of keeping track of a sea of different stand-alone applications for each subtask like marketing, task management, appointment booking, accounting and communication, rather connect all these functions together.
Thanks to the Moco integration, you help to ensure that Moco really remains the hub for all relevant processes. All other tools are connected to it and synchronise with Moco so that the data always remains up-to-date and clear. If you are curious, you can start here with Make for free .
Cloud Integration, iPaaS, SaaS, BPA… Ough, hard to keep track of all these terms. They are currently used frequently (and increasingly) in the context of automation, and it is sometimes difficult to make a clear distinction and distinction. We have already written blog posts on the terms iPaaS, SaaS and BPA, but we’ll take them up again here to make the difference.
But let’s start with cloud integration, because that’s the central umbrella term in which we embed all the other technologies in this blog post.
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
Arrange a free cloud integration consultation now
To illustrate these advantages, an example is suitable that we know well from our everyday work as an automation agency:
The central data to be used here is the data of a major customer. This can be the simplest information, such as the address. This address is required in numerous but completely different processes in the company: on the one hand, for correct invoicing in accounting. On the other hand, in the CRM system, where all the data of the large customer is also stored. But the address is also important in sales, for example, when employees go to the sales meeting on site.
Now the customer announces that the address of the company has changed after a move. This information will reach you by e-mail. There are now two options:
01. The e-mail is forwarded to all affected departments, accounting, sales, customer service, marketing… All persons open their corresponding program, CRM, accounting software, marketing tools (such as newsletter marketing) and change the data already stored there of the customer. This means that in multiple applications, different people do exactly the same thing: change one address.
02. But there is also an alternative: By connecting your applications, thus by integrizing them, the customer’s e-mail, or rather the information it contains about the address change, is automatically passed on to all affected applications: CRM, accounting, marketing, ERP. This does not require any clicks, because the cloud integration detects a trigger, i.e. address change, and thus automatically starts the process.
What sounds unimpressive in a single process becomes more effective when such a process occurs several times a day or weekly. Because there is a lot of data that is available in different applications and should always be correct. If these applications are cloud applications they are suitable for cloud integration.
But cloud integration doesn’t just happen. There are now a variety of applications that enable and implement this. Such tools usually allow us to link the relevant cloud applications on a central platform and define clear rules on when, how, where, how much data should be passed on and what happens to them.
To realize cloud integration, there are various applications and technologies that are sometimes used interchangeably.
We have made a first distinction between iPaaS and BPA here.
We explain the term SaaS in more detail here.
Cloud integration is rather an umbrella term that includes numerous technologies, such as SaaS, iPaaS and BPA, and this is also absolutely necessary. Cloud integration is a concept that is made possible by appropriate technologies.
However, all terms share the commonality that they are cloud-based and thus offer enormous potential for growth and scaling. In addition, they are often cheaper to implement and maintain because changed requirements are easy to implement.
As an independent automation agency, we implement cloud integration according to your requirements. We use a variety of SaaS tools and iPaas (strictly speaking BPA) software. Together we find individual solutions that are flexible and scalable.