Data ingestion

Data ingestion is the step where data gets collected from different places and brought into one. For a small business, those places might be Shopify orders, Fresha bookings, Gmail enquiries, and Xero invoices. Ingestion is the plumbing that pulls them in, ideally on its own, every day or every hour. We call this connecting your tools (the industry calls it data pipelines). Without it, someone copies figures into a spreadsheet each week, which is slow and error-prone. We work with a solo business coach whose enquiries arrived through Meta Business Suite, Gmail, and Kajabi, and we connected them into one list. Ingestion breaks when a tool changes, so it needs a check now and then.