HubSpot + S2K Enterprise integration

S2K Enterprise is VAI’s ERP for wholesale distributors and manufacturers, with editions for food and pharmaceutical distribution. It runs order management, pricing and promotions, the warehouse and a customer portal, and VAI implements and supports it directly rather than through a reseller. A distributor on S2K is used to one vendor answering for all of it.

The HubSpot request comes from the commercial side. Reps want order history, open quotes and invoice status on the company record before a call, instead of phoning the office to ask what an account bought last month. Marketing wants to segment by what customers buy, not by a list someone exported last quarter. Both groups want that without a concurrent user seat in the ERP or a login to the portal VAI built for customers. VAI’s pricing counts concurrent users, so a seat for every rep is a real cost.

S2K already reaches beyond the ERP. VAI lists REST connectors for Shopify, Magento, Salesforce and Amazon, an S2K Marketing Cloud built on ActiveCampaign, and Outlook and Gmail sync in S2K CRM. HubSpot is missing from that list, so the connection is a project rather than a setting. The first thing it needs from VAI is the API reference behind those connectors.

Four objects carry what reps and marketers ask for. S2K customers become HubSpot companies, customer orders become deals, invoices land on a custom object and items become products. Everything moves one way, into HubSpot, and S2K stays the system of record for every document.

Keys are S2K’s own identifiers, held in custom HubSpot properties and never matched on names. VAI does not publish the object model behind its APIs, so the exact identifiers come from the reference VAI supplies and are checked against records the business already knows.

Pricing stays out. S2K prices by customer, contract and promotion, and the customer portal shows each buyer their own prices. A HubSpot product carries list data only, so a rep never quotes from a price that belongs to somebody else. Contacts join the object list once VAI confirms how the APIs expose them, because a guess about where S2K keeps its contacts is how duplicates start.

The runtime is a polling sync, since VAI documents no webhooks or change events for outside systems. A service authenticates the way VAI’s reference specifies, reads each object on a schedule, and keeps a checkpoint per object so a restart resumes rather than reloading everything.

If the APIs can filter on a last-changed date, each read starts from the checkpoint. If they cannot, the service compares each record with a hash of the version it last sent and forwards only real changes. Writes into HubSpot are batch upserts on the S2K identifiers, then a separate association pass that links orders and invoices to their companies. A reconciliation step compares counts on both sides after every run, and the whole service is built and rehearsed against the S2K sandbox before it reads live data.

S2K runs on-premise, in the cloud VAI hosts or in a hybrid of the two, with the same software in each. Where it runs decides the network path rather than the design: the service stays the same, and only the route to the APIs changes.

Every route here waits on the same thing: VAI’s API reference and credentials. With those, a service we build is the most direct route, and it can be built and rehearsed in the sandbox VAI includes at no extra cost.

VAI lists Cleo as an iPaaS partner for data exchange and EDI. A distributor already running Cleo can weigh a HubSpot flow there instead, once Cleo’s HubSpot support is confirmed. The third option sits outside these cards: ask VAI’s own programmers, who change the software for customers and ship its connectors, to build the HubSpot connection inside S2K. That keeps support in one place, with a roadmap that belongs to VAI rather than to you.

1. Scope. We ask VAI for the API reference, the authentication method and a sandbox login, and agree which system owns the pipeline and consent.
2. Architect. We fix the key per object, the change signal each endpoint allows and the association order, then write them down.
3. Build. The service is written against the S2K sandbox and a HubSpot sandbox portal, with an allowlist that fails closed from the first commit.
4. Validate. A full backfill of customers and invoice history, reconciled by count and by open balance against an S2K report.
5. Operate. We watch each run against its checkpoint, keep a replay endpoint available, and recheck the response shapes after every S2K release.