How much do process automation and system integration cost?

Connecting two systems that both have API documentation costs roughly €1,500–3,450 net (excl. VAT), automating a single process €2,550–6,100 net, and integrating KSeF, Poland's National e-Invoicing System, with your own system €2,400–5,900 net. Below we show which hours make up the business process automation cost, what pushes it up and how long it takes before automation starts paying for itself.

Euro amounts converted at the NBP mid-market rate of 14 September 2026 (€1 = 4.3391 zł) and rounded. We invoice in PLN.

These are price ranges, not a price list. Two companies saying the same sentence — “connect our shop to our accounting system” — can differ by dozens of hours of work, because one has 30 orders a day and one exception, and the other has 300 orders, three warehouses and credit notes.

Where do these ranges come from? Hours times rate

The maths is simple: hours of work times the rate. At CodePort our rates are public — development €46/h net, design €35/h net. The rest is estimating the hours for a specific scope.

In automation and integrations, the hours fall into four parts:

• Foundations — architecture, job queue, logs, error handling and deployment: 12–24 hours for an integration, 10–20 for an automation. This is the part that stops a dropped connection from quietly losing an invoice.
• Connections to systems — counted separately for every system you exchange data with.
• Process logic — the rules: what happens, when and in what order.
• Extras — a monitoring panel, error alerts, importing historical data.

That is exactly how our cost calculator works it out: you pick the processes and systems, and it adds up the hours and shows you a price range and a timeline straight away, with no email required.

What connecting to one system costs

Every system is a separate connection: its own API, its own limits and its own errors to handle. Below is the indicative effort assuming the provider supplies API documentation, at a rate of €46/h net.

Example. A shop plus an accounting package, both with API documentation: 30–75 hours, i.e. €1,500–3,450 net. Orders and invoices no longer get retyped by hand, and statuses update themselves. We describe what that work covers on our system integration page.

What automating one process costs

Automation is connections plus rules: software carries out the steps someone clicks through by hand today. Below is the effort for the process logic alone — on top of that come the connections to the systems in the table above.

Example. Orders from the shop go into accounting, the invoice is created automatically, the customer gets a notification and the team can see the errors: 55–130 hours, i.e. €2,550–6,100 net. You will find more about what we automate most often on our business process automation page.

What pushes the cost up: no API, exceptions, volume

Three things make the biggest difference to the hours.

• No API or no documentation. If a system has no API, the data has to be extracted through file exchange, direct database access or an API built on top of it. In that case we add around 60% to the connection hours. If you do not know how it looks in your case, tick “not sure” — we will check during the estimate, and until then we allow a small buffer.
• Exceptions in the process. Returns, credit notes, partial orders, a customer with two VAT numbers, payment in instalments. The “happy path” on its own can be twice as cheap as a process with five exceptions — but it is the exceptions that generate the phone calls to your accountant.
• Volume. A hundred documents a month and a hundred thousand call for different solutions: API limits, retries, queues and overnight windows.

What brings the cost down: a process described step by step, access to the API documentation, and starting with one process rather than the whole company.

Extras that are easy to forget

The most commonly skipped items are the monitoring panel and error alerts. Without them, an automation works until the provider's first outage and then quietly stops — and it is your customer who finds out, not you.

How long it takes

We work out timelines from hours, not from a wish list. As a guide:

• connecting two systems that have API documentation — 3–5 weeks;
• automating one process across two systems — 4–7 weeks;
• integrating KSeF with your own system — 4–7 weeks, or 5–9 weeks if the system has no API.

Every 1–2 weeks you see a working part, not a presentation. The first week is usually the process map and the data flow diagram: where data comes from and goes to, and what happens when one of the systems does not respond.

When automation pays for itself

The simplest calculation: how many hours the process takes today. Two people at 5 hours a week is about 40 hours a month. At a labour cost of €14 an hour, that is €550 a month. An automation requiring 60 hours of work costs €2,750 net, so it pays for itself in about 5 months — and after that it simply gives that time back to your team.

The figures in the example are assumptions; we will work out yours during the estimate. It is also worth counting what does not show up in hours: mistakes made when retyping data, late invoices and “where is my order” phone calls.

Maintenance after launch

Providers change their APIs, the shop gets an update, an authority changes a file structure. That is why after go-live we propose ongoing care: monitoring, updates and fixes, typically 5–15 hours a month, i.e. €230–690 net. With one simple connection it can be an hour or two a month; with several systems, the upper end of the range.

KSeF is a special case: from 1 February 2026 every business in Poland receives invoices through the system, and from 1 January 2027 issuing an invoice outside KSeF carries penalties. We cover the deadlines and the scope of work in our articles integrating KSeF with your own system, shop or ERP and KSeF penalties from 2027.

How to prepare for an estimate

The more we know at the start, the narrower the range. Before we talk, it is worth gathering:

• the process step by step: who does what, and in what order, today;
• a list of the systems and who has administrator access to them;
• the volume: how many documents, orders or enquiries a month;
• the exceptions everyone knows about but nobody has written down;
• who on your side approves changes and signs off the result.

If you want to see a figure for your own process, start with the cost calculator — choose “Process automation” or “System integration” and you will see the price range and timeline straight away. We will prepare a detailed estimate with a schedule free of charge within 2–3 working days, and you can describe the details in the project brief.