Background
If you are reviewing this document, your organization is evaluating the Recurrency ERP Automation platform.
By adopting Recurrency, your organization can significantly reduce manual work associated with optimizing purchasing decisions, enhance data visibility, and uncover valuable trends that are often difficult to identify. Organizations that use Recurrency are frequently able to decrease their operating costs through more informed purchasing decisions, and increase their revenue by helping their sellers identify timely opportunities to sell additional products.
During the evaluation process, Recurrency will establish a connection with your ERP system to assess the feasibility of our platform for your organization. Additionally, this connection will grant you access to our free reporting suite.
In order to configure this integration, we need your help to establish a secure connection between Recurrency’s systems and your ERP’s database.
💡 Direct SQL Database Access: This guide assumes that you have direct access to the SQL server hosting your ERP data. If you are relying on a third party to manage your SAP Business One (B1) instance, you may need their assistance with these steps.
If you are using B1 HANA, the Integration Service configuration remains the same, but creating the read-only database user is different. Instead of executing SQL queries, this is done through the HANA Studio UI. Send an email to [email protected] for additional support.
Additionally, if you are using a public or private cloud to host your Business One instance, there may be alternative ways to establish a secure connection between our systems. Reach out to [email protected] if you have questions.
System Architecture
Before diving into the tactical steps, it’s important to have an understanding of the different components that make up Recurrency.
SAP Business One MSSQL Database: behind every Business One deployment, there is a Microsoft SQL database that holds all of the data. Recurrency works by establishing a direct connection with this database.
Recurrency web application: hosted at https://app.recurrency.com, this is the website that users will interact with to use Recurrency’s features and capabilities
Recurrency production environment: this is our cloud based environment which hosts all of your data and the systems necessary to push/pull data to/from the Business One database. It also includes all of the systems which support the web application.
Recurrency backend service: this is what you are installing in this guide. This is a service you install which will interact with the Business One MSSQL Database. Most of these databases sit behind extensive networking and firewall rules and Recurrency’s backend service allows us to create a secure connection between our production environment and your database.
Integration Steps
Provide answers to Recurrency’s initial configuration questions which should have been sent to your email
Download the installer provided by Recurrency
Run the installer to create a Windows Service that will create/manage the secure connection between your database server and the Recurrency platform
Create a database user with read/write permissions (only read permission is required for the initial integration)
Recurrency Engineering will finalize the initial sync during offline hours
If your business has abnormal operating hours, please let us know
Creating your Admin Account
Within the Recurrency web application, we provide these same instructions along with useful tools to help you verify your installation along the way.
You will receive an email from Recurrency to “Join your team on Recurrency.” The email will be sent from [email protected].
Open the email and click on the Activate Account button.
This will take you to the Recurrency Integration Portal where you will set a password for your account.
Next, you will be asked to log in using the password you just created.
You will then be taken to a Database Connection Setup page that will walk you through establishing the network connection and creating a database user with read/write access.
You’ll reference this page a few more times during the setup process.
Initial Configuration Questions and Download the Installer
The Recurrency team will send you these questions via email. Your answers here help us do the upfront work to provide you with the right installer to create this connection.
The Recurrency backend service you will install is designed to be lightweight and consumes few resources.
Questions:
Will you run the service on the same server as your B1 database or another server within your network that has access to the B1 database?
Does that machine run a 64-bit or 32-bit version of Windows Server?
What port does your database run on? (standard is 1433)
If the service will run on a separate machine, what is the internal IP of your database server?
What version of B1 are you running (i.e. 9.X, 10.X)
Recurrency will then send you a link to a ZIP file which you can download and install on your chosen server.
Establishing the Network Connection
The next step is to download the ZIP file installer onto your server and install the Recurrency service. Your Recurrency point of contact will send this to you via email.
After downloading the agent ZIP file on your server, move it to a location where it can run indefinitely. We recommend placing this directly on your C Drive or in ProgramFiles.
Unzip the file which will create a new folder. This folder will usually be in the format:
recurrency_agent_{your_company_name}_{32|64}
Enter the folder, and right click on install_agent.bat and then select Run as Administrator. This may ask you to enter your password to continue. Your screen will look something like this:
Alternatively, we can run this .bat file from within an Administrator Command Prompt directly:
Click the Windows search button and type in “cmd”
Right click on Command Prompt and select “Run as Administrator”
Navigate to the directory where the install_agent.bat file lives.
Type cd followed by the full path to the install_agent.bat file. You can get this path in File Explorer by navigating to the install_agent.bat file and then copying the Path in the top of the File Explorer window
For example, if we placed the install folder on our C Drive the command would be cd C:\install_agent_my_company_64
Type install_agent.bat
A command prompt window will appear and you will receive a Success message. Once you see this, you can close the window (note: it may automatically close on you depending on your Windows settings).
Return to the Recurrency Integration Portal and click the “verify network connection” button. You should see a Success message. If you do not, take a screenshot of the page, and send the details to your Recurrency point of contact, and they can help troubleshoot.
💡 More details on the install_agent.bat file: This installer creates a Windows Service that will run an agent which creates a secure connection to Recurrency’s systems. This service will run indefinitely and will self-reboot if it (or the server) crashes. The Windows Service will be called “ngrok” which you can view in the Windows Services Management panel.
Creating the Recurrency Login and Database User
Next, we will create a database user with at least read permissions.
After verifying the connection in the Recurrency Integration Portal, you will be taken to a page where we provide the SQL query to run in your ERP database. We need to run this query on your B1 database and not on the “master” database. To create a new user with SQL access in MSSQL, you have to create two different “types” of users – a login user, and a database user tied to that login user. The query we provide will do both.
Open your database studio/program of choice, copy the SQL query from the Recurrency Integration Portal, and paste into your database studio. It should look something like this:
create login recurrencyuser with password = 'r@nd0Mpa5sw0rD'
CREATE USER recurrencyuser FOR LOGIN recurrencyuser WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA=[dbo]
exec sp_addrolemember 'db_datareader', 'recurrencyuser'
exec sp_addrolemember 'db_datawriter', 'recurrencyuser'If you do not want to provide write access at this time, remove the last line
You should also change our “r@nd0Mpa5sw0rD” with a strong password of your choosing.
Our system will recommend a randomly generated, strong password. If you want to change it, you can update the password=”r4nd0Mpa5sw0rD” section and input your own. The only characters you can’t use are single quotes (‘) or the @ character.
Confirm that you’ve selected the B1 database to run the query on and not “master.”
Double check that you’ve selected the write database in the top left, and Run Query
Head back to Recurrency and click on Input Credentials. Here you will confirm the configuration data:
Database Name: the name of the database that you created the user on in the previous step
Username: the name of the user you created in your database. If you did not modify this username in the query we provided, this will be recurrencyuser
Password: the password you generated in the last step
Press Submit
This updates the configuration data within Recurrency and our team will review and verify the connection is working properly. We will reach out with confirmation or questions if there are any issues.
Waiting for the Initial Sync
Within a few days of confirming that the Recurrency service and database user are properly configured, Recurrency will run an initial sync after hours to sync your database with our system. Following the initial sync, we continue to pull incremental changes from your database to keep your ERP database in sync with Recurrency’s systems.
[OPTIONAL] Confirm the Install Service is Working
One check we can do to confirm that everything is installed correctly on your Windows machine is to check the Windows Service Manager and look for the specific service we installed earlier.
Open Windows Service Manager
Search for “ngrok”
It should show as “Running”
If you do not see it, or the status is not Running, then something may have failed during the install. We recommend running the uninstall-agent.bat file included with the installer folder we provided earlier, and then re-running install-agent.bat. If you are still not seeing the service, or it is not showing as “Running,” please contact [email protected] for help.
[OPTIONAL, RECOMMENDED] Enable Change Tracking
💡 Microsoft SQL Server only: This section only applies if your ERP is using MSSQL. If you are using SAP HANA, you can skip this section.
Recurrency's integration establishes a real-time connection with your ERP's database, ensuring accurate and current data within their web application. This data is used to calculate various metrics like forecasts and replenishment values. However, challenges arise due to inconsistencies in how ERPs configure their Microsoft SQL databases. While most ERPs have a "last updated" time for each database row, some do not consistently update these values, leading to Recurrency displaying outdated information.
To address this, Recurrency highly recommends utilizing MSSQL database's change tracking feature. Change tracking creates a log that records which rows were altered, the time of change, and the type of operation performed.. Enabling change tracking can resolve data inconsistency problems, ensuring Recurrency maintains up-to-date and consistent data with your ERP.
If you are open to enabling change tracking to improve the performance of this integration, you can access the instructions at the following link.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How does the Recurrency service securely communicate with your services?
Recurrency encrypts all data in transit and at rest. In transit, we use HTTPS with at least TLSv1.2 to communicate with the Recurrency service. Any users interacting with our web-based application will also use HTTPS with at least TLSv1.2 . At rest, data is encrypted using AES-256.
2. What are the resource requirements for the Recurrency service? Should we be worried about it impacting the performance of our ERP?
The Recurrency service is designed to be lightweight and consumes few resources. Most issues we see are due to the server the agent is on losing connection to the internet or being taken offline. We also implement rate limiting within our services to ensure we do not overload your ERP.
3. I don’t feel comfortable giving Recurrency write access, can I proceed with read permission only?
Yes. We can begin with just read access. If you want to use the full suite of Recurrency’s features, we will need to add write access.
We provide an uninstaller that you can use to uninstall the backend agent and disconnect the integration at any point, and you are the only one with the ability to modify the config file.
If you have any questions, please reach out to your dedicated Account Executive, sales@recurrency,com, or [email protected].