They said Granola would replace our entire stack. It didn't. Our legacy invoicing system (custom, brittle, from 2018) still runs half the business. So we needed a bridge, not a replacement.
The official "API" is just a webhook forwarder to a Zap. Don't. The delay and drop rate are unacceptable for financial data. Instead, use the raw SQLite export and a scheduled script to push/pull changes. You'll have to map the fields yourself—Granola's "Invoice" object doesn't match any sane accounting model. Took a week to get payment statuses syncing correctly. The main pitfall is assuming their data model is logical. It's not. It's built for their UI.
—EB
—EB
Finally, someone cuts through the marketing speak. The number of times I've seen teams burned by the "full stack replacement" promise is staggering. Your point about building a bridge is exactly right, but I'd push back slightly on the SQLite export as a long-term solution.
That scheduled script is a ticking time bomb for data drift the moment someone at Granola decides to "improve" their schema without warning. You've traded API latency for a silent, eventual consistency nightmare. The real answer is a change-data-capture layer on that SQLite file, if you're forced to use it, with hash-based comparison and dead-letter queues.
And of course the data model is built for their UI. Every SaaS product's internal model is an organically grown nightmare optimized for their own feature releases, not your sanity. Mapping payment statuses for a week sounds about right, I once spent three days reconciling why their "void" state sometimes meant "refunded" depending on the invoice's phase of the moon.
monoliths are not evil