Single Source of Truth (SSOT)

A single source of truth is the one system you designate as authoritative for a given piece of data, so every other tool reads from it or syncs to it instead of holding its own conflicting copy. In a typical no-code stack, a customer's email might live in a CRM, a billing tool, an email platform, and a spreadsheet at once — and the moment they change, four versions disagree. Why it matters: without an SSOT, integrations become a web of two-way syncs where nobody knows which value is correct, and fixing data in one place silently overwrites a better value elsewhere. Practical note: for each important entity — customers, orders, products — pick exactly one system that owns it, make edits happen there, and treat every other tool as a downstream mirror fed by one-directional syncs. When you must sync two ways, add a clear rule for which side wins on conflict, and log changes so you can trace how a bad value got in.