Business Automation: Where to Start with CRM, Task Tracker, Integrations

Business automation should start not with buying a CRM or a task tracker but with a process map. First you describe how a request turns into a deal, a deal into a project and a project into a payment, and find the places where data gets lost or moved by hand. Then the order is: CRM, task tracker, integrations between them, reporting and only at the end AI assistants. Each next step relies on the data collected by the previous one.

This article is for founders and managers of IT companies, studios and service teams in Kazakhstan who are tired of deals in WhatsApp and tasks in chats. Below we go through each step, a “symptom → what to automate first” table, a 90-day plan and the mistakes that turn automation into a pile of paid subscriptions.

The order of steps and why

Automation solves one problem: it removes manual data transfer and makes work visible. That only works if each type of data has a single place where it lives.

1. Process map. What happens, who is responsible, where the data lives.
2. CRM. A single source of truth about customers, deals and agreements.
3. Task tracker. A single source of truth about the work after the sale: projects, tasks, deadlines.
4. Integrations. Data moves from the CRM to the tracker and back on its own.
5. Reporting. Management sees the pipeline and team workload without collecting spreadsheets.
6. AI. Assistants and agents work on top of clean data.

You can swap steps 2 and 3. You can’t skip step 1, and you can’t start with step 6. In our implementation experience, most failed automation projects started with choosing a tool rather than with the question of which process it should cover.

Step 1. Process map

A process map doesn’t require special software. A board or a spreadsheet and two or three meetings with the people who do the work by hand are enough.

What to capture:

• The flow of money. Where requests come from, who qualifies them, how the proposal is prepared, who signs the contract, when the invoice is issued.
• The flow of work. How a deal becomes a project, who assigns tasks, how the result is accepted, how closure is recorded.
• Transfer points. Every place where a person copies data from one place to another: from WhatsApp to a spreadsheet, from a spreadsheet to the tracker, from the tracker to an invoice.
• Owners. Each stage should have one responsible person, not “the sales department.”

The output of this step: a one-page diagram and a list of five to ten bottlenecks with an estimate of how much time and money they eat up. The estimate can be qualitative; what matters is that the team agrees on the priority.

The symptom tells you what to automate first

Symptom	What to automate first	Tool
Requests get lost, managers reply late	Request intake and the sales pipeline	CRM
Nobody knows how many deals are in progress and for what amount	Deal stages and required fields	CRM
Projects miss deadlines, status is learned on calls	Tasks, statuses and owners	Task tracker
Tasks are assigned in chats and forgotten	A single entry point for tasks	Task tracker with request intake
After the sale, the team gathers requirements all over again	Handing the deal over to a project	CRM and tracker integration
Management waits weeks for a report	Collecting metrics from systems	Reporting on top of the CRM and tracker
Employees answer the same questions over and over	A knowledge base, then an AI assistant	Wiki, then AI

Step 2. CRM: a single source of truth about customers and deals

A CRM exists so that a deal lives in one place. If a deal can be run in WhatsApp, a spreadsheet and the CRM at the same time, the CRM isn’t working. We covered a detailed step-by-step plan in our article on how to implement a CRM in an IT company in four weeks.

For IT companies in Kazakhstan, we most often consider two options.

amoCRM. A cloud CRM that is strong in sales through messengers: WhatsApp, Instagram, Telegram. It has telephony integrations and many Kazakhstan-based integrators. It fits if most of your leads come in through chats and response speed matters.

Twenty CRM. An open source CRM under the AGPL-3.0 license. It has custom objects and fields, workflows, an API and webhooks, CSV import, kanban and table views, and email and calendar integration with Google and Microsoft. There is no built-in telephony, SMS or email campaigns; these are connected through integrations. The self-hosted version is free, but you need an engineer who knows how to deploy it.

Criterion	amoCRM	Twenty CRM
Model	Cloud	Cloud or self-hosted
Messengers	Built in	Via integrations
Data structure flexibility	Fields and pipelines	Custom objects and fields
API and webhooks	Yes	Yes
Where data is stored	amoCRM servers outside Kazakhstan	On your server when self-hosted
Cost	Plans via Kazakhstan partners, priced in tenge	Self-hosted is free, cloud per twenty.com pricing

Kazakhstan context. A CRM almost always contains personal data: names, phone numbers, conversations. Some companies want to store these databases in Kazakhstan. With amoCRM, data is stored outside Kazakhstan; with self-hosted Twenty, it is stored wherever you put the server. If in-country storage matters, install the CRM on a server from a Kazakhstan hosting provider.

Step 3. Task tracker: the work after the sale

A task tracker covers the second half of the process: from the signed contract to the accepted result. One rule matters here: a task exists only in the tracker. If it was assigned verbally or in a chat, it doesn’t exist.

For IT teams, the main options in 2026 are:

• Plane. An open source tracker. The Community Edition under AGPL-3.0 is free with no user limit and installs via Docker. It includes projects, tasks, cycles, modules, Pages and Wiki for documentation, request intake via Intake, and time tracking. In the cloud, the Free plan covers up to 12 users, and Pro costs $6 per user per month billed annually (as of October 2026).
• Jira. The standard for large IT teams, with a mature ecosystem. In the cloud, Free covers up to 10 users, Standard is $7.91 and Premium $14.54 per user per month billed annually (as of October 2026). Documentation lives in a separate Confluence. Data Center is being discontinued: new licenses are no longer sold as of March 30, 2026, and support ends on March 28, 2029.

If you’re choosing between them, start with two questions: where the data should live and who will administer the system a year from now. And one more rule: a tracker is rolled out with one team, not with the whole company at once.

Steps 4 and 5. Integrations and reporting

When the CRM and tracker work separately, you have two systems and a manual bridge between them. An integration removes that bridge. A typical scenario: a deal in the CRM moves to the “Contract signed” stage, and the tracker automatically creates a project with tasks from a template, a link to the deal and the client contact. The project status and delivery date flow back into the CRM.

Technically this is done with an API and webhooks. Twenty, amoCRM, Plane and Jira all have them. We covered the event schema, fields and error handling in detail in our article on integrating a CRM and a task tracker.

What to consider before you start:

• Each integration should have an owner who learns about a failure before the users do.
• Sync the minimum number of fields. Every extra field adds conflicts.
• You need an error log and a clear retry scenario; otherwise some deals will quietly never reach the tracker.

Reporting is the last of the “classic” steps. As long as data is entered irregularly, any dashboard shows a false picture. Start with three to five metrics management already asks for every week: deals by stage, project deadlines, team workload. Add the rest on request.

Kazakhstan context. In Kazakhstan, a lot of sales and client work happens in WhatsApp. Banning the messenger is pointless. The goal of automation is to get conversations into the CRM and turn the agreements in them into tracker tasks. Another nuance: foreign SaaS is paid by card in dollars without closing documents that meet local standards, while self-hosted on a Kazakhstan hosting provider is paid in tenge under a contract. It’s worth discussing this with your accounting team before you choose.

Step 6. AI assistants and agents

AI is useful where there is structured data and repetitive actions: a deal summary before a call, a task draft from a client email, search across the knowledge base, initial sorting of incoming requests. All of this works only if the CRM, tracker and documentation are already maintained carefully.

Connecting AI as the first step means automating chaos. A bot that answers clients without knowing current prices and statuses creates more work than it removes. A separate question is agent permissions: which actions the AI can take on its own and which it can only suggest to a human. It should be settled before launch, not after the first incident.

A 90-day plan

Period	What we do	Result
Weeks 1–2	Interviews, process map, list of bottlenecks	An agreed diagram and priorities
Weeks 3–4	Choose a CRM or tracker, pilot with one team	The system runs on real data
Weeks 5–6	Required fields, rules, training for the pilot team	Deals or tasks live only in the system
Weeks 7–8	Second system or extending the first one to other teams	Both halves of the process are in systems
Weeks 9–10	CRM and tracker integration, error log	Deals are handed over to projects without manual transfer
Weeks 11–12	Reporting, review of results, AI plan	A management dashboard and a list of AI scenarios

The plan is a working one, not a mandatory one. If the pilot shows the chosen system doesn’t fit, it’s better to spend two weeks replacing it than a year on workarounds.

Mistakes that eat the budget

1. Starting with a tool. You bought a CRM because “everyone has one,” but the sales process isn’t described. Six months later, half the deals are in the CRM.
2. Rolling out everything at once. A CRM, a tracker, integrations and a bot at the same time overload the team, and none of the systems takes hold.
3. Leaving a parallel channel. If tasks can be assigned both in a chat and in the tracker, they’ll be assigned in the chat.
4. Customizing for everyone. Twenty statuses and forty fields make the system inconvenient. Start with the minimum.
5. Not appointing an owner. Without an administrator, within six months the system gets overgrown with extra fields and broken automations.
6. Ignoring data requirements. Moving a customer database from the cloud to a Kazakhstan server after launch costs more than making the right choice at the start.
7. Waiting for an AI miracle. AI speeds up work with good data and is useless with bad data.

How we do it

We start with a diagnostic: we run interviews, draw a process map and, together with management, choose one bottleneck that delivers the biggest impact. Then we launch a pilot with one team on real deals or tasks and set up the CRM (Twenty or amoCRM) or the task tracker (Plane or Jira), integrations and reporting. We scale to other teams only after the pilot shows the system lives on without reminders.

If you’d like to go through this with us, see our page on business automation: CRM, task trackers, integrations and AI assistants. It describes the process, what the work includes and how the diagnostic starts.

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Sources. Twenty CRM: twenty.com and GitHub repository. amoCRM: amocrm.ru. Plane pricing: plane.so/pricing. Jira pricing: Atlassian pricing. Data Center timeline: atlassian.com/enterprise/data-center. Prices are as of October 2026 and may change.

Terms in plain words

CRM

A system that stores customers, deals and agreements. It only works if a deal can't also be run in parallel in chats and spreadsheets.

Task tracker

A system for tracking tasks and projects: who does what, what status the work is in, when it's due. It covers the work after the sale, from the signed contract to the delivered result.

Open source

Software with publicly available source code that you can download, install yourself and modify. Twenty CRM and the free version of Plane are distributed this way.

AGPL-3.0

The open source license under which Twenty and the free version of Plane are released. You can use them and install them on your own server for free; modifications you make available over a network must be published.

Self-hosted

Installing a system on your own or a rented server instead of the vendor's cloud. It gives you control over where data is stored but requires an engineer for installation and maintenance.

API

A programming interface through which one system reads and changes another system's data without human involvement. The link between a CRM and a task tracker is built on it.

Webhook

An automatic notification one system sends to another when an event happens, for example when a deal moves to the 'Contract signed' stage. It triggers the creation of a project in the tracker.