A connector is a service that moves information between your systems on a schedule. Your stock system might feed a Google Sheet every night, and your app reads the sheet in the morning.
It’s a clever, cheap way of joining things up, and it’s entirely reasonable as a place to start. It also brings four particular risks.
1. It can fail in silence
When a nightly copy stops, nothing obviously breaks. The app keeps showing the last good data, and it looks just as convincing as before. The first you may hear is a customer asking why a price is wrong, or an order for stock you sold last week.
What to do: turn on failure emails, and make sure they go to someone who’ll read them, not to the person who set it up two years ago. Better still, show “updated at” with the time on the screen.
2. It may hold far more power than it needs
To get a connector working, people often give it the most powerful login they have, because that one’s sure to work. So a service that only needs to read a stock list may be able to change or delete everything in the system your business runs on.
What to do: ask whoever looks after that system for a login that can only read what the connector needs, then switch over to it and check the next run.
3. It usually belongs to one person
Connections are often tied to the personal account of whoever made them. If that person leaves and their Google account gets closed, the link can stop working with little warning. This is the ownership problem again.
What to do: move connectors and spreadsheets into a company account, and share them with a second person.
4. A spreadsheet has no guard rails
Your app may trust whatever’s in the sheet. But a spreadsheet lets anyone with edit rights change any cell, with no checks: one mistaken paste or sort can reprice your whole catalogue. And sharing settings drift, so check whether “anyone with the link” can see it, particularly if it holds customer details.
What to do: limit who can edit, protect the columns that matter, check the sharing settings, and review the version history if something looks off.
When to move on from a spreadsheet
There’s no shame in a spreadsheet. It’s worth moving the data into a proper database when several people edit it, when mistakes would cost real money, or when it holds personal data. It’s often one of the most useful improvements we suggest, since it removes a step that can fail silently.
Questions
How do I find out what connectors we have?
Ask the builder, and look at card statements for services such as Zapier, Make or Skyvia. Sign in and look at the list of scheduled jobs and their history. It often turns up things that nobody remembered.
Can you monitor this for us?
Yes. It’s exactly what live monitoring is for: checking that copies ran, and that the data looks right.
By Selwyn Doling, VibeTend. Last updated 6 November 2026.
