Retiring legacy commerce, one workflow at a time
How a custom Shopify-Xero integration let La Jolie Ronde modernise telephone ordering without disrupting their accounts.
Manual reconciliation replaced by automatic sync
Workflow migrated with zero disruption
Built to scale alongside the business
The client
La Jolie Ronde is an award-winning provider of French and Spanish language learning for children, delivered through lunchtime classes and after-school clubs across the UK and Ireland. Over 560 tutors run more than 1,660 classes, with around 20,500 children enrolled.
Cursor has worked with La Jolie Ronde for several years, including building their Language Resources e-commerce platform and companion media player app. Through the site, licensees, tutors, schools and parents can order teaching resources and learning materials, with orders placed either directly online or via a staff-assisted telephone ordering service.
The opportunity
La Jolie Ronde's commerce operations ran on Craft CMS, handling two very different jobs at once: a customer-facing online shop and a staff-operated telephone ordering system. Both fed into Xero for accounting, but the connection relied on manual and semi-manual reconciliation, adding admin overhead and risk of error.
Replacing the whole platform in one move was too risky. Instead, the plan was to migrate one workflow at a time (starting with telephone orders) onto Shopify, while making sure nothing broke on the finance side.
The solution
Cursor built a custom integration layer connecting Shopify directly to Xero, replicating (and improving on) what the Craft-based system had done for years. This gave staff a modern, supported platform for taking phone orders, while finance continues to receive clean, automated records - no double handling required. The integration automatically:
Contacts
Creates and manages customer contacts
Invoicing
Generates itemised invoices, correctly handling bundles, discounts, shipping, and multiple product types
Reconcilliation
Records payments and keeps reconciliation accurate
The outcome
Because there was no single source of documentation for how the existing Craft-based Xero integration worked, the team had to reverse-engineer the required logic, particularly around correctly itemising complex orders (bundles, discounts, multiple product types) so invoices in Xero matched what the previous system had always produced.
Telephone ordering now runs on Shopify, backed by an integration that keeps Xero accurate automatically. It's the first phase of a longer-term plan to migrate commerce fully onto Shopify, proving out the migration approach before the online shop follows.
