TIMS is made by Computers Unlimited (CU) out of Billings, Montana, and the industrial version is sold to gas and welding supply distributors, so alongside the usual financials, inventory, and sales, it handles cylinder balances, rental billing, bulk gas, and delivery routes, with drivers recording deliveries and signatures on a mobile app.
That specialization is the appeal, and it’s also why the integration work looks.
CU also sells a separate TIMS line for home medical equipment providers, but this guide focuses on the industrial version. We’ll cover how data gets in and out of TIMS, what tends to get connected, and the habits that prevent from falling.
Top Methods of TIMS Integration
TIMS RESTful APIs
CU lists RESTful APIs and event triggers among its integration capabilities, and that’s what some third-party connections end up using, although you won’t find any public developer documentation for them because CU sets up access for each customer.
Published setup guides from TIMS partners give a good idea of what that involves. One storefront vendor, EvolutionX, documents its connector in detail, and it asks for a TIMS Security URL for the authorization token, a client ID, a client secret, an API URL, and an API key, and CU supplies each of them for a test environment and a live one. The same guide makes clear that the CU team should manage the API key..
IWDC Vendor Ordering
For purchasing, TIMS includes the Electronic Vendor Ordering for members of the Independent Welding Distributors Cooperative (IWDC). CU explains that each electronic purchase order is routed through IWDC to the vendor, that acknowledgements come back automatically, and that vendor invoices get matched line by line before they flow into TIMS Payables. Beyond IWDC, CU also lists EDI automation as a general capability.
Integration Platforms
A middleware platform isn’t really a separate method; it’s more the way the API gets used once there are several systems involved. You still need the credentials CU hands out. The difference is who deals with schedules, mapping, retries, and alerts. With four or five systems hitting the same ERP, somebody ends up doing that by hand if a platform isn’t. Platforms like DCKAP’s Integrator help you sync multiple systems, ensuring the right data is updated at the right systems and at the right time.
Best Practices for TIMS Integration
Start With CU
Since the credentials and endpoints come from CU, the first real step is a conversation with them, and it’s a good moment to confirm which version you’re on. One storefront connector, for instance, expects TIMS V8 R19 and needs V80.29.574 or later for its credit card surcharge feature.
Respect Field and Cart Limits
TIMS has character limits that any storefront or portal has to enforce, with published figures such as 25 characters for an address name, or keeping carts to 50 lines or fewer unless you’ve tested performance at the payment step. It’s a lot easier to stop a bad value at the input field than to chase down a truncated or rejected order afterwards.
Map Codes Before You Map Orders
Shipping methods have to line up exactly, so each shipping option on the web side needs to map to a valid TIMS Ship Via code, even though customers only ever see the friendly label. The same goes for customer item numbers, locations, and guest accounts.
Understand the Order Lifecycle
TIMS orders move through numbered statuses, and the integration has to keep up with them. One published storefront flow shows how it works. At checkout, a draft goes into TIMS as status 1, mostly so TIMS can calculate fees and tax.
When the shopper lands on the thank-you page, that draft turns into status 2. Later, once TIMS posts and invoices it (status 5), the web order flips to ‘completed’. Anything that fails sits on hold until someone reprocesses it, and that documentation suggests filtering for new and on-hold orders every so often to catch strays.
Punchout orders need a bit of extra attention. Partner documentation notes that any account set up for punchout has to have punchout checkout enabled so that taxes are calculated properly in TIMS, and distributors using the newer Eprocurement System – ED 058 in TIMS have to turn on a matching setting so those orders get processed correctly.
Check Feature Flags and Known Gaps
Some data only exists when a particular TIMS module is turned on, which is why connectors typically check whether Blanket PO, Advanced Cylinder Management, and customer site tracking are enabled, and features like gas POs rely on those. There are a few API quirks to plan for as well; for instance, one partner notes that because of TIMS API limitations, unpaid invoices aren’t excluded by the date filter.
DCKAP: ERP-First Integration Platform for CU TIMS
It’s rare for a TIMS distributor to need just one connection. More often there’s a storefront, a CRM, some finance tools, and something on the supplier side, and without a central platform, each of those gets set up and maintained separately.
That’s the situation DCKAP Integrator was made for. We regularly connect systems using REST, SOAP, direct database queries, flat files, FTP or EDI, working from the endpoints and credentials CU issues.
The scheduled-versus-live split maps straight onto how our pipelines work, since each one is set to batch or dynamic on its own.
Stuck orders and rejected documents don’t have to wait for someone to go looking. The platform keeps detailed transaction logs that show the exact step where a transfer failed, and alerts can be set up per integration.
API limits are something we’ve worked around before.
Gas-specific rules like volume pricing, split orders, or Ship Via code matching are handled with mapping and modifiers, which is where the logic sits that reshapes a value before it reaches the other system.
Projects with similar challenges
Several of our projects have encountered similar issues to those raised by TIMS. Magnuson Superchargers, Global Shop Solutions had no native REST API, so we wrote custom APIs and staging tables around it, and DDI Inform at Wichita needed similar workarounds.
The guide above covers TIMS’s own EDI and IWDC ordering, but other connections often follow. ACI Controls now gets a HubSpot deal for every ERP quote, and Tangent runs EDI with retailers like Home Depot and Walmart without paying the per-transaction fees of a traditional VAN.
What working with us looks like
Implementation follows a six-step lifecycle: discover, design, build, validate, launch, and maintain. Once you’re live, we monitor the integrations, fix sync errors, and keep up with API changes from your vendors, so your team mainly helps confirm the mapping and business logic early on.
Conclusion
TIMS is a specialist ERP, and integrating it well means treating it like one. That means starting with CU for credentials and version checks, using the partner integrations that already exist, keeping TIMS as the record of truth, and getting codes, field limits, and order statuses mapped before any data starts moving.
Got more than one system TIMS? Book time with one of our integration engineers and we’ll go through it with you.
