What is a File-Based Integration?

Before real-time APIs were common, file-based integration was the default: a nightly export job would drop a CSV of updated records onto an FTP server or shared drive, and a scheduled import job on the other side would pick it up and load it. It remains widely used today, especially with legacy systems, banks, and enterprise software that were never built with modern APIs, or in situations where a batch cadence is actually fine — payroll runs, end-of-day reconciliation, bulk data migrations. The trade-offs versus an API integration are real: file-based integration is inherently batch and delayed rather than real-time, format drift (a column added or reordered without notice) can silently break the import, and there's no built-in request/response feedback loop — you often don't know a file failed to process until someone checks. Robust file-based integrations compensate with schema validation on ingest, checksums or record counts to confirm a complete transfer, and alerting when an expected file doesn't arrive on schedule.