Syncing with Redtail

SurgeTK's Redtail integration pulls your firm's client data — contacts, family groupings, accounts, and beneficiary designations — from Redtail CRM into SurgeTK so you don't have to re-enter it. The integration is one-way: SurgeTK pulls data from Redtail, and nothing is ever written back to Redtail. The integration is available to firms on any SurgeTK plan that includes CRM connections.

For the full endpoint list, authentication details, and field-by-field mapping, see our Redtail integration technical reference.

You will need:

If you do not yet have Redtail API access, contact Redtail Support to enable it on your account before continuing.

You can start from the Integrations page or from the Connect CRM button in the top navigation.

SurgeTK will validate your credentials with Redtail. On success, the card flips to Connected, the Sync and Sync Filters buttons appear, and you can run your first sync.

Always select Production. The Development option connects to Redtail's internal review environment and is intended only for Redtail-guided testing. Do not select it for normal use — you will not see your firm's real Redtail data. In production use, always select Production.

If SurgeTK cannot validate your credentials, the modal will show one of the following errors:

Important: Redtail is the source of truth for data that syncs into SurgeTK. If you edit a synced field in SurgeTK — for example, correcting a client's email address or updating a date of birth — your change will be overwritten on the next sync. Make corrections in Redtail first, then sync them into SurgeTK.

This applies to every field sourced from Redtail, including names, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, marital status, employer, occupation, category, status, account balances, custodian, and beneficiary designations.

Value Add snapshots, household notes, internal tasks, manual account entries, and any other data you create inside SurgeTK are never overwritten by the sync. The sync only touches fields it sourced from Redtail. Work you do in SurgeTK on top of synced data — a Buckets snapshot, a Guardrails review, a manual advisor assignment, a task — is safe from overwrite.

Syncs are manual. SurgeTK does not run Redtail syncs on a schedule and does not receive push notifications from Redtail. You sync when you want updated data.

Sync duration depends on the size of your Redtail database, the responsiveness of the Redtail API, and the number of accounts per household. Rough expectations:

Large first syncs can take substantially longer than later incremental syncs.

While a sync is running:

Clicking Cancel asks SurgeTK to stop the sync at the next safe checkpoint. Cancellation is cooperative — work already in flight finishes before the sync stops, so you may see a short delay between clicking Cancel and the sync ending. Records that were already written before you cancelled remain in SurgeTK.

Partial failures are expected behavior. If Redtail returns a bad record or a network hiccup drops a page of results, SurgeTK logs the error for that specific record and continues processing the rest. At the end of the sync you'll see one of three outcomes:

If a sync fails, retry from the Integrations card. If it fails again with the same error, see Troubleshooting below.

The sync brings the following into SurgeTK:

For the full field-by-field mapping, see the Redtail integration technical reference.

A few practical notes about how SurgeTK handles records created by a Redtail sync:

The integration is one-way. SurgeTK pulls data from Redtail; no SurgeTK data is ever sent back to Redtail.

In addition, the following Redtail data is not pulled into SurgeTK today. Where a field is not pulled, enter it manually in SurgeTK if you need it.

Beneficiaries are a partial sync. For every account, SurgeTK captures:

SurgeTK does not capture IRD (income-in-respect-of-decedent) flags, contingent-trigger conditions, or per-stirpes distribution detail — Redtail's beneficiary model does not expose these consistently across accounts.

Sync Filters let you control which Redtail contacts and accounts SurgeTK will pull. Click Sync Filters on the Redtail card to open the filter modal.

There are three filters:

Category and status options come from your own Redtail instance. SurgeTK caches them for 24 hours. If you've just added a new category in Redtail and want it to show up immediately in the filter modal, click Refresh.

Changes to filters take effect on the next sync. Click Save, then click Sync.

Each of the contact filters can run in Allowlist or Denylist mode:

Out of the box, SurgeTK ships with sensible defaults:

Important behavior to understand before you start selecting items:

Gotcha: As soon as you check any item in an Allowlist, SurgeTK switches to strict matching. It will sync only contacts whose category (or status) matches one of your checked items exactly, case-insensitively. Partial matches do not count. If your Redtail firm uses category names like "A Client", "B Client", and "Personal Client", you must check each of those names — checking only "Client" will not match any of them, and you will sync zero contacts.

Truth table for Allowlist mode, once you've checked at least one item:

Truth table for Denylist mode, once you've checked at least one item:

Both filters are applied; a contact must pass both the category filter and the status filter to be synced.

The Closed Account Filter is a separate toggle. It is off by default.

When on, SurgeTK will skip any account that is:

Threshold options are 6 months, 1 year (default), 2 years, 3 years, and 5 years.

A subtle but important edge case:

Gotcha: If an account is marked closed in Redtail but has no close date on the record, SurgeTK cannot tell how old the closure is, so the Closed Account Filter will not exclude it. If you want long-closed accounts removed from SurgeTK but they are still appearing after enabling the filter, check whether those accounts actually have a close date set in Redtail.

Clicking Refresh in the Sync Filters modal forces SurgeTK to re-fetch your category, status, and account-type lists from Redtail immediately, bypassing the 24-hour cache. Use it when you've just added or renamed a category in Redtail and want it to show up in the filter list right away.

If Refresh fails (for example because your Redtail credentials have expired), SurgeTK will show the error and keep whatever was previously cached. Fix the underlying issue — usually by disconnecting and reconnecting — and try again.

When you tighten a filter — for example, switching Contact Categories from Allowlist with no items (the default) to Allowlist with only Client checked — SurgeTK does not automatically delete any clients that were previously imported. Previously-imported contacts that are now excluded by your filter will:

If you want those previously-imported clients removed from SurgeTK, you can do it yourself:

Deleting a household also removes the clients, accounts, liabilities, assets, and insurance records linked to it. If you resync afterward with a filter that allows those contacts, SurgeTK will recreate the records cleanly on the next sync.

If this is your first sync and you realize you misconfigured the filters — for example you pulled in every Prospect and COI by accident — the cleanest recovery is to delete every Redtail-sourced household from the Households page, adjust your filters, and resync. On the next sync SurgeTK re-pulls only the records your new filters allow.

Important: Only do this if you have not yet created any SurgeTK-originated data on those households. If you have made manual edits, created household notes or tasks, assigned advisors, or generated any Value Add snapshots on the affected households, deleting the households will permanently delete that SurgeTK-originated data. It is not recoverable from Redtail.

If a contact is deleted in Redtail, their SurgeTK client and household are not automatically removed. Syncs will simply stop updating them. To clean up, delete them yourself from the Households page in SurgeTK.

Redtail stores a servicing advisor and a writing advisor on contacts and families. During a sync, SurgeTK pulls Redtail's advisor lists and records the Redtail advisor on each household — but it does not automatically map a Redtail advisor to a SurgeTK user. Until you link them, the household's lead-advisor assignment in SurgeTK stays empty and the household shows up as unassigned.

Linking is a one-time step per advisor:

When you link a servicing advisor, SurgeTK reassigns every existing household whose Redtail servicing advisor matches that mapping immediately, in the same request — you do not need to wait for the next sync. Linking a writing advisor does not run an immediate reassignment; writing-advisor links take effect on the next sync.

New advisors that appear in later syncs will need to be linked the same way. If an advisor leaves the firm, update the linkage so future syncs reassign those households correctly.

Disconnecting removes your Redtail credentials from SurgeTK. It does not delete any data that was previously synced. Only Admin users can disconnect the integration.

After disconnecting:

You can reconnect later with the same or different Redtail credentials. Because SurgeTK identifies records by their underlying Redtail IDs, reconnecting and running a sync will match existing SurgeTK records to their Redtail source and keep them in place rather than creating duplicates.

Your Redtail password is encrypted at rest.

Only the Admin role can see or use these controls. If you are a Lead Advisor, Assistant, or Team Member, you will see that the integration is connected and when it last synced, but the action buttons will be hidden. Ask an Admin at your firm to run the sync or adjust filters for you.

Counting and first-fetch phases can legitimately run for several minutes on large firms without a progress update. If the progress card has shown no change for 20 minutes or longer, SurgeTK will show a "Sync may have stalled" warning with a Retry button. Click Retry to restart. If it stalls again, check Redtail's service status before escalating.

If your Redtail password changes, SurgeTK's stored credentials become stale. The next sync will fail with "Invalid Redtail credentials." To fix:

Check, in order:

Check, in order:

This is expected behavior. Redtail is the source of truth for any field the sync provides, and the next sync overwrites SurgeTK values with Redtail values. Make the correction in Redtail and sync again. Fields you've created in SurgeTK that Redtail does not provide — notes, tasks, Value Add snapshots — are not touched by syncs.

Lead-advisor assignment requires a one-time linking step per Redtail advisor. See Linking Redtail advisors to SurgeTK users. Remember that linking a writing advisor only takes effect on the next sync, while linking a servicing advisor applies immediately.