Custom ERP or off-the-shelf ERP? How to choose the right one

An ERP brings the running of a company into one place: customers, orders or services, staff, purchasing, invoicing and figures. When it works, each piece of data is entered once and everyone works from the same information. When it doesn’t fit, the team ends up with the ERP for invoicing and a collection of spreadsheets for everything else. The question is not which ERP is best in general, but which one fits how your company works.

When an off-the-shelf ERP is the best option

• Your business follows standard purchasing, sales, stock and accounting processes, without strong particularities.
• You need invoicing, tax and accounting covered now, and an off-the-shelf ERP already does it.
• You have someone (in-house or an implementation partner) to configure it and train the team.
• You prefer a per-user or per-module fee to an upfront investment.

What people rarely mention about off-the-shelf ERPs

The licence is only part of it. A general-purpose ERP has to be implemented: modules configured, data migrated, reports adapted and people trained. That work is usually done by a partner, billed by the hour, and every customisation outside the standard also makes future upgrades more expensive. Before deciding, ask for the cost of implementation and customisation, not just the licences.

Signs your company needs its own

• What sets you apart (how you plan, how you price, how you deliver the service) lives outside the ERP, in spreadsheets or in someone’s head.
• Work is organised in services, shifts, visits or sessions, and the ERP is designed for selling products and managing stock.
• Field staff have no easy way to clock in, check their schedule or log their work from their phone.
• Finding the real margin of a customer or a service means cross-checking data by hand at the end of the month.
• Every change to the process depends on a customisation that takes weeks and costs a lot.

What you gain with a custom ERP

A custom ERP is built around your process: the screens, fields, alerts and reports your team actually uses. It can include an app for field staff and an area for your customers, it connects to the software you already have, and the code is yours, so it evolves when the business changes. You don’t have to build everything: invoicing and accounting can stay in an off-the-shelf program connected to the rest.

And what it costs

It takes an upfront investment, ongoing maintenance and your team’s time to explain how they work. At first it will have fewer general features than an ERP with years on the market. To compare fairly, add up several years of licences, implementation, customisations and the time lost to workarounds, and set that next to building and maintaining your own.

The middle path: an ERP built for your sector

Between the general-purpose ERP and building from scratch there is the vertical ERP: a product made for a specific kind of company, with its processes already solved, that you configure rather than program. If one exists for your sector, it is usually the fastest route. That is what we do with Kirexa, our ERP for service companies: a shared core and a package per sector, currently for cleaning companies and psychology and educational psychology practices.

Discover Kirexa, the ERP for service companies

How to decide in three steps

• Map your real process from start to finish and mark which parts are standard and which set you apart.
• Look for an ERP for your sector that covers the parts that set you apart; if there is one, start there.
• If there isn’t, build only that part to measure and connect it to an off-the-shelf program for accounting and invoicing.

Work out the price of your custom ERP