ERP vs Spreadsheets: When Does a Growing Business Need to Switch?
Spreadsheets are brilliant — until they become the business. These are the five signals that tell you it is time to move to a real system.
Read articleSoftware is a long-term relationship disguised as a purchase. The demo tells you what the product can do today; these questions tell you what the vendor will do for the next five years.
The six questions
- Who owns my data, and how do I export it? The only acceptable answer: you own it, and export is available any time in standard formats.
- What happens after go-live? Ask for the support process in writing — response times, escalation path, and whether support staff are the same people who built the product.
- Can I speak to a customer in my industry who has used it for two years? Reference calls from year two say more than any case study.
- What does customisation cost, and what breaks when you update? Vendors who customise the core product create forks that quietly stop receiving updates.
- What is included in the price — really? Training, data migration, additional users, new branches, report changes: get each on paper.
- What happens if you shut down? A serious vendor has an answer involving source code escrow or data handover — not silence.
We publish our answers to all six openly, because we believe long-term partnership is a feature — the most important one we ship.