The heroic spreadsheet
Every business I have walked into has one: the spreadsheet. Stock in one tab, orders in another, a pricing formula only one employee understands. It grew organically, it works, and everyone is quietly afraid of it.
A spreadsheet IS an ERP - one with no permissions, no history, no validation, and no idea that two people just edited the same cell. It does not fail loudly. It fails quietly: a wrong price to a good customer, stock that exists in the file but not the warehouse, an order that lived in someone's head.
The five signals it is time
- Two people need the file at the same time, so one of them keeps a copy - and now there are two truths.
- A number reached a customer that nobody can explain.
- Onboarding a new employee starts with "let me explain the spreadsheet" and takes a week.
- The month-end close means one person and one weekend.
- You cannot answer "what was our stock on March 3rd?" because the file only knows now.
Why custom, when SAP exists
Off-the-shelf ERPs are built for the average of a thousand companies, which is why every one of them fights you somewhere. The alternative for a small or mid company is not a lighter SAP - it is a system built around the processes you already have: your stock flow, your invoicing quirks, the approval step that exists because of that one incident in 2021. Built to fit the business, not the other way round.
The honest comparison is not "custom vs off-the-shelf price tags". It is custom vs the cost of the quiet failures plus the monthly seats plus the workarounds, over three years. Run that number - I will help you run it on one call - and the answer is usually obvious in either direction.