finance · stock · sales · productionERP Build vs Buy Checklist
A 29-point checklist across process fit, data, cost, compliance, and team readiness — score yourself before you sign anything. Fill in your details and the download unlocks below.
The workaround became the process
Approvals happen in chat, the real numbers live in a spreadsheet, and the ERP is just where data goes to be filed.
Every change is a paid ticket
A new approval step or report should take days. Instead it waits in a vendor queue and arrives with an invoice.
Five tools, no single truth
Sales, stock, accounts, and HR each hold a piece. Someone spends every month-end stitching exports together.
Per-seat pricing taxes growth
Each new hire, branch, or partner login adds to a licence bill that grows faster than the business does.
Compliance is a manual chore
Tax filings, e-invoices, and statutory reports need hand-checking because the system was never built for your rules.
Reports answer last month's question
By the time a dashboard is assembled, the decision it was meant to inform has already been made.
Accounting and compliance
Ledgers, payables, receivables, bank reconciliation, and the statutory reports your region requires.
Inventory and warehousing
Multi-location stock, batches and serials, transfers, reorder levels, and cycle counts.
Procurement
Requisitions, vendor quotes, purchase orders, and three-way matching with your own approval chains.
Sales and CRM
Quotes, orders, pricing rules, credit limits, and a customer history your whole team can see.
Production planning
Bills of materials, work orders, capacity planning, and shop-floor status tied back to stock and cost.
HR and payroll
Employee records, attendance, leave, shifts, and payroll runs that follow your policies.
Projects and field work
Job costing, timesheets, site reports, and milestone billing for teams that work off-site.
Reporting and dashboards
Live views for owners and managers, drawn from one source instead of five exports.
Customer and vendor portals
Let partners track orders, raise tickets, and upload documents without calling your team.
- Sales tax by state and local jurisdiction, with exemption certificates
- 1099 and year-end reporting
- Approval controls and audit trails for financial reporting
- Access controls suited to regulated data such as HIPAA
- VAT, reverse charge, and cross-border sales across member states
- Structured e-invoicing and Peppol formats as national mandates arrive
- GDPR tooling for consent, retention, export, and deletion
- Multi-language, multi-currency, and SEPA payments
- GST/HST, PST, and QST applied by province
- Provincial payroll and remittance rules
- PIPEDA and provincial privacy obligations
- English and French interfaces and documents
- GST and BAS reporting
- Single Touch Payroll and superannuation
- Peppol-based e-invoicing
- Privacy Act obligations and Australian data hosting
Exact obligations depend on your registrations and industry. We confirm them with your tax adviser during the blueprint stage.
Manufacturing
Bills of materials, work orders, and shop-floor status tied directly to stock levels and product costing.
Distribution
Multi-warehouse stock, customer price lists, credit control, and dispatch in a single order-to-cash flow.
Retail
Branch-level inventory, point-of-sale sync, and replenishment rules, rolled up for head office.
Logistics
Shipments, fleet upkeep, and driver settlements managed together, with a tracking portal customers can use directly.
Healthcare
Appointments, patient records, billing, and pharmacy stock across clinics, designed around applicable privacy and record-keeping rules.
Construction
Project costing, material requisitions, and subcontractor billing tracked per site, so margins stay visible while there's time to act.
Discover
Workshops with the people who run each process. We watch how work actually moves, including the spreadsheets and side channels.
A process map and a ranked list of problems to solve first.
Blueprint
We turn findings into wireframes, a data model, an integration list, and a phased plan, then price it.
A written specification, phase plan, and estimate — free to walk away with.
Build in sprints
Working software every two weeks, demoed to your team. Feedback shapes the next sprint, not a change order.
A running build you can click through, on a staging site, from week two.
Migrate and launch
Trial data migrations, user training, and a department-by-department cutover so operations never stop.
Validated historical data and a team that knows the system on day one.
Run and evolve
A stabilisation period with the engineers who built it, then a support plan and a backlog for the next modules.
Monitoring, fixes, and a roadmap you control.
You own it
Source code, database, and documentation are delivered to you, with no hidden licences underneath.
Secure by default
Role-based permissions, encrypted data, audit logs, and backups are part of the baseline, not extras.
Built to connect
Documented APIs from day one, so the ERP plays well with the tools you already pay for.
Visible progress
A demo every sprint and a plain-language status note, so you never have to ask where things stand.
Typical stack React or Next.js front ends, Node.js and Python services, PostgreSQL or MongoDB, deployed on AWS or your own servers.
When your workflows are part of what makes you competitive, when you pay for features you never use, or when people keep exporting data to spreadsheets to finish what the software cannot. If a packaged tool fits most of how you work and the gaps are cheap to live with, buy it — we'll tell you which side you're on during scoping.
Tell us how the business runs. We'll tell you what it would take.
A senior engineer reviews your answers and comes to the call with a first view of modules, integrations, and likely phases. If packaged software suits you better, we'll say so.