Business management software
Six products, four logins, and one spreadsheet holding it together.
Most Australian businesses under fifty people did not choose a system. They accumulated one. A CRM from 2019, a job tool somebody trialled, a shared drive, a scheduling app, and a spreadsheet that quietly became the real source of truth.
Every one of those is a subscription, and none of them talk properly. The cost is not just the six invoices. It is the double entry, the reconciliation, and the fact that no report can be produced without somebody assembling it by hand.
The accumulation problem
Nobody decided this. It just happened, one trial at a time.
Each individual decision was sensible. The scheduling tool solved a real scheduling problem. The CRM solved a real follow-up problem. The issue is that none of them was chosen with the others in mind, so the joins between them are people.
A person copies the job from the CRM into the scheduler. A person updates the spreadsheet after the invoice goes out. A person builds the monthly report from three exports. Those people are the integration layer, and they are the most expensive one available.
What a single system actually buys
The report you cannot currently produce.
Ask most owners for profitability by client, or utilisation by staff member, or which service line is actually growing, and the honest answer is that it would take a day to work out. Not because the data does not exist, but because it exists in four places with no shared identity.
When the work, the client and the money are one record, those questions become a screen instead of an afternoon. That is usually the change owners notice first, ahead of the subscriptions stopping.
The scope
What gets built, and what we leave alone.
What gets built
- Clients and contacts with your real structure, including groups and sites
- The work, in your words: jobs, matters, projects, cases, whatever your business calls it
- Your pipeline and your stages, with the rules about what can move where
- Quotes and invoices flowing from the same record as the work
- Scheduling and capacity, so you can see who is actually available
- Documents attached to the thing they belong to rather than a shared drive
- Owner reporting: profitability by client, by service and by person
- Role-based access, so the right people see the right things
- Accounting integration, because Xero stays
What we will not build
- Accounting, payroll or award interpretation. All three are regulated, all three change, all three stay with specialists
- Anything already solved well and cheaply that you are happy with. If a $30 a month tool does its job, keep it
- A system that needs us. Handover means handover: the code, the data and the hosting are yours
We will talk you out of scope. The most common mistake in a build like this is including everything at once. The first version should cover the work that actually runs the business, and the rest can follow once people are using it.
The sum
All of it, added up, times sixty.
Do it on your own number
Count every subscription with a login: CRM, job tool, scheduler, document store, forms, e-signature, reporting. The total is almost always higher than the number people carry in their head.
Common questions
Answered plainly.
How much does custom business management software cost?
From $9,000 for most businesses, fixed before anything starts. Basic at $5,000 covers a single well-defined flow; Complex from $18,000 is for businesses with genuinely complicated operations. You pay once and own the result.
How many tools does it typically replace?
Three to five. Usually the CRM, the job or project tool, the scheduling app and whatever spreadsheet was holding the joins together. Accounting stays.
Is this an ERP?
No, and that word is worth avoiding. An ERP is a large, expensive, slow implementation aimed at big organisations. This is a system sized to a business under about fifty people, built in weeks rather than years.
What happens if we grow past what was built?
The code is yours, so it can be extended by us, by another developer, or by someone you hire. That is the practical meaning of ownership: you are not asking permission from a vendor's roadmap.
What if we only need part of this?
Then build part of it. The most common failure in a project this size is trying to do everything at once. We would rather ship the thing that runs your business and add the rest once people are actually using it.
Where to next
Bring the list of logins.
Every subscription with a password attached. Twenty minutes going through it usually finds two you had forgotten you were paying for, and tells us whether one system is worth building.