ERPfm
The Journal
The Real Cost of Sticking With Spreadsheets Another Year
Not buying an ERP system feels free. It isn't — a small business running on spreadsheets can lose more to manual-process errors and a single bad outage than a modest ERP system would cost to run.
Building Your First ERP Budget: A Worked Example
Most first-time ERP buyers budget for the licence and get blindsided by everything else. Here's a complete worked budget, built the way a CFO would want to see it.
Benchmarking ERP Spend Per User Across Company Sizes
Cost per user drops steadily as company size grows — from $233/month at 25 seats to $108/month at 1,000 seats. Four worked scenarios show the curve and where the steepest savings actually happen.
ERP Cost Per Employee: A 50-Seat and a 500-Seat Rollout Compared
The same style of ERP rollout costs $7,600 per employee at 50 seats and $4,300 per employee at 500 seats. Here's why per-seat cost drops as companies scale, and what it means for a small buyer's budget.
What You're Really Signing Up For With a 10-Year On-Premises ERP
A manufacturer planning to run its ERP system for a decade sees on-premises come in $470,000 cheaper than cloud — but only because of a five-year crossover most buyers never model that far out.
Cloud vs. On-Premises ERP: Finding the Breakeven Year
Cloud ERP looks cheaper year one and on-premises looks cheaper by year seven, for the same company. The breakeven point is a specific, calculable year — here's how to find yours.
Building the Business Case for a Tighter ERP Uptime SLA
Moving from 99.5% to 99.9% uptime sounds like a rounding error. Modeled against real downtime cost, it's worth over $168,000 a year for a mid-sized business.
What an Hour of ERP Downtime Actually Costs
A four-hour ERP outage isn't just an inconvenience — it's a number. Here's how to calculate it from revenue per hour, productivity loss, and recovery cost.
Modeling the All-In Cost of an ERP License Before You Negotiate
A per-seat quote is only three numbers away from a real contract total: users, term, and the setup fee that's easy to forget. Here's how to build the full figure before you're in a negotiation.
Named Users vs. Concurrent Users: Pricing Out an ERP License
The same 90 people can be licensed two different ways, and the two-year cost difference on a real worked example is over $41,000. Here's how the two models actually compare.
ERP Payback Period: A 50-Seat and a 500-Seat Company Compared
The same ROI math produces very different payback periods depending on company size. Two worked examples show why bigger companies often recover their ERP investment faster, not slower.
Calculating ERP ROI Before You Sign: A Worked Example
An ERP business case needs a number, not a feeling. Here's how to build one from your own numbers — annual benefit, total investment, and horizon — worked through step by step.