A first ERP for a small business: what to move out of the spreadsheets

Move stock, invoicing and receivables into the ERP first, leave everything else in spreadsheets for a quarter, and judge the system on whether month-end closes in a day.

A company of ten people runs on spreadsheets until the day it cannot. The sign is never dramatic. It is the Tuesday the stock sheet says there are forty units and the shelf has nine, or the month-end that takes the owner six evenings because every number has to be checked against another sheet. That is when the search for a first ERP for a small business begins, and the first mistake is to shop for everything at once.

Buy three jobs, not a system

An ERP sells itself as one system for the whole company. For a ten-person company it should be judged as three jobs: stock, invoicing and money owed to you. Those three are where spreadsheets fail first, because each of them is edited by more than one person and each has to agree with the other two.

Stock is the one most people start with and the one that pays fastest. When a sale and a purchase both move the same count in the same place, the shelf and the screen stop disagreeing. The owner stops walking to the back room to check.

Invoicing is next because every invoice has to carry the fields a GST return wants, and a sheet that was fine for thirty invoices a month is a liability at a hundred and fifty. One template, one numbering sequence, one place the accountant pulls from.

Receivables is the quiet one. A list of who owes what, by date, that updates itself when an invoice is raised and a payment is entered. Most small companies discover they are owed three weeks of revenue they had stopped chasing, because the chasing lived in somebody's memory.

Payroll, purchase orders, production, a customer list with follow-up dates: all real, all later. A system that does the three jobs well and the others adequately beats one that does everything a little.

What to look at in a demo

Ask to see a sale entered end to end: the order, the stock moving, the invoice printed, the payment recorded, the receivable closing. If the demo cannot do that in ten minutes with your product names, the system is heavier than you need.

Ask how a mistake is corrected. Someone will enter a sale twice in the first week. The honest answer is a reversal that leaves a trail, not a delete button. A system that lets a junior silently delete a sale is a system whose stock count you will never trust.

Ask what gets exported. Your accountant wants a sales register and a purchase register in a spreadsheet at month-end. If the export is a PDF, you have bought a printer.

Ask who else is in the data. A browser-based system with a login per person, and a permission that keeps the packer out of the price list, is the normal shape now. Check that the login for a person who leaves can be switched off in a minute.

The spreadsheet that must come with you

Before the first login, build one product sheet: a row per item you sell, with the name as it should print on an invoice, the unit, the MRP, the GST rate and the opening stock count. Count the shelf for that last column; do not copy the old sheet, because the old sheet is why you are here. This is the only migration that matters. Customers and suppliers can be typed in as they appear.

If you sell through a shop and online, the same product row carries the barcode number too, so the till and the listing read one key. That is one line in the sheet now and a week of reconciliation saved later.

Cost, in the numbers that matter

A small-business ERP is priced per user per month, and a ten-person company rarely needs ten logins; four or five people touch stock and money. Budget for the logins you need plus one. The bigger cost is the two days somebody spends entering the product sheet and the opening stock. Put a name on those two days before you sign.

The return is counted in hours. If month-end moves from six evenings to one afternoon, that is twenty hours a month back to the owner. If the stock count stops drifting, that is the emergency purchase at full price that no longer happens. Both are numbers you can check in the second month, and should.

The one test

Run the new system beside the old sheets for one month. At month-end, close the month in the ERP in a day. If the sales register, the stock count and the receivables list all agree with reality without a sheet beside them, retire the sheets. If they do not, the problem is almost always the opening stock count, and the fix is a recount, not a different system.

We set up and host small-business systems alongside the rest of the stack a company needs, from the domain and the e-mail to the website and the barcode numbers on the products; the overview is on buzzlytech.com. Use code STARTUP10 for 10% off one order per account. It is valid until 31 December 2026 or for the first 100 uses on this site, whichever comes first.