Ask a fifty-person company what its software costs and you will get a number from the subscriptions column. It is always wrong, and not by a little.
Here is the shape of what actually gets spent, drawn from what companies tell us when we do a migration assessment.
The visible layer
A typical Dutch company of that size runs something like a CRM, an accounting package, a webshop, a helpdesk, an HR tool and a project or time tracking system. Six vendors, six renewal dates, six sets of terms, six price rises a year, most of them per seat.
That is the number on the spreadsheet. It is usually somewhere between one and three thousand euro a month, and it is the part everybody argues about at budget time.
The layer just underneath
Then there is the integration platform, because those six systems have to agree with each other. Add the connectors that are only on the premium tier. Add the data warehouse or reporting tool, because no single system can answer a question that spans two of them.
Now add the work. Not a line item, but real:
- Someone maintains the synchronisations, and investigates when one silently stops
- Someone reconciles the CRM’s revenue figure against the ledger’s, monthly
- Someone deduplicates the customer records that three systems each created their own version of
- Someone builds the report that the reporting tool cannot quite produce
- Someone onboards each new hire into seven separate systems, and offboards them from six of the seven
None of that appears in the software budget. All of it is paid in salary.
The layer nobody counts at all
The most expensive layer is the decisions that get made slightly wrong because the information was slightly late.
A salesperson quotes a price on stock that sold this morning. A support agent promises a delivery date the warehouse cannot meet. A director looks at a pipeline report that counts two deals twice. A purchase gets made because the reorder spreadsheet was last updated on Thursday.
Each of these is small. Each of them is also a direct consequence of the same fact being stored in more than one place, which is the defining property of a stack of separate systems and cannot be engineered away by better synchronisation. Synchronisation reduces how long the disagreement lasts. It does not remove the disagreement.
What actually gets removed
When a company moves to one instance with one database, three things disappear at once.
The integration platform. There is nothing to connect internally. A sales order writes its stock movement and its ledger entry in the same transaction. Not eventually, not after a nightly job. In the same transaction.
The reconciliation work. You cannot reconcile a system against itself. The month-end ritual of exporting two systems and explaining the difference stops existing, because there is only one number.
The person who knows which system to believe. Usually the most quietly valuable person in the company, and usually spending a third of their week on work that only exists because of a purchasing decision made four years ago.
The arithmetic, honestly
The subscription saving alone is substantial: six vendors billing per seat replaced by one plan billed on usage, typically nineteen to sixty-nine euro a month for the whole company. But the subscription saving is the least interesting part.
The larger saving is the half of an FTE spent maintaining the seams, plus the integration platform, plus the reporting layer. That is where a mid-sized company finds tens of thousands of euro a year, and it is why we ask about your process during an assessment rather than only about your systems.
What it costs you instead
Honesty requires the other column too.
You give up the ability to swap one application for a specialist competitor’s, because they are not modules, they are one system. If your business genuinely depends on a best-in-class tool for one function, that is a real trade and you should weigh it rather than let a sales page wave it away.
You also spend real effort on the migration. Two to four weeks for a small company with clean data, six to ten for a mid-sized one, and a parallel month end that you should not skip.
What you get is a company where the answer to any question is in one place, and everyone can see it, because logins are free.
