Start with the questions you cannot answer today

A distributor with three warehouses needs inventory accuracy and landed-cost visibility. A services firm billing by project needs utilisation and work-in-progress. A platform excellent for one can be a poor fit for the other.

Write down the three operational questions you cannot answer today without asking someone to build a spreadsheet. Those three questions are your real requirements document.

Want to know how this works out for your company? Send us the question as you would ask it.

Three questions that narrow the field quickly

  • How much of our process is genuinely unusual? If 80% of it is standard, adapting the process to a configurable system beats bending software to match old habits
  • What happens at month-end? If closing takes more than a week, the bottleneck is usually reconciliation between disconnected systems. The new system must remove that gap, not relocate it
  • Who will own this internally? A system with no internal owner degrades within a year. If nobody can be freed up, plan for ongoing partner support from day one

Compare five years, not the licence

Licence cost is rarely the largest number; implementation, migration and integration are. ERPNext removes the licence line and shifts the weight onto implementation and support. Ask for the five-year figure in writing.

What rules a system out in Egypt

  • ETA e-invoicing. If the system cannot submit invoices to the Egyptian Tax Authority, natively or through a proven integration, it is not a candidate
  • Arabic your team will actually use. If the screens are Arabic but the printed invoice and the reports are English, staff quietly revert to spreadsheets

Build, buy, or configure

Custom development solves your process exactly as it exists today, then becomes maintenance only its original authors understand.

We recommend a custom build in two cases: a genuinely unusual core process that is a competitive advantage, or a niche no mature platform serves. Otherwise a configurable platform — Zoho where speed and breadth matter, ERPNext where manufacturing depth and inventory complexity dominate.

A six-week selection process

Two weeks documenting your three questions and your month-end pain. Two weeks of demonstrations where you write the scenarios using your own data. Two weeks checking references at companies your size in your sector, and getting five-year figures in writing.

Every demonstration runs on your data and your scenarios. A polished demo on sample data tells you nothing.