CRM and ERP work, by industry

Every business runs on a handful of systems that mostly work and a set of gaps between them held together by spreadsheets, email and somebody’s memory. The gaps are where the money goes. These pages describe what closing them looks like in four sectors.

Configure, integrate, or build

Three different engagements, three different costs. Most enquiries arrive asking for the third and are better served by the first or second.

Configure an existing product

Where a mature product already does most of what you need, the work is deploying it and configuring it around how you actually operate — your services, your rates, your people, your exceptions — then migrating what you already hold into it. This is the fastest route and the cheapest to maintain, because the vendor keeps developing the core.

The clinic page is the clearest example: a licensed clinic management system, set up properly, rather than a practice management system written from nothing.

Integrate around what you have

Most businesses do not need new software. They need the systems they already run to stop requiring a human to copy data between them. Connecting a booking system to accounts, a CRM to a mailbox, a job system to invoicing — this is usually the highest return per pound spent, and it does not ask anyone to learn anything new.

Signs this is the right engagement:

  • The same information gets typed into two systems
  • A spreadsheet sits between two products and everyone depends on it
  • Someone’s week has a recurring admin block in it
  • Reporting means exporting from three places and reconciling by hand

Build something bespoke

Worth it when the way you work is genuinely unusual — when it is the thing that makes the business competitive rather than an accident of history — or when no product covers the ground. It is the most expensive option and the one you own forever, so it should be a deliberate choice rather than the default answer.

We will say when we think a product would serve you better than a build, including when that means a smaller engagement for us.

Property and lettings

Estate and lettings agencies are well served by established products — the portals, the CRM, the property management software are all mature and integrated with each other. Replacing that stack is rarely a good idea, and we would usually advise against it.

Where the work is worth doing is around the edges those products leave: applicant matching that currently happens in someone’s head, viewing feedback that never makes it back to the landlord, maintenance requests arriving by email and tracked in a spreadsheet, compliance dates for gas and electrical certificates sitting in a calendar rather than a system that chases them.

There is no separate page for this yet, deliberately. Writing one that repeated the sections above with the word “property” substituted in would add a URL and no information. If this is your sector, the fastest route is a conversation.

Talk to us about property