Do you actually need an ERP?
Twenty statements about how your business runs today. Tick the ones that are true this month.
You get a score, a verdict and the reasoning, including the cases where the honest answer is no.
Free · no email required · nothing leaves your browser · about four minutes
Most advice on this question is about company size or revenue. Those are poor predictors. Businesses of the same
size run on wildly different amounts of duct tape, and the ones that need a single system of record are the ones
showing specific, observable symptoms. This check asks about those symptoms.
Each statement carries a weight between one and three, because they are not equally serious. Inventory that is
counted rather than known says more than a naming inconsistency. The total is 40 points.
The method is explained below, and you should disagree with it if your business works
differently.
How the score is built
Five areas, four statements each. The areas are the places where a missing system of record actually shows up,
in the order they usually start hurting.
| Area | What it tests | Points |
|---|
| One version of the truth | Whether the same fact is stored, and disputed, in several places | 9 |
| The close and the numbers | Whether the business can state its own results without a reconstruction project | 9 |
| Order to cash, purchase to pay | Whether a transaction is entered once and flows, or is re-keyed | 8 |
| Inventory and cost | Whether physical reality and recorded reality agree, and what things cost | 8 |
| Scale and risk | Whether growth, hiring and scrutiny are being limited by the current setup | 6 |
The bands
| Score | Verdict | What it usually means |
|---|
| 0 to 5 | Not yet | Isolated friction. A process to tighten, not a system to replace. |
| 6 to 13 | Early | One function is hurting. A targeted fix is usually cheaper and faster. |
| 14 to 23 | Due | The failures are connected. This is where an evaluation pays for itself. |
| 24 to 40 | Overdue | Reconciliation is now capping what the business can take on. |
Why weights, and why these weights
An unweighted checklist treats a naming inconsistency as equal to inventory nobody trusts. They are not equal.
The three-point statements are the ones that, on their own, tend to force a system change: a disputed number,
a close that runs past ten business days, and inventory that is counted rather than known. Each of those means
the business cannot answer a basic question about itself without human reconstruction.
The one-point statements are early warnings. They rarely justify anything on their own, but they cluster with
the serious ones, and a business ticking several of them is usually further along than it thinks.
What this does not measureBudget, timing, and whether your people have the capacity for a change this
size. It also cannot tell you whether the right answer is a full ERP or a single point solution. A high score
says the current setup is failing. It does not say what should replace it, and anyone who tells you otherwise
from a twenty-question form is selling something.
What a high score costs you, in practice
The expense of an unerpified business is rarely a line item. It shows up as the finance team's first two weeks
of every month, as invoices going out days late because someone had to assemble them, as buying stock that was
already in the warehouse, and as the quotes that were never written because the person who could price them was
reconciling instead.
None of that appears in a budget, which is why it can run for years. The first useful thing an evaluation does
is put hours and dollars against it, so the decision stops being a matter of taste.
If you scored in the lower bands
Do not buy anything. The most expensive mistake in this field is an implementation bought to fix a handful of
habits. Fix the worst process by hand, give it a quarter, and re-take this. If the same statements are still true,
the problem is structural and worth solving structurally.
If you scored Due or Overdue
The next step is not a demo. It is a current-state map: every process, tool and spreadsheet the business runs on,
who re-keys what, and how many times. That map is what turns a vague sense of drowning into a scope, a budget and
an order of operations. It is the first of the six stages of
erpification, and it is the one most often skipped.