Choosing Business Software: A Guide for Growing Australian Businesses

Most businesses don't choose their systems in one go. They start with Xero or MYOB and a few spreadsheets, then add a job app, a CRM, an inventory tool, a payroll add-on and a reporting spreadsheet as each need comes up. Each one made sense at the time. A few years later there are a dozen apps, none of them talk to each other properly, and people spend part of every day copying information between them.

The signs are usually easy to spot once you look for them. The same customer or job is typed into two or three places. Month-end waits on someone's spreadsheet. Sales, operations and finance each have a different number for the same thing. Approvals sit in email. New staff take months to learn the workarounds, and one or two people are the only ones who know how it all fits together.

The other trigger is age. If a core system is close to the end of its vendor support, runs on an old server nobody wants to touch, or relies on one person who built it years ago, the risk grows every year you leave it. Planning the move on your own timetable is far easier than doing it in a hurry after something fails.

None of these signs automatically means "buy a new system". They mean it's time to look at how work and information really move through the business, then decide what to fix.

An ERP is one system that runs most of the business in one place: stock, purchasing, sales orders, production, jobs and usually the accounts. For a growing Australian business the choice often comes down to moving up from Xero or MYOB to something like MYOB Acumatica (formerly MYOB Advanced), NetSuite, SAP Business One or Pronto, or keeping the accounting system and adding an operations system beside it.

Start with how your business actually works, not with feature lists. Write down the processes that matter most, such as quote to cash, purchasing, stock and month-end, and the reports the owners and managers need. Then ask each vendor to show those exact tasks, with your kind of data, rather than their standard demo.

Look past the licence price. The real cost includes setting it up, moving your data, connecting it to the systems you keep, training, and the time your own people spend on the project. Check who will actually do the work, whether they have done it for a business like yours, and what support looks like after go-live.

Think about the shape of your business too. Several companies reporting to one group, complex manufacturing, or stock across many locations all push the choice in different directions, so make sure the shortlist handles your particular kind of complexity.

A common situation: the accounts work fine in Xero or MYOB and your accountant is happy, but stock, jobs, production, purchasing or approvals live in spreadsheets or a tangle of add-on apps. Moving everything to a large ERP feels like too much, and you would lose the accounting setup that already works.

One practical answer is to run ERPNext beside your accounting system. ERPNext is open-source business software, so there are no per-user licence fees; you pay for hosting, setting it up and support. It handles the operations side (inventory, manufacturing, projects, purchasing, CRM and workflows), and Xero or MYOB keep the accounts. The two are connected so invoices, bills and payments go across without retyping.

Your bookkeeper and accountant keep working the way they do now, and the operations team gets one system built around how they work. Because ERPNext can be extended with custom apps rather than by changing its core, it can be shaped to your processes and still be upgraded later.

It isn't right for everyone. If your accounting itself has outgrown Xero or MYOB, for example with many entities or complex consolidation, a full ERP may be the better fit, and that is part of the decision to make with care.

If you are down to a shortlist, our plain-English comparisons set the main options side by side for Australian businesses: who each suits, what they cost to run, and how they connect to the rest of your systems. Kenomont doesn't sell software licences, so the comparisons are written to help you choose, not to steer you to a product.

Use them to narrow the field, then test the last two or three against your own processes and data. Vendor prices and plans change, so always check the current price on the vendor's site before you decide. All comparisons are listed on the software comparisons page.

Choosing the software is only half the job. Most projects that go wrong do so during implementation, and usually for familiar reasons: requirements that were never written down, data migration left until the last few weeks, integrations assumed rather than tested, staff too busy to take part, and nobody in the business with the authority to make decisions quickly.

A few habits lower the risk. Make one person in the business responsible for the project and give them time to do it. Move a sample of real data early and check it balances. Test the integrations with real transactions before go-live, not after. Train the people who will use the system on their own tasks. Agree in advance what counts as a change and how changes are priced. And plan go-live away from your busiest period and month-end.

If a project has already stalled, don't keep paying for more of the same. Stop, take stock of what was promised, what has been delivered and what is still in the way, then agree a short, specific plan to get it finished, or to cut your losses on the parts that will never work.