Every ERP conversation starts with the same question, and it is the wrong one. Not because price does not matter, but because the licence line is the part that is easiest to compare and least likely to decide your total spend.
Where the money actually goes
Across the implementations we deliver, licences are usually a minority of three-year spend. Implementation effort, data work and the internal time your own team gives up are consistently larger, and only the first appears on a quote.
| Cost line | Usually quoted? | Typical share of 3-year spend |
|---|---|---|
| Licences or subscription | Yes | 20 - 35% |
| Implementation and configuration | Yes | 25 - 40% |
| Data clean-up and migration | Partly | 10 - 20% |
| Customisation and integration | Rarely in full | 10 - 25% |
| Training and change | Often understated | 5 - 10% |
| Your own team's time | Almost never | Frequently the largest single line |
Why per-user pricing misleads
Per-user pricing looks precise. It becomes misleading at both ends. At the small end you buy licences for people who touch the system twice a month. At the large end you start rationing access, and an ERP that only some people can open stops being a single source of truth.
The moment you begin sharing logins to control licence cost, you have lost the audit trail you bought the system for.
The lines that appear after signature
- Data that turned out to be dirtier than anyone admitted during scoping.
- Integrations to systems nobody mentioned until month two.
- Reports the business considered obvious and the scope considered custom.
- A second training round because the first happened too early.
- Support in the month after go-live, when question volume peaks.
Ask for this in writing
What is explicitly out of scope? A vendor who will not write that down is quoting a number you cannot hold them to.
A three-year view worth building
Compare platforms on total three-year cost including your own effort, not on a first-year licence figure. It changes the ranking surprisingly often, and it is the only comparison a finance director will accept twice.
It also exposes the cheapest-looking option that requires the most internal time, which is the most common way businesses overspend without ever seeing it on an invoice.
