The Hidden Cost of Using Multiple Software Tools in SMEs

Ask your bookkeeper what the company spends on software in a month. The answer does not come, and not because it is confidential. There is no such line in the books.

What there is instead: five or six card charges on different days. One of them is annual. It went out last March, and nobody will think about it again until next March. Another still runs under the name of a colleague who left. Each one is small enough on its own that the total never gets asked about.

The total is made of four items, and the second one is the largest in most companies. Why several programs never add up to one system is a separate article; what follows is the price tag.

Subscriptions do not add up, they multiply

Most business software is priced per person. For one tool, that is reasonable. Across five, it means a new hire creates a new charge in five places rather than one.

Your warehouse colleague does two things all day: checks what is arriving and closes what has gone out. You still have to buy them full access, because there is no smaller plan. The same goes for the bookkeeper who comes in twice a month and for anyone working part time.

There is a second step that costs more than the first: the one feature that only exists on the higher plan. You need permission controls, because not everyone should see everything. Permission controls sit one tier up, and a tier is not something you buy for one person. You buy it for the whole team.

So the software bill does not track revenue. It tracks headcount, and it does not grow smoothly. It grows in steps, and you always notice a step after you are standing on it.

Double entry is payroll

The details of a new order go into the project tool, because that is where the team works. They go into the client records, because that is where sales needs to see them. They go into the spreadsheet the monthly overview is built from, because that is what the overview is built from.

One piece of information, typed three times, each time out of somebody's working hours. This is not the kind of cost that arrives as a bill, so it appears nowhere. It is still payroll. You simply do not call it that.

The expensive half is not the typing. It is the correcting. When one of the three places disagrees with the other two, somebody first has to notice, then work out which version is right, then fix the other two. If the client notices first, add a phone call in which somebody has to explain.

Individually these are minutes. Add them up once and you would probably find a body of admin work in the company that nobody ever decided to create, and that gets done every month anyway.

What you pay for and do not use

Every company has at least one subscription that runs because somebody started it two years ago and cancelling looked like more effort than leaving it.

Some of it was bought for a project that closed long ago. Some of it you use for exactly one thing, the form or the export, and pay for the rest at the same rate. Some of it lives in the account of someone who has left, and nobody cancels it because two years of correspondence is in there.

The last one is the most expensive, and the monthly fee is not the reason. Cancelling means losing the contents, so nobody cancels. From that point on it is not software. It is rented storage you keep paying for so that you do not have to make a decision.

Moving costs real money too

Changing systems costs time and money. The data has to come out of wherever it currently sits. It has to be cleaned, because the export is where you find out that the same client appears three times, spelled slightly differently. There is a period when you keep both places updated, because you are not ready to let go of the old one. After that come the weeks when everyone works more slowly, because they have to think about something they used to do from memory.

That is why companies stay where they are, and it is not laziness. Moving has a visible price. Staying has an invisible one. The price of staying is just as real, but you pay it in minutes and corrections rather than in a single line.

So the choice is not whether to pay. It is which cost you take on deliberately.

When moving is not worth it

If two of you run the company, two subscriptions are running, and the pair of them does not amount to much, a move would cost more than it saves. Do not make it.

If you have one specialist tool that goes very deep in a single area, and you genuinely use that depth, it has earned its place. The design software is not the problem, so replacing it does not solve anything.

The case for moving starts when the larger share of the cost has stopped being the subscriptions and has become the work you redo by hand every month. If you have assembled the same list from the same two places three months running, you already have your answer.

What we do differently

IntrApp is priced per person, so one more colleague does not mean buying a plan twice the size. For a company of three it comes to roughly the price of one lunch a month. Storage is included, and larger teams get a volume discount.

There is no risk attached either. You try it for free, and if it does not suit you, you cancel it the way you cancel a streaming subscription. There is no notice period, and we do not bill for implementation or training, because you do not need us for that: the automated setup takes around thirty minutes and you can do it alone.

If you find something missing, that is not a dead end. You can request a feature, and if roughly three quarters of our customers would use it too, we build it for free and everyone gets it. Which requests those are is our judgement to make, because we are the ones who see the whole customer base.

IntrApp covers what a small or mid-sized company does day to day, without the complexity. If you are looking for the deepest possible tool in one specific area, you will find something better than us, and that is how it should be. That is not a gap. It is a decision.

The question your bookkeeper could not answer does not get easier by being postponed. It gets easier once somebody adds it up.

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