By Andy Scott • Managing Director
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is traditionally associated with end-to-end process control automation for medium and larger businesses – today there are forward-thinking sole-traders using this software – and Wow - these folk know how to box above their weight!
Today, your shop window is your website; submitting accounts to His Majesty online is largely compulsory; saving money and the planet by holding meetings online; and keeping your followers and potential followers up to speed on what you are doing, thinking, and solving is now a must – for all sizes of business.
We are a small service provider in Scotland and North England. If we were a typical business, we would have asked our accountant about what software we should use to run the business. We would be directed towards Xero, Sage or QuickBooks because they know it and like it. Good bookkeeping solutions – and accountants can push you in the direction of apps that they have heard of for CRM – Mailchimp to HubSpot; e-commerce - Shopify; booking appointments – Calendly. GoDaddy is good for hosting and you can build a website. AWS good for Storage. Spreadsheets will do everything else, and the accountant and their mates have spreadsheet templates for most things – inventory (where new accounting innovations come from), fixed asset register, pricelists, even works order templates.
Use your operational spreadsheets internally, and if they involve financial transactions, give them to your accountant – they Excel at everything, and they are very good at solving issues you didn’t know you had in a way you will never understand.
As a small business with many years of experience in implementing ERP systems, Calibrate didn’t have far to look for the business solution that was most appropriate for us – Odoo Enterprise with over 85 modules. We have implemented for ourselves and while we provide configuration, implementation, training, customisation and support services to our clients – we can be cobbler’s children. We started with the basics of accounting with all the compliant VAT registration etc, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and all the order processing were a great start. We added Projects to run our projects! We added Help Desk for our customer support and we became very efficient operationally.
We learn as much from our clients as they do from us. One of our small – two user customers is a business advisor, very focused on e-learning, events, subscriptions, surveys, appointments, marketing automation and all of the social media capabilities of Odoo. As a result, we are so much better at using these tools internally. Our customer is going to market with a proposition that reflects their abilities, experience, and knowledge at least as professionally as a major accounting and advisory firm.
We met a sole-trader recently, at a local networking event. We had spoken about Odoo before, but he forgot about us and bought monthly subscriptions for Shopify at £25 per month, Standard Xero for £30, Calendly for $10 per month with GoDaddy Hosting for e-commerce at £12.99 a month and considering HubSpot at £18 per month. “I forgot I can do everything in Odoo for £17.50 per month!”, so he cancelled his subscriptions and started on Odoo at the beginning of February – he is already providing his services powered by Odoo – not Live (yet), but showing clients what he can do for them on his test system!
We use the very same solution for other clients, including over 100 users for a rocket manufacturer; a whisky distiller, some heavy engineering, warehousing, clothing and workwear manufacturers and many more. Odoo makes our lives interesting whatever the size of client.
To find out how Calibrate and Odoo can help your business...contact us at;