Complete business management in a single suite

Complete guide

ERP for SMEs: standard, custom or both

Choosing an ERP is one of the technology decisions with the longest reach in a company: it shapes how you sell, buy and invoice, and what information management has when it needs to decide. Most failed projects do not fail because of the product chosen, but because the company was forced to work the way the product dictates. This guide explains what an ERP for SMEs is, when a standard system is enough, when a custom ERP pays off, how it connects with the software you already use and how to migrate from a legacy system without stopping the business.

What an ERP for SMEs is and what it should solve

An ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system brings the management areas of a company into a single database: sales, purchasing, warehouse, production, invoicing, accounting, treasury and staff. Its value lies not in each module on its own but in the fact that they all share the same information. A sales order reserves stock and produces the delivery note, the invoice and the accounting entry without anyone typing anything twice, and management sees the result on the dashboard straight away.

An ERP for SMEs has to do the same job without the complexity of systems built for large corporations. That means a phased rollout that does not paralyse the company, screens the team learns in days, modules that are switched on when they are needed and a supplier close enough to know Spanish regulations: electronic invoicing, Veri*Factu, tax returns and working-time records. Those are the principles behind Gestinity, our management suite, which you can explore in more detail on the Gestinity ERP application page.

Custom ERP or standard ERP: how to decide

The debate between custom ERP software and a standard ERP is often framed as picking a side. In practice, the useful question is which part of your operation is the same as in any other company and which part sets you apart. This table sums up the criteria we use with our clients:

Our recommendation is almost never one extreme. Accounting, invoicing, taxes and treasury work the same way in every company and there is no point in programming them again: a well-implemented standard ERP is the sensible choice there. What does deserve bespoke development is whatever sets you apart from competitors, such as a particular way of quoting, planning production or serving customers. That is why Gestinity combines a standard core with custom modules: the result behaves like a custom ERP without the burden of maintaining the common parts.

What an ERP must cover in each sector

The basic modules are similar everywhere; what changes is where the critical process sits. These are the points where an ERP for SMEs proves its worth in each sector:

• Industry: bills of materials, production orders, capacity planning, batch traceability and control of actual against planned costs.
• Logistics: warehouse management by location, order picking with handheld terminals, perpetual inventory and invoicing of third-party services.
• Retail and commerce: point of sale connected to the ERP, a single stock across shops and online store, automatic replenishment and centralised price lists and promotions.
• Transport: loading orders, fleet and driver management, costs per route and per vehicle, and invoicing by service or by customer.
• Services: projects and timesheets, maintenance contracts, recurring invoicing and profitability by customer and by project.

Integrating the ERP with the software you already have

No company starts from scratch. By the time the ERP arrives there is already an online store, a payroll program, machines producing data or in-house applications that work well. An ERP that does not connect with them duplicates work and ends up living alongside the very spreadsheets it was meant to replace. The integrations we build most often are:

• Online store and marketplaces: catalogue, prices, stock and orders synchronised with PrestaShop or other platforms, so you can sell online without keying in orders by hand.
• Point of sale and physical shops: counter sales, till closings and stock levels reflected in the ERP in real time.
• Banks and accountants: statement reconciliation, collection and payment batches, and accounting exports in the format your adviser uses.
• Custom and mobile applications: shop-floor, warehouse or sales tools that read from and write to the ERP through its API.
• Human resources: time tracking, absences and the employee portal linked to management, so hours worked feed into the cost of each project.

Migrating from a legacy ERP and keeping control of your data

Many SMEs still run on a management program that no longer receives updates, that only one person understands or that cannot meet the new invoicing obligations. Replacing it is daunting, and rightly so: years of customers, items, prices and history live there. An orderly migration starts by deciding which data is transferred and which is archived, removes duplicates before loading and is rehearsed several times with real data. Go-live is scheduled for a quiet date and, for the first few weeks, the old system stays available in read-only mode.

Being able to leave matters as much as getting in. Before signing with any supplier, ask who owns the data, in which format it can be exported and what happens if the service is cancelled. With Gestinity the data always belongs to the company: it can be extracted in full in open formats, the installation can run in the cloud or on your own servers, and any custom ERP development you commission is documented. Backups, role-based permissions and activity logs are part of the service from day one.

Signs that your company needs a new ERP

With two or three of these signs, the cost of not changing is already higher than the cost of the project. The usual approach is to start with the area that hurts most and extend the ERP to the rest of the company step by step.

ERP for SMEs across Spain

We implement Gestinity for companies all over Spain from our offices in Murcia and Madrid, with training and support both on site and remotely.

Why Gestinity and Grupo Unifema

We are a software development consultancy with more than 20 years of experience and also the makers of Gestinity. That combination is unusual: the team that implements the ERP is the team that writes it, so when your company needs something the standard does not cover you do not depend on a third party or a patch. We build it as one more module, integrated and maintained with the rest of the system.

Every project begins with an analysis of your processes and a demonstration using cases from your own business. From there we define which modules are activated, what is adapted and in which order it goes live, with a stable point of contact during the rollout and afterwards.

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