You've Outgrown Spreadsheets But You Don't Need an ERP. Here's What to Do Instead.
Published by Sol Solutions Consulting | February 2026
There's a moment that every growing business hits. The spreadsheets that used to work fine start breaking. Someone overwrites a formula. Two people are working from different versions of the same file. Your quoting process takes three times longer than it should because the data lives in four different places. Reporting means someone spends half a day pulling numbers together manually. So you start looking into "real" systems. You Google "ERP for small manufacturers" or "best software for growing businesses." You book a few demos. And then you see the prices. $50,000 to implement. $150,000 if you want the full package. A 6 to 12 month rollout timeline. Per-seat licensing fees that go up every year. And a feature list so long that you know your team will use maybe 15% of it. You close the browser tab and go back to the spreadsheets. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. And you're not stuck. There's a middle path that most businesses don't know about.
## The gap nobody talks about
The business software market has a massive blind spot. On one end, you've got spreadsheets, email, and basic tools like QuickBooks. On the other end, you've got full ERP platforms like NetSuite, SAP, and Dynamics 365 that are designed for companies with dedicated IT departments and six-figure software budgets. For businesses in the middle, companies with 10 to 200 employees doing $1M to $50M in revenue, neither option actually fits. Spreadsheets are flexible but fragile. They don't scale, they can't enforce processes, and they're impossible to report from reliably once more than a few people are touching them. But a full ERP is overkill. You end up paying for modules you'll never open, training your team on a system that fights against how they actually work, and spending months in implementation before you see any value. The result is that thousands of perfectly good businesses are stuck running critical operations on tools they've outgrown, simply because the "upgrade" doesn't make sense for them.
## What actually needs to happen
Before jumping to any solution, it helps to step back and ask a simple question: what's actually breaking? For most small and mid-size businesses, it's not everything. It's usually two or three specific pain points that are causing most of the friction. Common ones include: Quoting and estimating. The process is manual, slow, and inconsistent. Different people quote differently. There's no easy way to pull up past quotes or track win rates. Job or project tracking. Work gets scheduled through a mix of whiteboards, emails, and memory. When something falls behind, nobody knows until it's a problem. Reporting and visibility. Getting a clear picture of how the business is performing requires someone to manually compile data from multiple sources. By the time the report is done, the numbers are already stale. Data scattered across systems. Customer info is in one place, financials in another, job details in a third. Nothing talks to anything else. People re-enter the same data multiple times a day. Compliance and documentation. If you hold certifications like ISO 9001 or AS9100, you know how much time goes into maintaining the paper trail. Manual tracking makes audits stressful and error-prone. You don't need a system that does everything. You need solutions that fix the specific things that are costing you time and money right now.
## The custom solution approach
Here's what's changed in the past few years: the cost and complexity of building custom tools has dropped dramatically. Modern development tools, cloud infrastructure, and AI have made it possible to build targeted, purpose-built solutions for a fraction of what a full ERP implementation costs. We're talking weeks instead of months, and budgets that are closer to five figures than six. What does that look like in practice? A custom quoting tool that matches your actual process, pulls in your real costs and margins, and lets your team generate professional quotes in minutes instead of hours. Built around how you work, not how a software company thinks you should work. A job tracking dashboard that gives you real-time visibility into what's on the floor, what's behind schedule, and what's coming next. Accessible from a browser, updated automatically, no software installation required. Automated reporting that pulls from your existing data sources (yes, even your spreadsheets) and delivers the numbers you actually need, formatted the way you want, on a schedule you choose. No more half-day report-building sessions. Simple integrations that connect the tools you already use. Your QuickBooks talks to your job tracker. Your CRM updates when a quote gets accepted. Your inventory numbers flow into your dashboard without anyone re-entering them. Each of these solves a specific problem. Each can be built and deployed independently. And each one pays for itself in time saved and errors eliminated within weeks, not years.
## How this compares to an ERP
Here's an honest comparison of the two approaches for a typical small manufacturer. Traditional ERP implementation: - Cost: $50,000 to $150,000+ upfront, plus ongoing licensing - Timeline: 6 to 12 months before full deployment - Training: Weeks of training for your entire team on a new system - Customization: Expensive and often requires the vendor or a consultant - Risk: High. If it doesn't work out, you've invested heavily in something that's hard to undo - Ongoing costs: Per-seat licensing that increases annually. SaaS costs per employee reached approximately $9,100 in 2025, up 15% in two years Custom targeted solutions: - Cost: A fraction of a full ERP, scoped to your actual needs - Timeline: Weeks, not months. You see value fast - Training: Minimal, because the tools are built around how your team already works - Customization: That's the whole point. Every feature exists because you need it - Risk: Low. Start with one solution, prove the value, then expand - Ongoing costs: You own what gets built. No per-seat fees that balloon over time This isn't to say ERPs are bad. For large enterprises with complex, multi-site operations and dedicated IT teams, they make perfect sense. But for a 30-person machine shop or a growing construction company? There's a better path.
## What to look for if you go the custom route
Not every consultant or developer is equipped to do this well. A few things to look for: They start with your operations, not their product. If someone leads with their platform or their tech stack before they've spent time understanding how your business actually runs, that's a red flag. The right partner will want to walk your floor, watch your processes, and understand your pain points before they propose anything. They build incrementally. The best approach is to start with the highest-impact problem, solve it, prove the ROI, and then move to the next one. Anyone who wants to overhaul everything at once is creating the same risk you were trying to avoid by skipping the ERP. They give you ownership. Whatever gets built should be yours. Not locked behind a subscription. Not dependent on a single vendor. If the relationship ends, you should still have a working system. They can show you results quickly. If someone says "you'll see value in 12 months," that's an ERP timeline, not a custom solution timeline. The right approach delivers measurable improvement within weeks. ## The bottom line If your business has outgrown spreadsheets, that's a good sign. It means you're growing and your operations are getting more complex. But "outgrown spreadsheets" doesn't automatically mean "needs an ERP." There's a growing space between those two extremes, and it's being filled by custom, right-sized solutions that solve your actual problems without the cost, complexity, and risk of a full platform implementation. The businesses that figure this out early get a real competitive advantage. They run leaner, move faster, and spend their money on solutions that fit, instead of paying for software they'll never fully use. If you're stuck in that middle ground, wondering what comes after spreadsheets, it might be worth a conversation about what a custom approach could look like for your specific situation.
--- *Sol Solutions Consulting builds custom data and workflow solutions for small and mid-size businesses that have outgrown their current systems, contact us today to learn what we can do for you.
