If you value your business and your customers, do not save at their expense because you will end up paying a few times more. There is nothing wrong with wanting to save, but free Enterprise Resource Planning systems may do more harm than good. Primarily, we are talking about wasted time, which could be used to improve performance if you had a high quality ERP.

Problems of Free ERP Systems

On their web sites free ERP developers promise the moon, but you will soon come to realize that the features which are really useful in the system will be charged for and will usually cost more than when renting a paid ERP system.

Suppose you agree to pay for the required features and continue to use free ERP to save money. But can you really rely on such system? Data protection is one of the biggest problems with free ERPs. They often make money not only from charging for additional functions of the system but also from advertising, and thus inevitably disclose some of the data to advertisers.

In addition, it is not convenient to work with free versions. It is not possible to control the layout of the dashboard – this feature is additionally charged for. Paradoxically, such systems have many users, and if a problem occurs, as if on purpose, their service department crashes. Same thing happens with your data backup, and if the data is lost, it is very difficult to re-motivate your employees to trust an Enterprise Resource Planning system ever again, even if you choose a trustworthy supplier the next time.

You Get What You Pay For

The impression that free ERP will save you money is just an illusion. In fact, you will have to pay for all the functions that are necessary to ensure smooth workflow. Yes, you can choose from a variety of plans, and the sums are not big, but everything added together, it is much cheaper to rent an ERP from a reliable supplier. And it‘s not just the cheaper price, paid Enterprise Resource Planning systems have many advantages, not to mention all the required features and versatility.

In addition, data protection, customer service and system support are important features for every modern system. This ensures that the system will work without a hitch and the data will remain secure and will be recovered in the event of malfunction. In case there are questions or ambiguities, employees will be able to consult the system maintenance team to resolve any issues, as well as receive timely system updates.