How ERP Pricing Actually Works, and How to Read a Quotation

The short answer: what ERP price is made of

ERP is priced as the man-days the work takes multiplied by the daily rate of the team doing it — not per user per month like an off-the-shelf product. Get hold of those two numbers and you can compare any vendor. Without them, a single total is a figure you cannot compare against anything.

The daily rate has a public reference. The Thai Ministry of Finance criteria for consultant engagement set the ICT rate at roughly ฿6,048 per day for an engineer with 7 years, and ฿7,573 for 10 years. That is not our price — it is the benchmark government agencies use to set their own reference prices, and you can download it and check.

The day count depends entirely on your scope, which is why this page publishes no all-in figure. A total that did not come from your actual scope will mislead you more than it helps. What is genuinely useful, and what follows, is the day range by scope — then you multiply.

Where the daily rate comes from

The basis is the Ministry of Finance criteria for consultant engagement pricing — the same criteria Thai government agencies use to set reference prices for IT work, published and downloadable. The ICT rate table sets a basic monthly salary by qualification and years of experience, then applies a published multiplier to reach a monthly billing rate.

One man-month is 22 working days under the same criteria. Divide back and you have a daily rate. Everything after that is arithmetic you can do yourself.

How many days each scope takes

This is the other half of the equation. The durations come from the frame we actually work to: an SME ERP takes roughly 4–6 months from scoping to go-live, with a team of 2–3 people full-time, which is what work at this level genuinely needs.

Multiply the man-days below by the daily rate from the previous section and you have the band for that size of work. Do the same to any quotation you receive. If the two are far apart, the next question is whether the gap is in the day count or the daily rate.

• A day count far below this range means something was removed from scope — ask what, rather than assuming greater efficiency
• A count far above it should come with an account of where the extra time goes
• A vendor who will not break the price into man-days has not given you a comparable number

How cheap can an ERP get, and what does cheap cost you

In ERP work, cheap almost never means more efficient. It means something is missing from the quotation — usually a narrower scope than the one discussed, a day count set below what the work takes, or a delivery team other than the one named in the proposal.

There is a line worth knowing. Senior engineer salaries in Bangkok run roughly ฿80,000–160,000 per month; add employer on-costs of about 1.3–1.45× and divide into days, and a billing rate below roughly ฿5,000 per day is at or under the cost of that person. Work priced below that line is coming from a less experienced team, from people split across several projects at once, or from a low day count that gets topped up later as change requests.

The honest way to spend less is to cut scope, not the daily rate. Build the part that hurts most first — usually inventory and accounting — and add HR in a later phase. The first commitment is genuinely smaller, and you see the team work before deciding on the next one.

• Open-source ERP has no licence fee, but implementation, data migration and fitting it to your process all remain
• Off-the-shelf packages have a lower monthly price but charge separately for customisation — and some things cannot be customised at all
• Cutting scope reduces the budget; cutting the daily rate usually relocates the cost to somewhere later

Costs that are not in the first quotation

Development is the largest line but not the only one. What follows tends to surface later and is why a three-year total often differs from what was signed. Ask about all of it in the first quotation.

The fair way to compare vendors is total cost over three years, not the headline figure. A lower starting price can be the more expensive option once annual support and change requests are counted.

• Migrating data from the old system — the dirtier the legacy data, the longer it takes, and this is the single most under-estimated line
• Annual support after go-live — ask whether it is a percentage of contract value or billed against hours actually used
• User training, and the time your own team loses learning the system during changeover
• Integration with what you already run — point of sale, banking, online channels
• Server or cloud hosting, and licences for any software the system depends on
• Change requests after go-live — agree the daily rate up front, before you are in a position where you cannot negotiate

SAP, Oracle and Microsoft versus a custom build

A common question is whether to buy from a major vendor — SAP, Oracle, Microsoft — or commission a custom system. The answer is not which is better, but that the two have fundamentally different cost structures.

Major-vendor ERP charges a licence per user per year, indefinitely, plus an implementation fee paid to a partner. The strengths are real: the system has been proven worldwide, it carries recognised standards, and people who have used it are easy to hire. The trade is that you adapt your process to the system rather than the reverse, and the licence is a cost that never ends.

A custom ERP concentrates spend in the build, after which the recurring cost is support and infrastructure only. The system matches how you actually work because it was designed around it — but you need long-term maintenance, and quality depends directly on the team that built it.

The dividing line that holds up in practice: if your processes look like everyone else's in your industry, off-the-shelf is better value. If what makes you competitive is a way of working nobody else has, forcing it into a standard package discards the advantage.

Why accounting software and ERP are priced differently

Accounting software is priced per user per month because the scope is narrow and the product already exists. That makes the price predictable and the start fast. ERP is priced as a project because the scope has to be established against a real business, the system configured, and data moved off whatever came before.

The price gap reflects a difference in the work, not in margin. Accounting software answers what this month's profit was. ERP answers how much stock is in which warehouse, how much leave each employee has taken, and keeps all of it reconciled to the accounts without re-keying.

Before paying that difference, be confident the business has genuinely outgrown accounting software. The clearest signals are finance re-keying the same data between systems daily, and management waiting on someone to merge several files before anyone can see the whole picture.