ERP software: what it actually covers, and how to shortlist one

An ERP is the system of record for money. That means the general ledger, the chart of accounts, journals, sub-ledgers for payables and receivables, bank reconciliation, fixed assets, revenue recognition, tax treatment, and the consolidated reporting that comes out the other end. If a number ends up in a board pack, an audit file, or a tax return, the ERP is where it should be able to be traced back to a source document.

Most ERP suites extend past finance into operations: purchasing, inventory, order management, project accounting, light manufacturing, and in some cases sales and HR modules. That breadth is the reason ERP evaluations sprawl. A useful discipline is to separate the ledger requirements, which are non-negotiable and hard to work around, from the operational requirements, which can often be served better by a specialist system connected to the ledger.

The practical test we apply on every profile in this site: can the system close a month on its own, across every entity and currency you operate in, without a spreadsheet doing the consolidation? A surprising number of tools marketed as ERP fail that test once a second legal entity appears.

Oracle NetSuite is the broadest of the five we profile. It is one database covering financials, inventory, order management, and ecommerce, which is why it remains the default answer for a company consolidating several subsidiaries and several operational tools at once. The trade-off is a longer implementation and a licence bill that grows with every module and user.

SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud brings SAP-grade finance and supply chain depth in a standardised package. It rewards companies willing to adopt SAP's process model rather than bend the system to existing habits. Where a manufacturing footprint is central, it and NetSuite are the serious candidates.

Sage Intacct is finance-first rather than operations-first: strong dimensional reporting, good project and fund accounting, no native production capability. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the SMB choice for companies already standardised on Microsoft 365, with Premium tier adding light manufacturing.

Light sits in the finance-first band alongside Sage Intacct: an AI-native ledger built around multi-entity, multi-currency consolidation with AP, AR, expenses, and corporate cards native rather than bolted on. It is not an operational ERP; it will not run MRP, inventory, or a shop floor, and manufacturing buyers should look at NetSuite, SAP, or Business Central instead.

Published pricing is rare in this category. What is reliable is the shape of the cost: an annual subscription driven by users, entities, and modules, plus a one-off implementation that frequently lands somewhere between half and one-and-a-half times the first year of subscription. Data migration, integration work, and internal time are the line items most often missing from a business case.

Timelines follow the same pattern. A single-entity finance-only rollout can be measured in weeks. Add subsidiaries, inventory, a warehouse, and a custom revenue model, and the same vendor will quote quarters rather than weeks. When you compare go-live estimates across vendors, hold the scope constant or the comparison is meaningless.

Start by writing down the ten things your current stack cannot do. Not features you have read about, but the specific monthly pain: the consolidation spreadsheet, the FX revaluation done by hand, the three-week close, the intercompany reconciliation nobody wants to own. That list becomes your demo script.

Then decide whether you are buying a finance system or an operations system, because that single decision removes roughly half the market. From there, shortlist three vendors, run the same script against each, and insist on seeing your own data in at least one session. Reference calls should be with companies of similar entity count and currency spread, not simply similar revenue.