Building custom business software for an SME: a practical guide

Before planning a build, check that you need one. If your administrative and logistics processes follow industry practice, a standard ERP covers breadth and keeps compliance current for you. Custom makes sense when the process that generates your margin is also the one no suite models, or when the customisations you would ask the vendor for cost more than the value they bring. The full comparison, dimension by dimension, is in a dedicated guide.

The ranges we publish, VAT excluded. A first custom module runs €5,000–€12,000, with go-live in 8–10 weeks. Automation between systems you already own starts lower: €2,000–€6,000 in 3–5 weeks for an automation package, €3,000–€7,000 in 4–6 weeks for integrations. A custom B2B portal sits between €8,000 and €18,000 one-off. A full platform spanning several areas — sales, inventory, administration and the accounting integration — typically runs €20,000–€50,000 depending on the sector. If you prefer day rates, ours are published: €48–€60 per hour and €384–€480 per day, which puts a first module in the order of 12–30 development days. The final figure comes from a free analysis of your process and the tools already in use, not from a price list.

Custom business software is built in increments: start with the process that weighs most, release, measure, extend. This sequence is also what lets you stop after the first module if the numbers do not add up.

1. Map the manual processes. List the activities that today run through spreadsheets, email and re-typing, with how many people perform them and how many hours they absorb each week. That list is the basis for both the scope and the return calculation.
2. Pick the first module. Take the process with the highest ratio of time lost to technical complexity: it delivers a measurable result in weeks and funds the steps that follow.
3. Fix the scope in writing. State what the first release does and, above all, what it does not. Excluded features go on a separate list rather than being dropped: that list becomes the roadmap.
4. Have a clickable prototype validated. The key screens should be seen and corrected by the people who will use them before development, when a change costs hours instead of weeks.
5. Work in sprints with interim demos. Short cycles with a working demo at the end of each: that is how a wrong requirement surfaces while fixing it is still cheap.
6. Check the incentives before signing. Some Italian schemes — Transizione 5.0, Nuova Sabatini, regional calls — cover part of a software investment, but the paperwork has to start before the order, not once the work is done.

Jakob Nielsen has been making the point for decades: enterprise software is almost always designed to satisfy the buyer, not the user. It is the most common way to waste a project — the specification is met, acceptance testing passes, and the staff keep their parallel spreadsheet because it is quicker. Four habits reduce the risk.

Handing custom software development to an outside supplier means giving them access to personal data about employees, customers and suppliers. Under the GDPR your company remains the controller and the supplier becomes a processor: the relationship has to be governed in writing and the security measures have to be verified, not assumed. Six things to ask any supplier, us included.

Nesso Labs is an Italian company based in Brescia: the contract, the invoicing and the processor appointment all stay under Italian and EU jurisdiction. Our information security management system is certified to ISO/IEC 27001, with the ISO/IEC 27017 and ISO/IEC 27018 extensions for cloud services and for personal data in the cloud: access assigned by role, development, test and production environments kept separate, tracked credential management, defined incident response procedures and recurring audits, with the resulting evidence available during due diligence. The source code is yours, in your repository, with access defined together: if you later choose to bring development in-house or change supplier, the handover is planned rather than negotiated. For data protection enquiries, the address is [email protected].