Custom built stock management software build - Anybody done?

[MAMC]

G'day all,

I run a retailer of bulky commercial products which we sell to the trade and home user. We are looking to get somebody to build some custom stock management software which can be constantly improved. None of the out of the box software suit us from what I can see. Does anybody have any experience in doing this? The budget is small £1k-£5k so the plan was to find a suitable base software and then hire a developer on Upwork to build on top.

Any thoughts?

[shouldbworking]

You'll be buying yourself long term pain if you get into bespoke software development for something like that. It'll cost more than you think both in terms of development and long term training / maintenance.

It'll be cheaper and simpler to change your business processes to do what normal stock management software does instead

[Taita]

I agree, please think very carefully about this before signing your business up to decades of tech debt. Budget is also EXTREMELY small.

Your requirements are unlikely that unique, the problem will have solved somewhere already.

Or tweak the business to fit the closest solution.

What are they key requirements? Perhaps we can give some recommendations?

[vaud]

I would try to find a consultant who specialises in this area to review more comprehensively what is available off the shelf.

To build and then maintain your own will cost you much, much more than your budget. And then finding people on upwork etc who will maintain other peoples code…

[48k]

MAMC said:

G'day all,

I run a retailer of bulky commercial products which we sell to the trade and home user. We are looking to get somebody to build some custom stock management software which can be constantly improved. None of the out of the box software suit us from what I can see. Does anybody have any experience in doing this? The budget is small £1k-£5k so the plan was to find a suitable base software and then hire a developer on Upwork to build on top.

Any thoughts?

Hi. My company built a bespoke ERM system (which includes a stock management module) for a client which is also adapted/ resold in whole or part to other clients. It has been developed over the last 6 years and continues to evolve every month with new features. Currently I have one developer working on it full time but at times over the past six years there have been up to 5 devs working on it. In that time the lead client has spent a 6 figure sum to get to where they are today and it costs them just under a grand a month to run it (all cloud based, hosted on Azure). It does exactly what they want, has saved them a lot of costs and headaches, and has spawned new ideas an opportunities - but it has not come cheaply.

Happy to chat if you PM, but based on your info and budget you might struggle. It sounds like you need something off the shelf and either adapt your business process(es) to work with it, or have a few strategic links to other systems built so that the workflow does what you need. I would also recommend you engage with a consultant / company who is going to partner with you long term and provide ongoing help/support/development and not try and farm the work out to some random on Upwork or Fiver who you then can't get hold of 6 months down the line when something breaks or you need something changed.

[plasticpig]

shouldbworking said:

You'll be buying yourself long term pain if you get into bespoke software development for something like that. It'll cost more than you think both in terms of development and long term training / maintenance.

It'll be cheaper and simpler to change your business processes to do what normal stock management software does instead

Taita said:

I agree, please think very carefully about this before signing your business up to decades of tech debt. Budget is also EXTREMELY small.

Your requirements are unlikely that unique, the problem will have solved somewhere already.

Or tweak the business to fit the closest solution.

What are they key requirements? Perhaps we can give some recommendations?

The above aren't necessarily true. A lot of the time changing the business process to match the software is the cheapest solution. However each situation is unique and the posters above are making an assumption that changing the business process to match the software is cheaper without knowing what the additional labour cost (if any) is in changing the business process.

[skwdenyer]

MAMC said:

G'day all,

I run a retailer of bulky commercial products which we sell to the trade and home user. We are looking to get somebody to build some custom stock management software which can be constantly improved. None of the out of the box software suit us from what I can see. Does anybody have any experience in doing this? The budget is small £1k-£5k so the plan was to find a suitable base software and then hire a developer on Upwork to build on top.

Any thoughts?

I'll echo many of the other comments. I've done what you're proposing (20 years ago); I run an ERP system; I've assisted others with a variety of systems.

£1-5k buys nothing in this space.

Have you considered looking at open source software, then paying somebody £1-5k to configure it for you?

If you can articulate a bit more about your needs, I'm sure somebody here can suggest some ideas. But something like PartKeepr might work for you. There are loads of different open source systems out there. You might, for instance, consider the stock management module of something like Odoo.

[Langleyuser]

Custom software is not cheap. As a rule of thumb , think average £300-£500 a day if you want 1 decent developer to work on it. And if it’s a ‘complex’ requirement 10 days would be barely enough to scratch at the problem.

The other way to think is if you got your ‘ideal’ software what would that be worth in terms of cost savings, better stock turnover, benefits etc. Then maybe you can look at 9-12 months of those benefits as ‘potential budget’ and see where that takes you.

Edited by Langleyuser on Friday 10th June 20:27

[cluckcluck]

No offence meant but no astute dev or company would entertain what you’re asking for that budget.

A classic mistake is to invest in bespoke things and reinvent the wheel. My view would be, find an existing platform that meets your needs best, and then investigate how it can be extended to meet your additional needs and the costs involved. This way you have all the basics covered with minimal technical debt.

Your budget probably won’t cover that either but hopefully it’ll be a good starting point.

[48k]

cluckcluck said:

A classic mistake is to invest in bespoke things and reinvent the wheel. My view would be, find an existing platform that meets your needs best, and then investigate how it can be extended to meet your additional needs and the costs involved. This way you have all the basics covered with minimal technical debt.

The counter argument is that it's a classic mistake to find an existing platform and extend it, because you could be paying for functionality you'll never use, plus possibly paying to replace functionality in the existing platform to get it to do exactly what you want. So you'd be hit with the double whammy of re-inventing the wheel you've already paid for.

Every situation is different, ideally all options should be investigated with an open mind rather than approaching it with a "we need to do X because Y is bad" mindset.

[Ultraviolet]

If you have the time, you could look at building it yourself with something like Airtable or Retool. These are no-code platforms, largely plug and play, with the backend managed for you. There will be some limitations but what you can build these days without a developer is really amazing. In fact, by the time you have explained what you want to a developer who doesn’t know your business, you could often have the software up and running (and also have the skills in-house for the future). Airtable sits on AWS so is also massively scalable. I built a solution to manage our R&D projects and embedded it in Microsoft Teams. It took me about 2 days.

[vaud]

48k said:

The counter argument is that it's a classic mistake to find an existing platform and extend it, because you could be paying for functionality you'll never use, plus possibly paying to replace functionality in the existing platform to get it to do exactly what you want. So you'd be hit with the double whammy of re-inventing the wheel you've already paid for.

Every situation is different, ideally all options should be investigated with an open mind rather than approaching it with a "we need to do X because Y is bad" mindset.

The core argument is that creating your own is risky, not least at the budget proposed. There will be no requirements gathering, no spec and poorly commented code (at best) that will not be maintained.

[DSLiverpool]

Spend your budget on a consultant to find you the best mainstream solution and help implement it.
£5k doesn’t get you the initial project scope I’m afraid.

[Countdown]

MAMC said:

G'day all,

I run a retailer of bulky commercial products which we sell to the trade and home user. We are looking to get somebody to build some custom stock management software which can be constantly improved. None of the out of the box software suit us from what I can see. Does anybody have any experience in doing this? The budget is small £1k-£5k so the plan was to find a suitable base software and then hire a developer on Upwork to build on top.

Any thoughts?

Why do you need "Custom" software? i.e. What is it about your processes that are materially different to any other organisation's stock management?

As has already been said £5k will not get you much and it's far better to get an off-the-shelf system and tweak your processes to fit it (rather than the other way round)

[48k]

vaud said:

48k said:

The counter argument is that it's a classic mistake to find an existing platform and extend it, because you could be paying for functionality you'll never use, plus possibly paying to replace functionality in the existing platform to get it to do exactly what you want. So you'd be hit with the double whammy of re-inventing the wheel you've already paid for.

Every situation is different, ideally all options should be investigated with an open mind rather than approaching it with a "we need to do X because Y is bad" mindset.

The core argument is that creating your own is risky, not least at the budget proposed. There will be no requirements gathering, no spec and poorly commented code (at best) that will not be maintained.

There are risks in all the options, so the "core argument" applies to any option. People sometimes mistakenly think that writing bespoke software means starting with no code and a blank sheet of paper. On the other hand people sometimes mistakenly think that buying off the shelf and adapting it saves money. Every situation is different, the options need investigating with an open mind.
I think it's generally agreed here that the proposed budget is quite low regardless.

[skwdenyer]

48k said:

There are risks in all the options, so the "core argument" applies to any option. People sometimes mistakenly think that writing bespoke software means starting with no code and a blank sheet of paper. On the other hand people sometimes mistakenly think that buying off the shelf and adapting it saves money. Every situation is different, the options need investigating with an open mind.
I think it's generally agreed here that the proposed budget is quite low regardless.

The biggest questions are (a) what is the ongoing budget like; and, (b) if custom development is done, how the risk of losing the sole developer (you won't get a big firm at that budget) will be managed.

£1-5k buys a one-man band developer, who may fall under a bus. I'd put my money into something supported (or open source). Or I'd put my money into changing my processes to fit something off-the-shelf.

[vaud]

skwdenyer said:

The biggest questions are (a) what is the ongoing budget like; and, (b) if custom development is done, how the risk of losing the sole developer (you won't get a big firm at that budget) will be managed.

£1-5k buys a one-man band developer, who may fall under a bus. I'd put my money into something supported (or open source). Or I'd put my money into changing my processes to fit something off-the-shelf.

^^^ This

[Mr_Megalomaniac]

MAMC said:

G'day all,

I run a retailer of bulky commercial products which we sell to the trade and home user. We are looking to get somebody to build some custom stock management software which can be constantly improved. None of the out of the box software suit us from what I can see. Does anybody have any experience in doing this? The budget is small £1k-£5k so the plan was to find a suitable base software and then hire a developer on Upwork to build on top.

Any thoughts?

As some others have mentioned, this might be more expensive than you think.
For example, I've built some custom software for financial institutions before. Back then it was ~£900/day, I won't go into what it is currently. It would take about a month to get the basic version running and about 3 months for something more usable from the interations and improvements from the business users. So that's about £54k. And then you still want improvements in future.
At that rate, you're better off hiring a full time developer for £80k/year and having a handful of projects.

Or, buy something off the shelf / White-label software, and customise it from there.
Anything bespoke is going to be costly.

[akirk]

there are some good replies on here, but not all necessarily accurate as we don't know what exactly is needed.

Stock management at its simplest is a blackboard in the stock room with a tally on one side as items come in and a tally on the other side as they go out:
- left side minus right side = qu in stock
- left side = right side = no stock
- right side > left side -> something has gone wrong
Add in a column to the left for ordered stock and you have the basic principles of stock management

You may wish to consider how you sell stock (e.g. perishables on a FIFO basis) or you might need to consider how you account for stock, but that at its most basic is a stock management system

put that in a spreadsheet / SQL database table and give it some options to allow you to add new stock / mark stock as sold, and you now have an automated stock system which can be built within budget... but which is so simple I am sure that you don't need a bespoke system!

So the question is really to ask why you feel that you need a bespoke system - what is it that you are trying to do that can't be offered, and why?
There are many answers, some of which are touched on above:
- find a system that will do what you want
- find a system and add on (we often write reporting logic against a system's API because the system can't do what is needed)
- change your corporate processes, could be a good opportunity to simplify processes
- write bespoke

As others have said, you won't get a lot for £1-5k however, neither do you necessarily need as much as has been suggested - we have written bespoke systems from the low £20k, we have others that are pushing up to wards 7 figures, but run entire international companies... many things are possible - but let's hear first about your needs