Five questions to ask before you buy any business software

Nearly every abandoned system we are called in to replace was bought by a competent person acting in good faith. The failure almost never happens at the demo. It happens in the questions nobody thought to ask first.

1. What happens to our data if we leave?

Ask this first, before price. If the answer is vague, or export means a PDF, you are not buying software. You are renting access to your own records. A supplier who is comfortable with this question will answer it immediately and in writing.

2. Who can change it after the person who built it is gone?

Software built on private frameworks by a single developer is a risk that grows quietly for years. Ask what it is built with, and whether a competent developer who has never seen it could pick it up. The answer determines whether you have an asset or a dependency.

3. Does it work on a cheap phone with a bad connection?

Not on the salesperson’s laptop in an office with fibre. On the device your storekeeper actually carries, on the connection your warehouse actually has. Ask for a demonstration under those conditions. Many systems quietly fail this.

4. What does it cost in year three?

Licence fees per user, support contracts, mandatory upgrades and the cost of the staff time spent working around it. Purchase price is usually the smallest number in the total. Ask for a three-year figure, not a headline one.

5. What will our staff have to stop doing?

Every new system removes a habit. If nobody has worked out which one, the system will be adopted on paper and bypassed in practice, and you will be paying for two processes instead of one.

If a supplier answers all five without hedging, you are probably in good hands. If several answers are uncomfortable, that discomfort is the finding. It is much cheaper to discover it now than eighteen months in.