Does your business actually need software?

We turn work down fairly often. Usually because a spreadsheet would fix it, or an app that already exists would fix it, or the real problem is a process that nobody has written down and software would simply make the confusion faster.

Here is how to tell which situation you are in, before you pay anyone.

Three signs you are not ready yet

Nobody can describe how the work currently happens. If you ask two members of staff how an order gets from a customer to delivery and you get two different answers, you do not have a software problem. You have an agreement problem. Building a system on top of it will freeze one version of the confusion into code and make it harder to change.

The volume is small enough to hold. Fifteen bookings a week fits in a notebook and always will. Software becomes worth it when the counting stops being possible, not when it stops being fashionable.

You want it because competitors have one. That is a marketing observation, not an operations one. A competitor's app might be losing them money. You cannot tell from outside.

Four signs you are ready

You are the bottleneck. Every decision routes through you because you are the only one who knows the full picture. This is the most common one, and it is the one that stops a business growing regardless of how good it is.

Things fall through predictably. Not occasionally — predictably. A particular kind of order gets forgotten. A follow-up never happens. Payments go uncollected because nobody is watching for them. When the same failure repeats, a system can catch it.

You are paying people to move information between places. Someone copies from WhatsApp into a spreadsheet, then reads the spreadsheet aloud on a phone call. That is a person doing a computer's job, and you are paying for it monthly.

You cannot answer a basic question quickly. How much did we sell last month. Which customer has not paid. What is actually in stock. If answering takes an afternoon of counting, you are running blind, and every decision you make is a guess.

The cheaper answers we suggest first

Before we quote anyone for a build, we ask whether one of these solves it.

• A better spreadsheet. Not a prettier one — a properly structured one, with the data separated from the reports. A lot of what people ask software to do is a spreadsheet that was never set up correctly. This is often a day of work rather than months.
• Something that already exists. Accounting, invoicing, appointment booking, basic inventory. These are solved problems and the existing tools are cheap, tested, and maintained by someone else. Paying a monthly fee for something that works beats owning something custom that nobody is maintaining.
• A process change with no technology in it at all. Sometimes the fix is that one person now owns a step that previously belonged to everybody. That costs nothing and works on Monday.

We say this out loud because it is the fastest way to tell whether someone is on your side. A developer who has never once told a client not to build something is a developer who is paid to say yes.

The test that settles it

Work out what the current way costs you every month. Hours, at what those hours are worth. Orders lost. Money uncollected because nobody chased it. Staff time spent copying.

Then compare that to what a fix would cost, spread over two years.

If the current way costs you forty thousand naira a month and a fix costs two and a half million, the numbers say wait, improve the process, and revisit when you have grown. If the current way costs three hundred thousand a month, the numbers say you have been paying for this system for years without receiving it.

That calculation is not sophisticated, and it is more useful than most of the advice you will be given.

When the answer is yes

If it is yes, build one thing. The workflow that costs you most, done properly, used for three months before anything else is added.

Systems that fail almost always failed by being too big on day one. Ten features half-built and none trusted, so everyone quietly goes back to the notebook. One feature that works completely gets used, and being used is what makes the second one worth building.

If you are not sure

Most people asking this question are not sure, which is a reasonable place to be and not a disqualification.

Tell us what is difficult about running your business at the moment, in your own words. We will tell you which of the three situations above you are in, including when the answer is that you should not build anything. That costs nothing, you do not need an account, and we reply within two working days.