CRM & ERP Development
Custom CRM and ERP
built around how you actually run
When Excel, email threads, and a half-adopted off-the-shelf CRM stop keeping up with reality, we replace them with software that matches your real workflow — integrated, permissioned, and pleasant to use.
Off-the-shelf vs custom: the honest answer
If Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Odoo, or NetSuite can do the job, they will almost always be cheaper than a custom build. We tell clients this on the first call. Off-the-shelf platforms are excellent at the long tail of boring workflows and they keep themselves patched, secure, and evolving without any work from your team. If your business fits, take the platform.
The moment custom starts to make sense is very specific: when the platform is forcing your team to work around it instead of with it. Classic signs are an ops team that maintains a parallel Google Sheet next to the CRM because the CRM cannot model the real process, support tickets that actually live in a shared inbox because the "help desk" in the platform is wrong for your flow, or per-user license fees that quietly hit a five-figure monthly bill before anyone notices.
That is when a focused custom platform — usually covering 70–80% of what your team needs and integrating with the best-of-breed tools for the rest — starts paying for itself.
Where SME CRMs and ERPs break
We have rebuilt enough operations systems to know the patterns. A custom project almost always starts from one of these pain points. Inventory that lives in three places — the e-commerce platform, the accounting tool, and a warehouse spreadsheet — each with slightly different numbers. Pricing tiers that the business just cannot represent inside the platform, so sales discounts happen manually over email. Permissions that are too coarse, so people see data they should not or get blocked from data they absolutely need. Reports that are either impossible to build or so slow the team stops trusting them.
When we do a discovery, we look for these patterns directly. We also ask where the real workflow breaks: which steps live in people's heads, which handovers get dropped when someone is on leave, and which "simple" tasks eat hours per week. That map is what the system is designed around — not the other way.
We leave the workflow map behind with you even if you choose not to build. It is yours.
Integration-first, not replacement-first
The biggest lesson from a decade of this work is that nobody should rebuild accounting, payments, or payroll unless they are an accounting, payments, or payroll company. Xero, QuickBooks, DATEV, Stripe, Adyen, Gusto, Personio — these tools exist, they are compliant, and they are better than anything a focused SME build can deliver in those specific domains.
So our custom CRM and ERP platforms are integration-first. The system we build is the workflow layer and the data backbone — customers, products, orders, jobs, assets, contracts — and it pushes numbers into the accounting tool, pulls payments from the payment gateway, syncs shipments with the carrier, and reads inventory from the warehouse system of record. That split keeps total cost of ownership low and keeps your compliance story clean.
Our standard integration toolkit covers Xero, QuickBooks, Stripe, PayPal, Adyen, Shopify, WooCommerce, Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, and most major ERPs that expose a stable API. When a system does not have a great API, we are honest about the workaround cost (file drops, webhooks, nightly syncs) before we commit.
Data migration, without losing the last five years
Migration is where a lot of CRM/ERP projects quietly fail. The platform is fine, the screens are fine, but somehow the team will not let go of the old system because "the old CRM has all our history." Solving that problem is a specific engineering exercise, and we treat it as one.
On every migration we write a reversible import that loads customers, contacts, deals, orders, invoices, files, notes, and tags from the source system into a staging environment first. We run a live dual-read period where the new system and the old system agree on numbers, and only then do we cut over. For fields where history is inconsistent (free-text "status" columns, duplicate customers, unclosed deals), we surface the conflicts and agree the cleanup rules with your team — we do not quietly invent them.
The outcome is simple: on day one after go-live, every team member should be able to find the same records, history, and documents they could find yesterday — just in a better system.
Training, rollout, and what "done" looks like
The most beautifully built platform will fail the rollout if the team does not trust it. We plan the rollout as a phased change, not a single launch day. Power users get the platform first, run real work through it for two to four weeks, and feed fixes back into the build. Then we widen to the rest of the team with documented playbooks, short video walk-throughs per role, and a support channel that is staffed for the first month.
"Done" for a CRM or ERP project is not "the last Jira ticket is closed." It is: the team uses the system for real work every day without needing us, the integrations run on schedule without manual intervention, and your in-house admin or IT lead can add a new user, change a permission, or run a report without opening a support ticket. That is the state we are aiming for when we scope.
After go-live we typically stay on a small monthly retainer for three to six months to absorb the inevitable "can we change this one thing" requests. After that, many clients move to quarterly check-ins or hand ownership fully to their internal team.
CRM / ERP FAQ
Real answers for
operations and finance leads
How do we know if we actually need custom, or if we should stick with our platform?
Ask your ops lead how many hours per week the team spends working around the platform (duplicate entry, parallel spreadsheets, out-of-system approvals). Multiply by blended hourly cost. If the answer is materially higher than what a custom build and its ongoing maintenance would cost, custom is probably the right call. If it is lower, stay on the platform — we will say the same.
Can you integrate with our accounting or ERP system?
In most cases yes. We have shipped integrations with Xero, QuickBooks, DATEV, NetSuite, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics, and several regional accounting tools. For systems with modern APIs we build directly against the API. For older systems we use webhooks, scheduled file drops, or an integration platform (Zapier, Make, n8n) when that keeps the cost reasonable. If your system genuinely cannot be integrated, we will tell you that too.
How do you handle sensitive data — customer PII, finance, HR?
Role-based access control is part of the default build: every action is checked against an explicit role / permission policy, not just hidden in the UI. Sensitive fields are logged for audit. Production data stays in a separate environment your team controls. For EU clients we design the data model with GDPR data-subject rights in mind (export and erase are supported operations, not afterthoughts). We also sign a DPA before access is granted.
What if we want to self-host the platform on our own servers?
Fully supported. We deliver containerised builds with a documented deployment path so your DevOps team (or a partner) can run the platform on AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner, or a private data centre. We keep hosting and licensing independent — there is no per-seat fee payable to DevLK for a custom platform you own. You pay us for engineering time; you do not pay us rent on the software.
Can this co-exist with a CRM or ERP we already have?
Often yes, and sometimes this is the right first step. A common pattern is: we build a focused operations platform that owns the specific workflow breaking today (for example, field service jobs, project delivery, or multi-location inventory), and it pushes clean data up to the existing CRM or ERP. You get the pain point fixed without a full rip-and-replace.
How long does a typical custom CRM / ERP project take?
A focused module replacing one broken workflow is usually 10–14 weeks. A multi-module platform replacing a full CRM or ERP for an SME is typically a 5–8 month program split into phases so the business keeps running while we build. A platform covering multiple legal entities, countries, or warehouses is scoped as a 9–15 month program with clear decision points every 8 weeks.
Talk to operations-savvy engineers
Ready to map your CRM
or ERP project?
Book a discovery call with an engineer who has shipped these systems before. We will walk through your current workflow, find the two or three places where the money is actually leaking, and tell you whether a platform change, a custom build, or a targeted integration is the best use of your budget.