When appraising technology upgrades in your firm, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of an ERP/CRM software is a critical measurement of value. Most often, the technology vendor and buyer fixate on one thing – the acquisition price. This is mainly because of budgetary cycles that trend towards the short or near-term.

, it is generally accepted that the cost of maintenance, upgrades, optimization, management, and training incur approximately 3-5 times the cost of the initial acquisition over a five-year ownership period.  Detailed studies, going back to the 1980’s prove that the cost of acquisition is the smallest part of the overall TCO.

Because of this, it is hugely important that the small business operator look past the acquisition and implementation costs and take the long-term view as to how much the solution actually costs thebusiness.

Similarly, you must determine the TCO for a cloud/SaaS solution like SMB Suite’s Cloud subscription with the same evaluation for an ‘on-premise’ technology solution. The evaluation criteria and calculation should look something like this:

1. Cost per user, per month
2. Consulting / Implementation Fees
3. Training Costs
4. Ongoing User Support Costs
5. Upgrade Costs
6. Maintenance Costs
7. Extra Application Integration Costs (3rd Party Applications and Information)
8. Application/Environment Backup/Restoration/Recovery Costs
9. Ease and Cost of Adding New Functionality or Modules
10. Ease and Cost of Adding New Users to the Solution/System
11. Uptime Commitments and Cost of Business Downtime

SMB Suite views TCO as the primary preferred method to analyze technology investments when two solutions provide roughly equivalent benefits over the solution lifecycle, but have different types of costs associated with acquisition, maintenance and operation. For these reasons, a TCO comparison offers a more tangible assessment of the total costs involved in deploying cloud-based SaaS and on-premise business solutions.

For more data on SMB Suite’s Cloud subscription TCO with Microsoft Dynamics GP, CRM and eCommerce, visit our website pricing page: www.smbsuite.com/pricing

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