When to move from Excel to an ERP or CRM: 5 signs

Excel stops being enough when you enter the same figure in two places and nobody can tell which number is right. You then have three options: fix the spreadsheet, add a CRM, or move to an ERP. An ERP pays off when data is retyped between sales, the warehouse and invoices. If only sales hurts, a CRM is enough. According to the Czech Statistical Office, only 41.8% of firms with 10 to 49 employees used an ERP in 2025, so a spreadsheet is nothing to be ashamed of. It does have a limit.

How many firms already use an ERP

The Czech Statistical Office published the data for 2025. 49.7% of firms with 10 or more employees used an ERP. The share grows with size: 41.8% for firms with 10 to 49 people, 76.4% for firms with 50 to 249 people and 93.0% for firms with 250 or more. CRM numbers are lower: 36.2% overall, 30.0% for small firms and 57.2% for medium ones.

One thing follows: a firm of 20 people without an ERP is in the majority. Asking whether you are behind makes no sense. Ask how much the retyping costs you.

Five signs that the spreadsheet is not enough

These five signs are our judgement from projects, not a measurement. Go through them with the people who keep the spreadsheets.

1. The same figure lives in three places

The salesperson sees stock in the CRM, the warehouse has a different number in a workbook and the accountant has a third. A customer calls to ask when the goods will arrive, and the salesperson calls the warehouse. An ERP keeps the figure in one database, so everyone reads it from the same place.

2. You enter an order more than once

It arrives by e-mail, someone writes it into the CRM, then into the accounting program and then into the warehouse sheet. Every entry is a chance for a typo. The study by Powell, Lawson and Baker (arXiv, 4 January 2008) cites an earlier survey of 50 operational spreadsheets in which 0.8% to 1.8% of formula cells had errors. The authors add that many errors have no impact, but some have a large impact on key results.

3. Answering a management question takes days

Which jobs are late? What is the margin on one customer? If the answer needs an export, a filter and a manual sum, the system is not good enough for running the firm.

4. Only people know the procedures

A new colleague spends a month learning where to find things. When an experienced person leaves, the order of steps leaves too. In an ERP the procedure is written into the system and the colleague sees what to do next.

5. Volume grows faster than you do

A spreadsheet handles fifty orders a month. Two hundred already needs someone who only retypes them. When volume doubles, the paperwork roughly doubles too.

Calculate what the retyping costs

Try it with your own numbers. Here is an example with made-up numbers: a firm processes 200 orders a month, enters each one three times and one entry takes 4 minutes. That is 2,400 minutes, or 40 hours a month. It is a whole week of one person's work that adds nothing that is not already in the system.

For your own calculation, enter the number of orders, the number of places you write them to and the time of one entry. If it comes to less than a day of work a month, do not rush. If it comes to several days, it makes sense to keep asking.

A CRM or a full ERP

Decide by where the data is retyped.

• Only sales hurts. You keep the pipeline in a spreadsheet and the customer history sits in e-mails. A CRM is enough. Odoo offers the One App Free plan: one app for an unlimited number of users, in Odoo Online (odoo.com/pricing, 25 October 2026). The article on free CRM plans goes back to this.
• You retype between sales, the warehouse and invoices. This is where an ERP helps. Lumenax defines it as joining sales, purchasing, the warehouse, production, invoices, people and projects in one database, with each figure entered once.
• Your accounting suits you. You do not have to change it. How a CRM is built next to Pohoda is described in the article on a CRM for Pohoda.

What it costs and how long it takes

Lumenax builds its ERP on open source Odoo. The licence costs CZK 0. You pay for running it: CZK 3,400 a month for the server and CZK 249 per full user, a light user costs CZK 49. For 15 full users that is CZK 7,135 a month.

The one-off start is estimated by the calculator on lumenax.cz. For a firm of 6 to 20 people it returns a range of CZK 170,000 to 420,000 for a CRM alone without data transfer. For a CRM, accounting and warehouse with a basic data transfer and one or two connections it returns CZK 270,000 to 630,000. Cleaning faulty data is not included; Lumenax prices it after looking at a sample. You get a fixed price only after the fit-gap analysis. A breakdown of the surcharges is in the article on the cost of Odoo.

Lumenax gives the project length on its ERP page as 4 to 12 weeks depending on scope, with the date confirmed after the fit-gap analysis. The calculator answers show a different range: 6 to 10 weeks for a small project with a CRM and accounting, 3 to 6 months for three or more modules with data transfer. Have the difference explained in the quote.

Before you start: three steps

1. List where each order is written and who does it.
2. Calculate the time as in the example above.
3. Try comparing Pohoda, Money and Helios with an ERP. The comparison of Pohoda, Money S3 and Helios helps.

Sources

• Czech Statistical Office, ICT in enterprises, data for 2025, viewed 25 October 2026: https://csu.gov.cz/ict-v-podnicich
• S. G. Powell, B. Lawson, K. R. Baker, Impact of Errors in Operational Spreadsheets, arXiv:0801.0715, 4 January 2008: https://arxiv.org/abs/0801.0715
• Odoo, pricing (One App Free plan), viewed 25 October 2026: https://www.odoo.com/pricing
• Lumenax, xOffice ERP system, viewed 25 October 2026: https://www.lumenax.cz/erp-system
• Lumenax, calculator (constants in the page script and answers to common questions), viewed 25 October 2026: https://www.lumenax.cz/kalkulacka-erp