What is Custom Software?

Custom software is software that is “made from scratch” to fit the exact needs and workflows of your business. But unlike the software you currently pay monthly fees for, custom software is owned by your business. You have full control over how its designed, how it should work, who should be able to do what–everything.

Custom Software is Made From Scratch

“Made from scratch” may sound outdated in an era where businesses rent so many of our software tools, but if you consider how much time you and your staff use working with different tools and moving information between them in the way that you need it, custom software is the best way to streamline business processes that involve software. And when you include the time it took to find those tools, set them up, and learn how to use them, custom software gets adds even more value.

In one case, we built a QuickBooks integration into a tracking tool for a 25-person shipment company which previously did their QuickBooks work manually.  With our solution in place, every time a shipment passed through the system, the solution updated QuickBooks instantly. Moreover, we added the ability to invoice from the same tool, which included all the industry-related details they asked for. And all without logging into QuickBooks.

Within a couple months, the company found it no longer had to spend on the monthly temporary help, and only the Chief Financial Officer needed to even log into QuickBooks at all. This simplified, standardized, and streamlined their daily workflow and saved them thousands a month all by itself. We built it in about two months, but they’ve used it for over 8 years. The investment paid for itself many times over, and enabled this small business to allocate its resources on other things.

Custom Software is Tailor-Made

Since our solution was tailor-made, it dove-tailed right into their existing system. No need for plugins, platforms or widgets to send things back and forth. The custom software handled everything at a monthly cost of zero dollars. If a vendor doesn’t exist in the QuickBooks account, the custom software adds it automatically. Same for charts of account, clients, address changes, AR or AP ledger changes. All of it.

Custom software goes beyond simply automating things. It’s about helping people do their jobs the way you trained them, without the need for them to learn how to use a mix of tools to get things done. It’s about consolidating, organizing,  streamlining, and optimizing your business processes your way. It can even enforce your rules, so that the system helps ensure everybody does things the approved way.

Though it’s common for a small business to have subscriptions to dozens of products, custom software can phase out many of them–yet improve how to interact with the stuff you really need. In one case, a client was paying $10 a month for a simple calculator widget on their website. We built a custom calculator in just a couple days that allowed the client to cancel the plugin. Unlike the old widget that had it’s own branded color-scheme that required an additional monthly fee to remove, the new calculator matched the look of their site and even sped up how fast the page is displayed.

Custom Software Creates a Competitive Advantage

Though many subscription offerings are industry-specific, they are still generic so they can appeal to thousands of businesses. That’s perfectly fine for some purposes, but custom software has the ability to be far more specific. It’s just for your business. Because of this, you can infuse your team’s training and expertise into your tools for the whole company to leverage every day.

As a simple example, employees at one of our client companies were trained to create case numbers using a certain mingling of project-specific information. The team did this manually for years, but thannks to their expertise, their custom software does it automatically. Small nuances like that can help create a competitive advantage.

In fact, that’s one of the larger reasons to use custom software. Marketing may get customers, but custom software builds atop staff business processes to ensure every internal process is optimized to give your business a competitive advantage. This means less hassle for employees and customers alike, yet better profit margins for the business.

Keep The Change

With the long-term right development partner, custom software can grow as your company does. And it does it without the per-person licensing pains or the complexity and expense of hiring in-house programmers.

If employees regularly uploading complicated spreadsheets to the company’s SharePoint, OneDrive, or Google Docs account, it gets unweildy fast. If your people have to generate multiple reports to get the info they need, then a streamlined approach can help simplify the process. If your team is swamped with slow, inefficient processes to make things happen, then your business has outgrown its tools.

Documenting processes, building company culture, and maintaining extensive job training can help any workforce succeed, but well-designed custom software enhances and enforces all of that by incorporating all that company uniqueness and expertise. It’s the best way to keep the change.

Custom Software That Clicks

Looking for a development partner for the long-term?  Turbine Web Solutions is glad to help.