ERP 5-Year Total Cost of Ownership Calculator for European Manufacturers
Mid-market ERP quotes from vendors such as abas, proALPHA, IFS, Exact, Priority or Visma rarely look alike: one is a large implementation with modest subscription, another is a cheap subscription with heavy services. This calculator puts them on one five-year basis so finance can compare them.
Your numbers
Users who need a paid ERP licence, not every employee.
Blended price across full and limited users from the quote.
Contractual index or typical vendor increase applied each year.
Partner fees for configuration, migration, integration and training.
Key users, IT and finance staff released for the project.
Cloud tenants, test systems, middleware, backup, interfaces.
Your results
Planning estimate. Excludes data archiving, audit fees, customer-specific add-on licences and benefits. Replace every input with figures from your signed or proposed contract.
Total cost of ownership vs number of users
Sweeps Named users from 10 to 300, holding your other inputs fixed.
Optional TCO review
Send us the exported figures and we will sanity check assumptions and flag missing cost lines. No obligation.
Optional. The tool and every export work without this. No spam.
How to use the calculator
Enter the blended per-user subscription from the quote, the services estimate and your own internal staffing. Set the horizon to match the contract term or depreciation view your CFO prefers. The tool compounds the annual uplift correctly, so a contract with a 6 percent index looks different from a flat price. Run it once per vendor, export each result to Excel and place the figures side by side.
- Use the blended price across full and limited users
- Include test and sandbox tenants in infrastructure
- Count internal staff at loaded cost, not salary
- Keep the same horizon for every vendor
The formula
Subscription over the horizon is users times monthly price times 12 times the geometric series factor ((1+r)^n - 1) / r, where r is the annual uplift. Add implementation services, infrastructure per year times years, and internal staff cost equal to FTE times loaded cost times the project duration in years. TCO divided by users and years gives a per-user-year figure that is useful for benchmarking across vendors and user counts.
Reading the result
If recurring cost is more than 70 percent of TCO, the decision is driven by subscription terms and uplift clauses, so negotiate those. If services dominate, scrutinise scope, fit-gap results and the number of customisations. Use the chart to see how the price scales if headcount in the ERP grows. Compare outputs with the fit-gap worksheet before trusting a low quote that leaves requirements uncovered.
Common mistakes
The most common error is comparing year-one subscription only. Others are forgetting data migration effort, omitting internal backfill costs, treating contingency as free and ignoring price uplift after the initial term. Also check whether the quote counts read-only or shop floor users, because those are often priced differently in DACH mid-market products.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does it cover on-premise perpetual licences?
Yes, approximately. Enter the annual maintenance as a monthly per-user equivalent and put the one-time licence fee into the implementation field. The uplift handles maintenance index clauses.
What horizon should I use?
Five years is common for ERP business cases because it spans implementation and a stable run period. Use the contract term if the vendor ties you in for longer, and test seven years for core systems.
Should internal staff be included?
Yes. Key users and IT staff released from daily work are a real cost, and backfill or overtime often appears in other budgets. Excluding them makes the cheapest quote look better than it is.
Is VAT included?
No. Enter net figures. Most EU manufacturers recover input VAT, so net cost is the right basis for comparison.
If you want TCO inputs pulled from your current ERP usage data rather than estimated, Netray can build a read-only extract of user activity and transaction volumes.
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- ERP TCO Comparison Calculator (5-Year)
- ERP Migration Risk Assessment
- Data Migration Effort Calculator
- ERP Selection Scorecard for Manufacturers
- ERP Go-Live Readiness Checklist
- ERP Change Management Readiness Assessment
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- Cloud vs On-Premise ERP Cost Calculator