Every off-the-shelf product is a compromise averaged across ten thousand strangers, and somewhere in that average, your particular way of working was rounded off.1 The subscription fee is not the cost; the cost is the hundred small surrenders your team makes to fit the tool.on the price of averages
This is not an argument against buying software. Buy the accounting package. Buy the word processor. Buy anything whose problem is genuinely the same as everyone else's. The argument is narrower and sharper: the workflows that make your operation yours are exactly the ones no vendor will ever ship — and those are the ones worth commissioning.
“The tool should bend to the work. When it's the other way around, you are paying rent on your own habits.”
A commissioned system starts from your nouns and verbs. It knows your suppliers' quirks, your approval chain, the report your director actually reads.2 It has no features you don't use, which means it has no places to get lost. And when the operation changes, the system changes with it — because you hold the pen.
1.The rounding is invisible until you watch a clerk export to spreadsheet, edit by hand, and re-import — daily. ↩
2.See the Ledgerkeeper engagement for what "knowing the quirks" looks like in production. ↩