What is the cost of SAP Business One? This is a question I get asked on a daily basis. The SAP Business One implementation team at Leverage Technologies has implemented more than 140 SAP Business One sites and whilst no blog can give you a 100% accurate price for the implementation of SAP Business one I can give you some information which I am sure will be useful to any business looking to implement SAP Business One and asking the question – what are the implementation costs likely to be?

Obviously one has to take into consideration hardware, operating system and SAP Business One software license pricing (more information is available at SAP Business One Pricing).

Let’s talk more specifically about implementation pricing. It is almost impossible to give a price to implement SAP Business One without asking a number of questions about the implementation services required. Leverage Technologies has implemented SAP Business One with services ranging from 2 days to 50 days plus. So what factors are most relevant when looking at the cost associated with an SAP Business One implementation?

1. How many companies will be implemented? Is the implementation for a single company (ABN) or multiple companies? If multiple companies are to be implemented is inter-company and consolidation required? SAP Business One offers some great tools to enable quick implementation of additional companies from a master company but you will need to ask yourself – are all companies to be configured in the same way? What about company forms (AR invoice layouts etc.) which will need to be set-up to the requirements of each company.
2. Geographies – is the implementation of SAP Business One going to cover multiple territories or countries? If so there are likely to be different set-up and configuration requirements based on the different legal and fiscal requirements for each country. Another potential complexity with multiple country support is different language sets.  SAP Business One offers support in multiple languages covering multiple legal and fiscal requirements – great for companies that are looking to expand overseas.
3. Data conversion – unless your business is a start-up it is highly likely that you will want to convert data from your legacy system. Data conversions are categorised into two broad categories – master data and historical data. SAP Business One offers a Data Transfer Workbench (DTW) module which assists with the upload of master data. There is still some work to be done – export data from your legacy system, check data, import into SAP Business One and reconcile / check data again. From a pricing / implementation point of view the real relevance with regards to data conversions is whether or not there is a requirement to export historical data and if so does the historical data need to be imported in summary or detail format. Summary format might be used to compare the current year’s profit and loss to last years (historical) profit and loss whereas a detailed import of historical data will allow drill down to original “closed” document (for example AR invoice).
4. Reporting – SAP Business One offers many standard reports and Dashboards. Even so it is highly likely that you will want some reports changed or custom written. The number and complexity of reports to be written to your specific requirements will have an impact on the days (and therefore price) to implement SAP Business One. Report development pricing can be substantially reduced by considering platforms like SAP HANA.
5. Training – how many people need to be trained? Will training be on-site or off-site and will site specific user notes be required. Many companies adopt a “train the trainer” approach where Leverage Technologies is responsible for training super users of the customer. These super users then train other users in the team. This approach helps reduce implementation pricing for remote and distributed sites.
6. Business Processes – sound obvious but is sometimes overlooked. If your business processes are very specific to your industry and your requirements are outside of the standard functionality offered then extra days consultancy or system development will be required. The suggestion is always to try and keep the initial implementation as simple as possible. This will reduce your upfront implementation costs whilst providing you with a platform for further growth.
7. User skill set – the skill level of users (including accounting, business knowledge and general computer skills) are all factors in determining how long it will take to implement SAP Business One in your business.
8. Project Management – the amount of project management required will vary dependent on the factors listed above.

In summary – there are a number of questions to be answered before being able to give a cost to implement SAP Business One. Answer the eight questions listed above and you will get a much better idea of the days required for implementation.