Bills of material
Multi-level BOMs with revisions, effectivity dates, phantom assemblies, and where-used analysis. This is foundational to manufacturing and we have nothing resembling it.
Watch it run
Seven seconds from inbox to a balanced journal entry, with the policy check and the approval gate shown in full.
Watch the agentThe difference
A parallel ledger that reconciles to your existing system every morning — to the penny, per account, per period.
See the tie-outCase study
Consolidated reporting in eleven days, without leaving the accounting system they already ran.
Read the storyMost requested
Most ERP projects miss their business case. We take over stalled deployments and get them closing books again.
Get a free assessmentEditorial policy
No paid placement, published criteria, disclosed ownership on every page. The directory is worth more than any deal it could win.
Read the methodologyNew research
We surveyed finance leaders on what actually went wrong. The answers are not what vendors tell you.
Read the studyPartner program
Accounting firms, fractional CFOs, and ERP consultants deliver implementations on our platform.
Become a partnerERP by industry
This page exists because manufacturers search for it, and the honest answer is that we are usually not the right purchase. We have no MRP, no bills of material, no routings, and no shop-floor control, and none of those are on the roadmap. Here is who to buy instead.
Describe your operation. We will point you at the right product, which is usually not ours.
The problems
Each of these is real, central to running a manufacturing business, and entirely absent from our product. We would rather list them here than let you discover them in month four.
Multi-level BOMs with revisions, effectivity dates, phantom assemblies, and where-used analysis. This is foundational to manufacturing and we have nothing resembling it.
Operation sequences, setup and run times, capacity by work centre, and the scheduling that depends on them. Not built, not planned.
Demand explosion through the BOM, lead-time offsetting, and planned order generation. This is the engine of a manufacturing ERP and we do not have one.
Work-in-process valuation as material and labour are consumed through operations, with variance analysis against standard. We handle project WIP, not production WIP.
Operators reporting completions, scrap, and downtime at the work centre, in real time, on hardware built for a factory. An entirely different product surface.
Genealogy from raw material through production to shipment, which is a regulatory requirement in several manufacturing sectors and something we cannot support.
Where the money goes
A representative shape for a discrete manufacturer. The first three lines are where a manufacturing ERP earns its cost, and they are exactly the lines we cannot help with.
Material, labour, and manufacturing overhead account for the majority of a manufacturer’s cost structure, and all three are controlled by BOM accuracy, routing accuracy, and standard cost variance analysis. A financial system without those cannot help you manage the part of the business that determines whether you are profitable. That is the whole argument for buying somebody else.
Your stack
If you buy a real manufacturing ERP, it becomes your system of record and we are not in the picture. The narrow case below is the exception.
Benchmarks
Where we can still contribute is the financial layer, and only where a real manufacturing system already exists. These are the metrics that layer moves — none of them are production metrics.
For a manufacturer, those are the two mid-market products we would send you to, and the choice between them follows the same logic as everywhere else. Acumatica if you want unlimited-user pricing, on-premise as an option, and a partner ecosystem with real manufacturing depth. NetSuite if you also need global statutory compliance and one system spanning ERP, CRM, and warehouse.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is a reasonable third option if your organization is deep in Microsoft and your manufacturing is relatively light — BOMs and routings without heavy scheduling or shop-floor requirements.
Manufacturing ERP is two decades of accumulated domain work: BOM structures, effectivity logic, capacity models, cost roll-ups, variance analysis, quality workflows, and regulatory traceability. It is not a feature gap, it is a different product.
Companies that try to enter it from adjacent categories generally produce something that demonstrates well and fails on the third real customer. We would rather be narrow and honest than broad and disappointing, and our roadmap says so publicly.
Everything above is about the financial platform, and it stays true of it. Separately we build AI PLM software, which owns the engineering record — items and approved manufacturer lists, revisions and effectivity, the engineering BOM, change control, documents, and compliance evidence. It is a different product with its own purchase, and it does not change a word of the list above.
The line between them is the one that matters when you are shortlisting. PLM describes what the product is. An MRP decides what to buy and build, and when. We do the first and not the second, so a manufacturer buying PLM from us still buys Acumatica, NetSuite, Epicor, or keeps the system they have, and we publish the BOM to it rather than replacing it. If somebody tells you a PLM removes the need for an MRP, they are selling you a problem for month four.
There is one situation where manufacturers work with us, and it is a real one: you already run a manufacturing system that handles production correctly, and the financial layer around it does not.
That typically looks like a group with several entities consolidating in Excel, an AP function keying several thousand supplier invoices a month by hand, and management reporting that requires somebody to assemble four exports. None of those are manufacturing problems and all of them are ones we solve.
In that arrangement your MRP stays authoritative for production, we read from it, and we handle consolidation, AP automation, reporting, and the close. We would describe that as an integration engagement rather than an ERP purchase, and we price it that way.
Manufacturers with a significant field service, installation, or engineering-to-order services arm sometimes have two problems: a production side well served by their existing ERP and a services side served by nothing. That is a case worth a conversation, because the services side is what we are actually good at.
If you are evaluating ERP to run manufacturing, we should not be on your shortlist. Do not spend a demo slot on us. Our selection advisory service will help you choose between the products that do fit, and we take no referral fees from any of them — so that recommendation costs you nothing but the advisory fee and costs us nothing we were going to win.
Questions
Describe your operation and we will point you at the product that fits. The recommendation is free and it will not be ours.