The features you pay for, that nobody opens

Open your management software's menu. Count the entries: fifteen, twenty, sometimes more. Then ask your team which ones they actually open in a normal week. The answer fits in three or four names. You still pay for the rest, every month, for every user.

Software built for everyone, fully used by no one#

A vendor selling to thousands of companies has to cover every trade at once. Accounting, HR, purchasing, sales, reporting: every module added widens its market. For you, every module added thickens the menu.

A building materials distributor does not need the day-rate project management module, built for consulting firms. A heating engineer does not need the multi-warehouse stock module, built for large retail. Both pay for it anyway, because it came bundled in the contract.

Counting what you use, not what you pay for#

The method takes an hour, in three steps.

1. List the billed modules. The contract or the latest invoice names them all, usually with a price per user.
2. Ask each role what they open in a normal week: the salesperson, the warehouse clerk, whoever runs payroll. Not what they were shown at onboarding, what they actually open.
3. Compare the two lists. Anything billed and never mentioned is a candidate to drop, or to never have activated in the first place.

What it costs, concretely#

Take a small building materials distributor, with a conservative hypothesis to show the math.

• Six user accounts.
• Modular subscription: €29 a month, per user and per activated module.
• Ten modules activated on the contract.
• Three modules opened at least once a week, across the whole team.

The math: 6 accounts × 10 modules × €29 = €1,740 a month for the full contract. The three modules actually used represent 6 × 3 × €29 = €522 a month. The seven modules never opened cost €1,218 a month, a little over €14,000 a year.

That figure is not yours: it depends on your contract, your number of accounts, and how many modules are genuinely active. The method applies as is.

What changes with an application built for the company#

An application built for a single company only contains the screens it uses. No project management module if nobody bills by the day. No HR screen if payroll runs elsewhere. And no per-user licence multiplying the price of a screen nobody opens by the number of accounts created.

When a new need shows up, it is one more screen in the existing application, not a new module to buy and fit alongside the others.

When off-the-shelf software is still the right call#

Standard software stays the right call when your way of working looks like most companies using it. General accounting, for instance, looks much the same from one company to another: an off-the-shelf tool does it as well as custom development, for less. The full grid is in off-the-shelf, ERP, or custom-built, the grid to decide.

If an off-the-shelf tool does the job, take it. We will tell you, and it happens.

The question is not whether the software is good. It is whether you are paying for features built for a trade that is not yours. See what off-the-shelf software really costs, beyond the price tag for the rest of the calculation, licences included.

The features nobody opens: the key takeaways#

A menu with dozens of entries costs the vendor nothing: it was built once, for thousands of customers. It costs you every month, per user, whether it serves you or not.

The three-step method takes an hour and gives you a number. Before signing a new contract or renewing one, count what you actually open: it is the safest basis for deciding whether to keep, cut, or have built exactly what fits your trade, as detailed in what a custom-built business application costs.