ERP systems are sold to small and medium businesses on the promise that they will one day grow into them. In practice the opposite happens: the business bends itself around the software until the software becomes the reason work is slow.
The first problem is that enterprise ERPs encode enterprise assumptions. They expect a purchasing department, a finance team, a defined approval chain and someone whose job is to maintain master data. A twelve-person company has none of those. It has one person doing all of it, and every mandatory field invented for a company of five thousand is pure friction for them.
The second is modularity, or the lack of it. Vendors describe their systems as modular, but the modules are usually priced separately and coupled tightly. You cannot take stock control without also taking the accounting model it assumes. So a business that needed one thing buys eleven, uses two, and pays for all of them.
The third is that implementation cost dwarfs licence cost, and nobody says so upfront. The quote covers the software. It does not cover the months of configuration, the data migration, the training, or the consultant who has to be called back every time a process changes. For an SMB, that gap is often the difference between a project that completes and one that is quietly abandoned.
What actually works is narrower and less impressive-sounding. Solve the one process that is bleeding money — usually inventory, invoicing or field operations — with something the team can learn in an afternoon. Make it work offline. Let it export cleanly, so nothing is trapped. Then extend it only when the business asks. Software that fits the company today is worth more than a system it might grow into.