Concession and Shop in Shop Software: Build, Buy or Stay in the Spreadsheet
Say the uncomfortable thing first: there is no packaged concession settlement product to buy, which is why so many hosts run this in Excel. So the real choice is between staying manual, forcing it through your retail platform with journals on top, or building.
On this page
Say the uncomfortable thing first: there is no packaged concession settlement product to buy, which is why so many hosts run this in Excel. So the real choice is between staying manual, forcing it through your retail platform with journals on top, or building. The threshold is contract variety rather than partner count. A dozen partners on one flat percentage should stay in a maintained workbook. Once you run more than two or three commercial structures and month end is a multi week finance exercise, a build is the only route that ends the argument.
When is off the shelf genuinely the right call here?
This category has no obvious packaged answer, and that is unusual enough to state plainly before anything else. Retail platforms will hold a supplier, a department and a rate, and large hosts do run concession estates through them. Oracle Retail, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce and Aptos all do this, with a layer of spreadsheets and journals on top. That is a legitimate choice and at modest scale it is the right one.
Stay manual if you host around a dozen partners on a single flat rate, with no partner owned stock complications and no multi jurisdiction tax question. A maintained workbook with a documented method and a second pair of eyes each month is cheaper than any build, the risk is contained, and the money belongs in floor space rather than software. Nobody gets credit for commissioning a settlement platform for twelve partners.
Keep running settlement inside your existing retail platform if you already do so successfully. The limitation there is structural rather than a defect. Those platforms model goods you buy and resell, with a supplier and a cost price. A concession is the inverse arrangement: you never owned the stock, you sold someone else's and retained a share. They can be made to represent that with departments and journals, and plenty of hosts do exactly that without pain.
The tell is where the calculation lives. If the actual commission arithmetic has migrated out of the platform into a workbook, the platform is holding your accounting and not your commercial model. If it has not migrated, you do not have this problem yet and should not spend money solving it.
When does a custom build actually pay off?
Build when your settlement cycle has become a multi week finance exercise, when your contracts use more than two or three commercial structures, when partners routinely dispute statements and you settle by goodwill, when you carry partner owned stock and shrink is an annual argument, or when you operate across jurisdictions with different self billing treatment by site.
The clearest single signal is commercial rather than operational. If your commercial team has stopped offering terms they would like to offer, a tiered structure for a growing brand or a seasonal rate for a pop up, because finance cannot calculate them, you are declining revenue to protect a spreadsheet. That constraint is the moment the build is due.
What a build gives you that neither manual work nor a retail platform can is a contract modelled as a set of dated, typed terms rather than a rate field, and a settlement computed as an explicit chain the partner can read: turnover, deductions with reasons, commission with the tier applied, levies, recharges, adjustments, net payable. If your commercial team can invent a term, the model should express it without a developer.
The second thing is transaction classification. A return processed at a different store from the sale, an exchange crossing two partners, a gift card sold by the host and redeemed against a partner's goods in a later period, a loyalty discount funded by the host applied to a partner's product. Every one of those has a right answer in the contract and a default answer in the till, and they are frequently different. A build handles them explicitly rather than letting a departmental total absorb them silently, which is what produces the unexplained variance every month.
How do they compare on the things that matter in this industry?
- Commercial model. Retail platforms express a supplier and a cost price. Concession is the inverse arrangement and the difference is structural, not a configuration gap. Everything downstream of that mismatch is journals and workarounds.
- Contract term variety. Sliding scales with monthly reset, minimum guarantee or percentage whichever is greater, category rates inside one partner, seasonal pop up terms, amortised fit out contributions. These are the negotiated terms, and they are the ones a rate field cannot hold.
- Self billed invoicing. The host raises the invoice on the partner's behalf because only the host knows what sold. The document needs its own sequence, immutability once issued, correction by credit note and correct tax treatment per partner. Confirm the specific requirements in your jurisdiction with your tax advisers rather than a developer.
- Partner owned stock. Receipts into your building that are not receipts into your inventory, transfers between stores, returns to the partner, counts by your staff on someone else's assets, and shrink allocated by a clause negotiated differently with every brand. No general retail platform has vocabulary for this.
- Reporting rigidity. A statement a partner can read from turnover through to net payable is the commercial product. Departmental totals will not settle a dispute, and a dispute settled by goodwill is a cost that never appears in any comparison.
- Data retention. Keep line level history for several years, because dispute defence depends on tracing an invoice back to individual transactions. Confirm your platform will hold that volume before assuming it.
What does total cost of ownership look like at your scale?
Three build shapes recur. Attribution and commission only, producing a defensible statement rather than an invoice, runs $45,000 to $85,000 in 8 to 12 weeks. A focused first release adding self billed invoice generation with its own sequence, immutability and credit note correction, plus general ledger posting, runs $75,000 to $160,000 over 12 to 18 weeks. A full platform adding partner owned stock with shrink allocation, a partner portal with dispute workflow, levies and recharges, fit out amortisation and multi jurisdiction handling runs $180,000 to $450,000 phased over 8 to 12 months.
A department store group hosting 180 partners across eleven stores, on four contract structures, with a till platform exposing transaction level data, came in at $158,000 over seventeen weeks for the focused first release. The line the board questioned was the $16,000 contract audit across 180 agreements and their amendment letters, and it was the line that saved the project. It surfaced that signed terms, amendment letters and what finance had been applying had drifted apart on a meaningful number of partners.
Running costs are 15 to 20 percent of build cost annually. Hosting is $400 to $1,200 a month at typical concession volumes, higher if you retain line level history for several years, which you should. The recurring line specific to this category is new partner onboarding: terms captured, mapping created and a first settlement checked by hand. Individually small, meaningful across a season of floor changes.
On the stay manual side, price the settlement cycle itself. Eight to eleven working days of a finance analyst that produces a statement rather than an insight, plus the query handling that follows, plus the ad hoc weekly figures your concessions team pulls by hand. Then price the goodwill spent on disputes where the commission was right and the derivation was unpresentable. Across a large estate that is usually the largest number in the comparison and the one nobody has written down.
What does the hybrid look like, and when is it the honest answer?
The hybrid is the default recommendation here rather than a compromise. Keep Oracle Retail, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Commerce, Aptos or whatever runs your tills as the system of record for transactions, inventory you actually own, and the general ledger. Build only the settlement layer that consumes transaction level data, holds the partner and contract model, computes commission and posts journals back.
That split works because the platform is doing its job. It captures sales, handles payments, runs your own merchandise and holds the ledger. What it cannot do is express a negotiated commercial relationship where the goods were never yours. Building that one layer costs a fraction of replacing a retail estate and carries none of the risk.
There is a second, narrower hybrid worth naming. Build the attribution and commission engine only, at $45,000 to $85,000, and keep raising self billed invoices the way you do today. That produces a statement your partners can read and accept, which solves the commercial problem. Self billing solves the accounting problem and can follow one phase later once the calculation is trusted.
Sequence matters more than usual. The attribution layer and the commission engine are separable and should be built in that order, because a perfect calculation on misattributed sales is worse than an approximate one on correct sales. Leave partner owned stock to phase two unless shrink is currently a live commercial dispute, in which case it is often the fastest payback in the programme.
Which should you choose, by operator size and stage?
Around a dozen partners, one flat rate, no partner owned stock, single jurisdiction: stay manual. Document the method, have a second person check it each month, and revisit when your partner count or your contract variety moves rather than on a calendar.
Forty to a hundred partners on two or three structures, settlement taking a few days, few disputes: keep running it through your retail platform and tighten the process. Do the contract audit anyway, because it costs a few weeks of somebody's time and it is the cheapest risk reduction available to you. Most hosts at this size discover at least one partner whose live rate cannot be traced to a signed document.
A hundred and fifty partners or more, four or more contract structures, month end taking a week or longer, regular disputes settled by goodwill: build the attribution and commission layer first, then self billing, then the portal. Partners value an accurate statement before anything else, and a portal sitting on a calculation nobody trusts multiplies queries rather than reducing them.
Airport, travel retail or any multi jurisdiction estate: build, and scope the jurisdictional tax treatment as its own phase rather than assuming it generalises. Separate tax treatment per site plus partners registered elsewhere is real scope, and it is the item most commonly discovered halfway through a project that was priced without it.
Whichever route you take, own the repository, the cloud accounts and the right to hire another firm, in writing before kickoff. The system encodes your negotiated commercial terms with every brand on your floor, and you should never need a third party's cooperation to change a rate or produce evidence for a dispute.
When you are ready to turn this into a specification, Digital Heroes has delivered more than 2,000 projects with a named team you can speak to before you sign, rather than a bench you meet in month two. You can take that specification to any other firm on your shortlist.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- Deloitte reports that modern ERP implementations aim to deliver reduced manual effort, greater transparency, a single source of truth, and increased productivity, but many organizations do not capture the full expected benefits (a significantly lower ROI) without disciplined strategy, change management, and data readiness. Source: Deloitte (2024) →
- APQC's Open Standards Benchmarking data on the monthly financial close found median performers take about 6.4 calendar days to close the books, while top performers (top 25%) do it in 4.8 days or fewer and bottom performers (bottom 25%) take 10 or more days. Source: APQC (2018) →
- Only 22% of firms are 'future ready' having significantly transformed digitally; these companies show average revenue growth 17.3 percentage points and net margins 14.0 percentage points above their industry average. Source: MIT Center for Information Systems Research (MIT Sloan) (2022) →
- Median SaaS spend reached $9,455 per employee, and organizations leave an average of 36% of their SaaS licenses unused. Source: Zylo (2026) →
Frequently asked questions
What does it cost to move settlement off our retail platform?
Less than moving the platform itself, because you are extracting a calculation rather than a system of record. The tills, the ledger and your own inventory stay exactly where they are, and the settlement layer consumes transaction level data from them.
The real cost is the contract audit that has to happen first. Reading every agreement and its amendment letters to confirm live terms is work you pay for either way, typically around $16,000 for a large estate, and doing it before scoping means you scope against reality rather than against a folder.
What happens if our retail platform changes its pricing or per store terms?
Concession hosts are exposed here in a specific way, because per store or per till pricing scales with floor changes rather than with revenue. A new location, a pop up or a seasonal expansion adds cost on a schedule you do not control.
The practical protection is to keep the settlement layer independent of the platform, so a renewal conversation is about tills and ledger rather than about your commercial model as well. A host whose partner contracts are encoded inside a vendor's configuration has considerably less bargaining power than one who owns that layer.
How long does a concession settlement build take?
A first release ships in 12 to 18 weeks. Three to four weeks is discovery and the contract audit, roughly eleven weeks is build, and the last three to four weeks are two parallel settlement cycles running both processes with statements compared partner by partner.
The schedule risk is the contract audit rather than engineering. Most hosts find that signed terms, amendment letters and what finance actually applies have drifted apart over the years, and reconciling that is a commercial conversation on someone else's calendar rather than a development task.
Can Oracle Retail or Aptos handle concession commission properly?
They can be made to represent it, and large hosts genuinely run concession estates through them, so this is not a defect claim. The limitation is structural: both model goods you buy and resell, with a supplier and a cost price, while a concession is the inverse arrangement.
The verifiable test is where your calculation lives. If commission is computed in a workbook outside the system and the platform only receives journals, the platform is holding your accounting and not your commercial model. If the calculation has never migrated out, you do not need to change anything.
Is a build worth it if we only have four contract structures?
Four structures across a large partner count is the easy case, and it is exactly where a build is most defensible. Two hundred partners on four structures means four calculation chains cover the estate, which is a straightforward project on meaningful turnover.
The difficult case is the reverse. Forty partners on twenty structures, with sliding scales, minimum guarantee against percentage, category rates inside one partner and seasonal terms, is a materially larger and slower project on a fraction of the revenue. Cost tracks contract variety, not partner count.
How much does the self billed invoice piece add, and can we defer it?
Typically $15,000 to $25,000 within a first release, and yes, it can wait one phase. A defensible statement that partners accept solves the commercial problem, which is where your disputes and your goodwill spending are.
The cost is not the document, it is the properties it must have: its own sequence, immutability once issued, correction only by credit note, correct tax treatment per partner including partners registered elsewhere, and a traceable path back to individual transactions. Confirm the specific requirements in your jurisdiction with your tax advisers.
What does partner owned stock add, and do we need it?
Expect $50,000 to $110,000, which usually moves a project out of the first release band. It covers stock as a separate ownership class with receipts, inter store transfers, returns to the partner and counts, plus shrink calculated per partner per period and allocated by that partner's liability clause.
Defer it unless shrink is currently a live commercial dispute. If it is, it is often the fastest payback in the whole programme, because it turns an annual argument into a monthly number both sides can see rather than a conversation about whose staff counted what.
Should the partner portal come before or after the settlement engine?
After, without exception. Partners value an accurate statement first, and a portal sitting on a calculation they do not trust multiplies queries rather than reducing them, because now they can see a derivation they disagree with in real time.
Once accuracy is proven the portal earns its cost twice over. Query volume drops sharply because partners can trace the numbers themselves, and your concessions team stops pulling ad hoc weekly figures by hand. It also becomes a commercial asset, since brands notice which hosts are easy to trade with.
How long does it take to build custom accounting software?
A focused first version takes 10 to 16 weeks, and a complete QuickBooks-class replacement takes 6 to 9 months. In Digital Heroes delivery data, schedules slip most often during data migration and bank feed integration, so we budget those two phases at double the first estimate. Treat any promise of a full accounting system in under two months as a warning sign.
What happens to my accounting software if the agency shuts down?
If you own the repository, the hosting accounts, and the documentation, another team can take over within weeks, usually before a missed closing cycle does real damage; if the agency owns any of those, you have a hostage situation. Before signing, confirm the code sits in your GitHub or GitLab organization, hosting bills to your card, and a written deployment runbook exists. A competent agency agrees to all three without friction, and hesitation is itself the answer.
When does it make sense to move off QuickBooks to custom accounting software?
Move when you are paying people to work around the tool, not when the subscription feels expensive. Common triggers are hitting the 25-user cap on QuickBooks Online Advanced, consolidating multiple entities in spreadsheets, or a billing model that forces manual journal entries every month. If your team spends several hours a week exporting to Excel just to answer basic questions, you are already paying for custom software in salaries.
Can custom accounting software connect to my bank, payment processor, and payroll provider?
Yes, and it should be treated as standard scope rather than an add-on. Bank feeds typically come through aggregators like Plaid, payments through Stripe or your existing processor's API, and payroll providers such as Gusto and ADP publish APIs for pulling journal entries. The real constraint is smaller regional banks without feed coverage, which is worth verifying during scoping instead of discovering after launch.
Should the first version of my accounting software be an MVP?
Yes, but scope it around one complete workflow rather than a thin slice of everything. A strong first release fully owns, say, invoicing and receivables while QuickBooks keeps running the general ledger, letting you validate the software with real money movement in 10 to 14 weeks. In Digital Heroes projects, one-workflow MVPs reach a stable full system faster than big-bang replacements almost every time.
How small can the first version of my software be and still be worth building?
One workflow, end to end, for one type of user: the single process that currently burns the most hours or loses the most money. In Digital Heroes delivery experience, first versions scoped to 6 to 10 weeks of build time ship, get used, and generate the feedback that makes version two obviously right, while 9-month first versions routinely launch with features nobody touches. Everything you cut from v1 gets cheaper to build later, because real usage reorders the roadmap for you.
Can I extend QuickBooks with custom features instead of replacing it?
Yes, and it is often the right first step. QuickBooks Online has a public API, so an agency can build a custom layer for quoting, inventory, or field service that pushes clean transactions into QuickBooks, which stays your ledger of record. Roughly half of the accounting engagements Digital Heroes scopes start this way because it costs a fraction of a full build and leaves your accountant's workflow untouched.
Who owns the code when an agency builds my software?
You should, completely, through a written intellectual property assignment that transfers everything on final payment; without that clause, copyright stays with whoever wrote the code by default. Insist that the repository lives in your own GitHub organization from day one and that hosting, domains, and third-party accounts are registered to you. Also check for licenses to the agency's proprietary frameworks buried in the contract, because those can make switching vendors practically impossible even when you own your own code.
Who can build a custom accounting software system?
Digital Heroes builds custom accounting software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other accounting software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
Related guides
Published · Last updated .
