Your Dunedin branch is three working days from every supplier warehouse in Auckland and your reorder point still assumes next day

A core build with lot, expiry, and lead-time logic runs NZ$45,000 to NZ$72,000 over 3 to 4 months. Adding consignment stock, cold chain evidence, and forecasting takes it to NZ$95,000 to NZ$130,000 over 5 to 7 months. A forecasting and expiry layer over software you already run costs NZ$26,000 to NZ$48,000.

Often, yes. Cin7 is a capable product with a genuine New Zealand fit, and if your requirements are reordering, purchase orders, and stock accuracy, it will beat a build on cost and time. Building becomes justified once consignment stock, strict lot expiry, or cold chain evidence are core to your operation. Ask any developer to argue the buy case honestly before you commit.

Give every line its own lead time and its own demand variability, then calculate safety stock from those rather than from a single global rule. Dunedin businesses usually find they are overstocked on slow lines and underprotected on fast ones, because one rule was applied to both. The recalculation alone often releases meaningful working capital.

Yes, consignment locations are modelled as stock you own at an address you do not control, with usage reported or scanned by the site. It removes the quarterly count that is currently the only time anyone knows what is out there. Agree with your customers how usage gets reported before the feature is designed.

By making expiry visible weeks ahead and forcing first-expiry picking automatically rather than relying on staff to check dates. Most write-offs happen because nobody saw the date coming, not because the stock was unsellable. Alerts at sixty and thirty days give your sales team time to move it.

Yes, and it should, since Xero is where your accountant works and stock valuation needs to reconcile to it. The inventory system holds quantity and cost detail while Xero holds the financial position, with journals posted on a defined cycle. Agree the valuation method during discovery because changing it later is disruptive.

In our delivery experience the reorder point recalculation and expiry alerting produce visible effects within the first quarter after go-live, well before the rest of the feature set is fully adopted. The larger structural gains from consignment visibility take longer because they depend on customer cooperation. Track working capital and write-offs from day one so you can see it.

Fix it before you build, or budget for a full stocktake and a data cleanup phase inside the project. A custom system built on bad data produces confident wrong answers, which is worse than an honest spreadsheet. Most Dunedin projects include a cleanup phase, and the ones that skip it regret it.

Plan 15 to 20 percent of build cost annually for support, hosting, and enhancements, plus scanner hardware replacement on a three to four year cycle. Nominate an internal owner from operations who understands both the stock and the system. That role matters more than the maintenance contract.

A usable first version covering receiving, stock movements, scanning, and low-stock alerts ships in 8 to 12 weeks across Digital Heroes inventory builds. Full multi-warehouse systems with Shopify, Amazon, and accounting integrations run 4 to 6 months. Any quote under 6 weeks usually means the vendor has not scoped concurrency handling or data migration.

The crossover usually shows up between 20 and 50 seats on premium tiers. Salesforce Enterprise lists at $165 per user per month, so 40 users cost about $79,000 a year in subscriptions, which is real money against a custom system you would own outright. Run the comparison over three years: if subscription spend beats the build cost plus 15-20% annual maintenance, custom wins on price before you even count workflow fit.

Budget 15 to 20 percent of the build cost per year, so a $50,000 system runs roughly $8,000 to $10,000 annually across Digital Heroes maintenance contracts. That covers hosting, security patches, integration updates when Shopify or Amazon change their APIs, and small improvements. Skipping it is how a channel sync quietly breaks in month nine and corrupts your counts.

Bring four things: your SKU count and how stock is identified (plain SKUs, or lots, serials, and expiry dates), every channel and system the software must talk to, a plain-language walkthrough of one order from purchase to shelf to shipment, and a sample export of your current data. With those, an agency can produce a real quote in days instead of a placeholder that doubles later. A one-line brief gets you a demo-sized quote for an operations-sized problem.

Ask to speak with two past clients whose projects resemble yours in size and industry, and ask exactly who will write your code, since some agencies sell senior faces and deliver junior or subcontracted hands. Demand a written specification with acceptance criteria before any fixed price, and check that their portfolio links to products that are actually live. An instant quote given without questions about your workflows is the clearest warning sign there is.

Budget 15-20% of the original build cost per year, which on a $100,000 system means $15,000 to $20,000 for security patches, dependency updates, bug fixes, and small improvements as real usage reveals what the spec missed. Cloud hosting for a typical business application adds $50 to $300 a month on top. Skipping maintenance does not save the money; in Digital Heroes rescue work, unmaintained systems typically need a far more expensive rebuild within about three years.

Digital Heroes builds custom inventory management software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. The work is delivered remotely: our engineers work from Delhi and Lucknow, leadership is in New York, and some team members live in London and Sydney and work remotely from there. We have no office in Dunedin. You can chat with the team directly, and every form gets an email reply within 24 hours.