We quote after scoping, so here is what a quote is made of.
Two businesses asking for the same thing in the same words can receive honest quotes that differ several times over, because the words describe almost none of the work. Answer six questions and this page writes your scope down, names the buckets a quote for it should separate, and says which of your answers pushes the figure up.
What you need
1. What are you trying to put in place?
Size of the job
2. How many distinct areas of work should it cover?
Who uses it
3. Who will open it day to day?
What it must talk to
4. What else does it need to connect to?
Existing records
5. What happens to the records you hold today?
On a phone
6. Does anyone need to use it away from a desk?
The buckets, whoever you buy from
- Discovery and design
- Agreeing the screens and the rules before anybody builds. One-time, and bounded.
- Build
- The largest line, and the one that moves with the number of distinct workflows.
- Integrations
- Each connection is its own piece of work, priced once the other system’s route in is known.
- Data migration
- Getting what you already hold into the new system, reconciled rather than dumped.
- Mobile app
- A phone app is a separate build from a web system, not a setting on it.
- Hosting
- A small predictable monthly figure that scales with use.
- Support and changes
- Fixes, small changes and somebody to call. Usually a monthly retainer.
- Training and rollout
- The part most often left out, and the reason systems go unused.
Common questions
- Why is there no price list?
- Because the same sentence describes jobs that differ several times over in cost. A number published here would be contradicted by the first scoping call, which helps nobody. What this page gives you instead is the scope and the buckets, so any quote, ours or anybody else’s, can be read properly.
- What does a quote from GullySystem separate?
- Discovery and design, build, each integration, data migration, hosting, support and training. They behave differently: discovery is bounded and one-time, hosting and support continue after launch.
- Is a ready product cheaper than a custom build?
- Usually, because the records and screens already exist and the work is configuration, migration and training. Where a trade genuinely works differently, the changes can cost more than starting from the product saved, and we say so during scoping.
- Do you work fixed-price?
- For a bounded scope both sides can describe before work starts, yes. For a larger build it is usually staged, with the first stage agreed and live before the rest is priced.
If you would rather start by working out whether you need software at all, the readiness scorecard takes ten questions, and the free technology audit looks at your actual records.