Introduction
Setup charges, per-entity pricing, renewal increases and exit terms — the four questions that decide whether a purchase works.
The quoted price is rarely the price
Most software evaluations compare licence costs and stop there. The costs that actually determine the total are elsewhere: implementation fees, per-entity or per-tax registration charges, paid add-ons for capabilities you assumed were included, and the renewal increase nobody mentions in year one.
For a mid-sized local business, these frequently exceed the licence cost itself over three years.
Four questions worth asking in writing
- What is the total first-year cost, including any setup or implementation charge?
- What does a second entity or GST registration cost?
- Which of SSO, audit logs and API access are included at this tier?
- What will the renewal price be, and will you commit to it in writing?
The fourth question is the most revealing. A vendor unwilling to commit to a renewal price is telling you their model depends on raising it.
Statutory depth is not a feature checkbox
Payroll that computes social insurance and pension is not the same as payroll that handles international workers, mid-year statutory changes and multi-state Professional Tax. Ask to see a real payroll run for a company shaped like yours, not a demo tenant.
The same applies to GST. Generating an invoice is straightforward; reconciling supplier tax data across four registrations and chasing the mismatches is where products separate.
Adoption risk belongs in the evaluation
The most expensive software failure is the one nobody uses. Before comparing feature matrices, work out what the person who actually generates each piece of data has to do — on what device, in what language, with what network.
If the honest answer requires a desktop browser and English for a workforce that has neither, the data quality in month four is already determined.
Exit terms
Ask what happens to your data if you leave: what formats, how quickly, at what cost. Free export in standard formats at any time is a reasonable requirement and an increasingly common one.
A vendor who makes leaving difficult is planning for a relationship that depends on it.
In summary
None of this requires a transformation programme. It requires deciding where each piece of data is created, making sure it is only created once, and letting everything downstream read from that record instead of keeping its own copy.
Aditya Kulkarni, Head of Product at easyto.work.
