ERP for Scottish Businesses, From the Yard to the Ledger.

Because they are two different economies and we would rather write honestly about both than publish two thin pages competing with each other. Aberdeen’s software problem is mostly field-to-office: crews, equipment and jobs happening away from a desk, in energy services, inspection, fabrication and construction. Edinburgh’s is mostly office-to-office: professional and financial services, plus the food and drink producers across the central belt and beyond. The ERP core is the same; which module comes first is not.

No. TechAuditPros is an engineering team in Kochi, India, working for UK clients remotely, and we say so before you ask. Kochi is 4.5 hours ahead of Scotland in summer and 5.5 in winter, so there is a live window every morning and early afternoon for calls, Slack or Teams. If your work needs someone on a site in Dyce or at a plant in Fife on a regular basis, hire locally — there are good firms in both cities and we will point you at that answer on the call.

It means the job does not exist twice. A crew books time, materials, equipment and inspection results on a phone or tablet at the site — often offline, because signal on a yard or an installation is not a given — and it syncs into the same system that raises the purchase order, tracks the equipment, values the work in progress and invoices the client. The alternative, which is what most businesses actually live with, is a paper timesheet, a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp photo and someone re-typing all three on Monday.

Yes, and in Scottish energy and inspection work it is usually essential. Serialised equipment with location and custody, calibration and certification dates with expiry warnings, service history against the asset, and the paperwork attached to the job rather than in a folder on someone’s desktop. If a client audit asks what was used on a job in March and when it was last certified, the system answers it.

Recipes and batches rather than parts lists, yields and losses recorded where they happen, allergen data carried through, and full forward and backward lot traceability — so a recall question is a query rather than a fortnight of reconstruction. Cask, tank and maturation tracking are the same problem shaped differently, and we have built that pattern before.

For the software, less than people expect. VAT and Making Tax Digital are UK-wide through HMRC, Companies House is UK-wide, and the accounting stack is the same Xero, Sage and QuickBooks. What genuinely differs is legal: Scotland has its own legal system, so contracts, partnerships and property matters follow Scots law, and public-sector tenders run through Public Contracts Scotland rather than the UK-wide portals. We build to what your solicitor or adviser specifies rather than pretending to advise on it ourselves.

One agreed monthly fee, quoted in writing on the call once we have seen how you actually run. For orientation, published UK list prices for subscription ERP sit around £74–£112 per user per month before implementation, and Sage 200 starts near £374 a month — per-seat pricing that becomes the problem as you add crews and shifts. There is no upfront project fee here and no separate implementation invoice.

Six to ten weeks to a first working module on your own data. For an Aberdeen services business that is usually job and time capture; for a manufacturer it is stock or works orders; for a food and drink producer it is batches and traceability. The rest follows in phases over roughly four to nine months, in use as it lands.

It would, if we built it naively. Capture screens — job booking, time, materials, scanning, inspection results — are built to work offline and sync when the connection returns, because yards, plants and installations are not office wifi. The office side runs in the cloud, hosted in AWS London (eu-west-2) in an account you own.

You do, entirely and from day one: the code, the database, the documentation and the cloud account, all in your name, with the data resident in the UK. We work under an NDA and a UK GDPR data processing agreement, with access you can revoke at any time.

We follow one real job through your business — from enquiry to invoice, including whatever currently happens on paper — and tell you where a system would pay for itself and where it would just add admin. You keep that assessment either way, and if the answer is that you need a process fixed rather than software bought, that is what we will say.