Consulting firms that also organise events and run a trading business without their own warehouse face a particular challenge: three very different business models have to be mapped cleanly in one shared ERP system, without Excel lists, SharePoint files and private Outlook calendars continuing to act as unofficial shadow IT that actually runs the business. A current requirements profile from exactly this environment shows impressively how complex — and at the same time how solvable — this task is.
Three business areas, one system
At its core, this is about three process areas that could hardly be more different: consulting and recruiting with project, time and expense recording; extensive event management with several hundred dates a year; and drop shipping in merchandise trading without any warehousing of their own. On top of that come finance, controlling and consistent master data management across several companies. The central requirement for the new system is not to slightly improve individual isolated solutions, but to interlink all areas end to end, consistently from a commercial point of view and without media breaks.
Replacing shadow IT: moving away from Excel, SharePoint and private calendars
The current situation will be familiar to many mid-sized consulting firms: projects, appointments and resources are planned primarily outside an end-to-end system — in Excel structures and partly in employees' private Outlook calendars. As a result, resources and appointments are managed in a decentralised way, and overlaps are avoided through manual checks rather than by the system. There is a clear information gap between this operational planning and the financial data: accounting has no reliable forecast of future utilisation, expected consulting days or revenue, which is why forecasting is based on experience rather than supported by the system. Changes to appointments often affect service recording only with a delay, because it is frequently updated retrospectively, for example at the end of the month based on calendar entries.
Consulting and recruiting: project, time and expense recording in one
The consulting and recruiting area needs an integrated system that reliably links the central planning of projects, appointments, travel and resources with the commercial targets, so that utilisation and revenue development can be derived at any time from a consistent database rather than estimated from experience. Employees should be able to record times, mileage, travel and incidental expenses in a structured and timely manner, with clear assignment to customers, transactions and cost units, as well as a simple, audit-proof approval process for financial accounting. The billing logic is particularly demanding: in addition to simple day-rate consulting, more complex constellations such as customer-specific agreements, price scales, cost allocations and tax splits — for example different VAT rates for consulting and training services — must be handled cleanly, so that invoices are created directly from the service data without manual transfer. Variable remuneration for consultants, closely linked to the consulting revenue achieved, should also be calculated transparently in the system — including notional or virtual revenue for internal consulting days — instead of being tracked and forecast in parallel Excel spreadsheets.
Event management: from scheduling to billing
Anyone organising several hundred events a year needs end-to-end control, from long-term scheduling and capacity planning through to delivery and billing. The system must support complex constraints such as facilitator availability, school holidays and public holidays as well as limited parallelism of multiple events, cleanly separate group-specific and open formats, and handle changes to dates in such a way that downstream tasks are automatically kept consistent — instead of having to be readjusted manually as before. A key component here is portal-based customer interaction: events are made visible to precisely the right target groups via a protected online portal, registrations and statuses flow straight back into the ERP, and documents and minutes are provided per event and according to individual permission groups. Granular invitation and participant management — including special cases in how people are addressed, follow-up logic and clean assignment of participants and invoice recipients — considerably reduces the manual coordination effort. In billing, participation fees and allocable costs should only be invoiced after the event, based on the actual number of participants — with a clear, event-related collection of costs and clear approvals instead of parallel Excel files and document storage.
Drop shipping in merchandise trading: orders without a warehouse
In merchandise trading entirely without a warehouse of one's own — classic drop shipping — a particularly large amount of manual work arises from unstructured incoming orders by phone or email, which first have to be interpreted and manually converted into a transaction before a supplier order can be generated automatically. A major efficiency lever lies in reducing after-sales queries through a customer portal with self-service for status and documents, and in consistent, ERP-based pricing and terms logic for an accompanying B2B web shop that largely replaces manual order entry. Special cases such as campaign assignments, period accruals and largely manual payment transactions increase the need for clear transaction logic and clean linking of documents. Overall, this process area needs an ERP-supported, end-to-end procurement design that reliably safeguards the automatic derivation of orders from customer orders, creates a consistent database for items and sources of supply, and integrates supplier processes in such a way that deadline monitoring, reconciliation and posting are far less prone to manual errors.
Master data as the single source of truth
For consulting, event organisation and trading to work end to end, business partner, contact and address data must be maintained centrally, consistently and free of duplicates — including properly mapped roles such as invoice, delivery and client constellations — without free-text clutter spreading through the master data. Group or grouping logic makes branch structures and corporate networks analysable, while groups, distribution lists and clear permission logic secure a closed circle of customers and protection from competitors, for example when services are offered exclusively to fixed members. At item level, the ability to maintain large volumes of data with structured attributes and variants as well as flexible units is needed, supplemented by supplier catalogues and reference mappings. A transparent pricing and terms model including discounts, surcharges, validity periods and variable additional costs such as freight largely automates pricing and thus also makes the provision of data for a web shop consistent, transparent and scalable.
Finance, controlling and a multi-company structure
Anyone working in a multi-company structure with several legal entities needs an end-to-end, rule-based and audit-proof mapping of financial accounting processes, with reliable tax and VAT logic including cross-border transactions, a clean multi-company structure including tax groups, and a closing process that reliably handles different financial years. Controlling and reporting should provide the necessary management information — for example on evaluating quote success, analysing revenue by product group or mapping kickback agreements at supplier level — without requiring manual data preparation in Excel every month. Travel expense, card and receipt management as well as system-supported fixed asset accounting should also be an integral part of the target picture, instead of running through external upstream systems and billing sources as before, whose different data streams then have to be merged by hand.
Conclusion: standard functionality instead of custom programming
The main goals of such an ERP project can be summed up in a few words: digitalisation of core business processes, abolition of internal paper documents and the many Excel lists acting as shadow IT, automation of standard processes and billing models, and a valid, uniform database for controlling analyses — ideally making the most of standard functionality instead of costly custom programming. Those who think of consulting, event management and drop shipping as one shared, end-to-end process rather than three separate worlds lay the foundation for sustainable growth without being slowed down by their own complexity.