These are good systems. Here's where they stop fitting.
Half the operators we speak to chose their current system themselves, and chose sensibly at the time. A hatchet job would be both unfair and useless, so what follows says honestly what each one is good at before it says where it strains.
Before the list, the honest framing
None of these products is bad. They are built for a general case and priced to serve thousands of businesses at once, which is a genuinely hard thing to do well.
What they cannot do is be shaped around your operation specifically, because that is the opposite of what a product is. The question is never "is this software good". It's "how much of my business am I bending to fit it, and what is that costing me every week".
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Cin7 Core and Cin7 Omni
Inventory · Multi-channelWhat it does well
Genuinely strong multi-channel inventory. If you sell through a website, a marketplace and a trade counter at once, Cin7 keeps those channels honest with each other, and the accounting and ecommerce integrations are mature and well trodden.
Where it strains
It is an inventory and order product with assembly attached, not a manufacturing system. Deep multi-level bills of materials, subcontract work and production scheduling are where we most often see growing manufacturers hit the edge, and reporting tends to end in an export. Costs also track user count, so the fit gets worse as you hire.
What changes with a custom build
BOMs behave the way your product actually behaves, several levels deep, with made and bought parts treated differently and subcontract stock visible while it's off site. Reporting is live in the system rather than rebuilt in Excel, and headcount stops being a pricing lever.
Migration: Cin7 exports cleanly. Products, stock on hand, suppliers, customers and open orders come across readily. The real work is deciding which of the historical SKUs are still real, which we do with you rather than importing fifteen years of noise.
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Unleashed
Inventory · AssemblyWhat it does well
Clean, well designed and genuinely well liked. The Xero integration is one of the better ones in the market, stock costing is handled properly, and for a wholesaler with straightforward assembly it is a good answer that many businesses never need to leave.
Where it strains
Assemblies are not production. Once you need work orders on a floor, scheduling against capacity, revision control that reaches the bench, or costing that includes labour and rework, you are asking it to be a category of product it was never built to be.
What changes with a custom build
The floor gets a system rather than a printout. Work orders come off the BOM, the supervisor sees the queue on a tablet, and job costing shows real margin per job instead of a standard cost nobody has revisited.
Migration: Straightforward. Good export coverage and a tidy data model, so most of the effort goes into the new production layer rather than into rescuing the old data.
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MYOB Exo
ERP · AustralianWhat it does well
Deep, configurable and built for Australian and New Zealand business. Businesses that have run Exo for a decade have usually shaped it a long way towards themselves, and there is a great deal of hard-won operational logic inside it. That's worth respecting rather than dismissing.
Where it strains
The interface shows its age, and more importantly, change usually has to go through a partner. Wanting a field moved or a report altered becomes a scoped, quoted, scheduled piece of work, which is exactly the friction that leaves an operation frozen at the shape it had in 2016.
What changes with a custom build
All that accumulated logic is carried forward deliberately, in discovery, rather than lost. Then change becomes ordinary again. A field moved or a report altered is requested inside the app and turned around in 48 hours.
Migration: Exo sits on a SQL database, so the data is reachable and complete. The care goes into the customisations, because the rules that matter most are often the ones a partner added years ago and nobody documented.
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MYOB AccountRight
AccountingWhat it does well
It is very good accounting software for Australian conditions. Payroll, BAS, compliance and the things your accountant needs are handled properly, and your bookkeeper knows it cold.
Where it strains
It is an accounting package being asked to run an operation. Inventory is basic by design, there are no real bills of materials, no work orders and no shop floor. Everything the software can't hold ends up in a spreadsheet beside it.
What changes with a custom build
Nothing, for your accountant. This is the one case where we usually replace nothing at all. AccountRight keeps the books and we push invoices and payments across, while the operational half of the business moves into a system built for it.
Migration: Usually not a migration. It's an integration, and the accounting file stays exactly where it is.
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Ascentis
ERP · DistributionWhat it does well
A long-standing Australian system with real distribution depth. It knows what a wholesaler needs, it has been hardened by years of use, and businesses running it are rarely running it badly.
Where it strains
It carries its heritage. The interface is dated enough that new staff take longer to become useful, change goes through the vendor, and reporting tends to end where Excel begins. For a business that has grown into manufacturing, the production side is thin.
What changes with a custom build
The screens look like this decade, which sounds cosmetic and is not: it is the difference between a new hire being useful in a week and in six months. And the reporting stops being an export.
Migration: The underlying data is reachable. As with any long-running system, most of the effort is in agreeing what history is worth bringing and what should stay in an archive you can still query.
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SYSPRO
ERP · ManufacturingWhat it does well
Serious manufacturing capability. Multi-level BOMs, traceability, MRP, costing, and the depth to run a genuinely complex operation. If you are a large manufacturer with the team to run it, SYSPRO is a legitimate answer and we would tell you so.
Where it strains
Weight. It is built for a bigger business than most of ours, which means implementation partners, long projects, licence and module costs, and more system than a twenty-person shop can carry. Capability you don't use is still complexity you pay for and train around.
What changes with a custom build
You get the manufacturing logic you actually use and none of the rest. Ten screens your people know rather than two hundred they navigate around, live in weeks instead of quarters.
Migration: Data quality is usually good, because SYSPRO enforces structure. The work is deciding what to leave behind, which is a scoping conversation more than a technical one.
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Simpro
Job management · Field serviceWhat it does well
Excellent at what it was built for. Jobs, quotes, scheduling technicians, timesheets and invoicing for trade and field service businesses. Australian, well supported, and a strong answer if that is your operation.
Where it strains
It is job-shaped, not production-shaped. Businesses that started in installation or service and grew into making things find that BOMs, batch traceability and stock control are the parts asked to stretch furthest.
What changes with a custom build
Jobs and production stop being two different mental models held together by a spreadsheet. Manufacturing feeds the job, the job consumes real stock, and the margin at the end includes both.
Migration: Customers, suppliers, catalogue items and job history export well. Where a business wants to keep Simpro for field service and add manufacturing alongside it, we'll integrate rather than replace. That's a legitimate outcome and we'll say so.
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Katana
Manufacturing · Small businessWhat it does well
Modern, clear and pleasant to use, with a live view of the floor that small manufacturers take to quickly. For a business making a defined range of products with a shallow BOM, it is a good fit and a fair price.
Where it strains
Depth. Deeply nested BOMs, subcontract routing, scheduling against real machine capacity and detailed traceability are where we typically see businesses outgrow it, along with the wish to change how a screen or a report works and finding that you can't.
What changes with a custom build
The system stops being a fixed shape. When the business changes, the software changes with it, in 48 hours for anything small.
Migration: Easy. Modern product, clean exports, and typically a shorter history to carry across.
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Fishbowl
Inventory · ManufacturingWhat it does well
Long established, with real warehouse and manufacturing features and a strong accounting integration heritage. Businesses that have run it for years generally get solid inventory control out of it.
Where it strains
It shows its origins. The experience is dated in places, it was built around a North American way of working, and the on-premise heritage means there is often a machine somewhere that somebody has to look after.
What changes with a custom build
Australian and New Zealand conditions, from GST to the way your suppliers quote lead times, are the default rather than a configuration. And there is no server, because it runs on Cloudflare's network.
Migration: The database is accessible, so extraction is manageable. Expect a data-cleaning pass, since long-running on-premise systems accumulate more duplicates than anyone expects.
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Spreadsheets
Excel · Google Sheets · SmartsheetWhat they do well
More than most software vendors will admit. A spreadsheet fits your business perfectly, because someone in your business built it. It is free, it is instant, everybody can read one, and it has almost certainly been holding the operation together for years.
Where they strain
One person at a time. No audit trail. No version anyone trusts. Six files called final. The reorder logic living in the head of the person who built it, who is now the single point of failure for purchasing and who would quite like to take annual leave.
What changes with a custom build
The logic in that spreadsheet is the specification. It is the clearest statement of how your business actually works that exists anywhere, which is why the builds that start from spreadsheets are often the fastest ones we do.
Migration: Send us the workbooks. Genuinely. They tell us more in an hour than a requirements document does in a week, and the data inside them usually imports without much trouble.
Also replaced, and the same rules apply
Zoho, NetSuite, Extensiv, Smartsheet and a long tail of industry-specific packages. The pattern is always the same: the product is competent, it fits somewhere between sixty and eighty percent, and the remaining part has quietly become a person's job.
If you're on something not listed here, ask. We'll tell you honestly whether replacing it is worth doing, including when the answer is no.
All product names are the trademarks of their respective owners. Praxa Tech is not affiliated with, endorsed by or partnered with any of them. The assessments above reflect what we see in discovery with Australian and New Zealand manufacturers and wholesalers, and every one of these products is under active development, so check current capability with the vendor before making a decision on our word alone.
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