@Ealfardan ,
What you mentioned is your mind, assessment and belief.
Frankly, I don’t know what kind of business you’re running and how you can afford to lay bare & exposed everything to your staff or, may be, the business is being run single handedly.
In our business, various department responsibilities are delegated to assigned individual. A business product cost side should only be available to higher executives. Being this very confidential information exposed to staff can only have undefined risk factors apart from complicated situations and revealing aa company’s core inside information of profit margin (easy to determine) with known cost to staff.
All I know is that my employees, customers and competitors all know my costs, and I have no problems with that whatsoever because they will not be able to replicate it, but your costs seem pretty easy to replicate.
I just said my previous comment assuming that in any remotely efficient market, costs, prices and margins are know by everybody. Turns out I am wrong.
But, all arguing aside, you know better about your situation so I’ll keep out of it.
With due regards to your situation, we have a different business approach/situation. An employee is supposed have just enough information relating to his/her particular task. We keep confidential our cost information from employee just to protect leakage to our competitors about our exact cost.
Although, we agree to what stated above, it is true that our competitors knows the pricing & cost. The purpose to keep this information away from employee is just to make sure that it do not get into the hands of our competitors’ that would give them advantage knowing our exact cost.
Having a computer system replicate the Management practice of individual businesses requires
each business to customise the software to describe their specific business practices (every business does things differently if you look at the details). Implementing detailed business specific software customisation is a complex task most businesses rarely do so typically requires employing a systems integrator. It is a time consuming task so is charged appropriately.
the software must also provide the flexibility to capture and enforce the detailed business practices of all businesses. Providing that level of programming flexibility dramatically increases the complexity of the programming interface, cost of using it, and cost of software which provides that level of customisation (all these options must be tested, documented, and supported).
There are immutable reasons products which actually provide full ERP functionality and customisation are sold by organisations with large customer support division and at a very different price point.
So yes Manager could evolve into a full ERP one item at a time however doing so would result in it addressing a completely different market segment and not supporting almost all of the current user base.