When a long-standing ERP system reaches end of life, choosing its replacement can quickly become urgent. Support may be ending, the software may no longer meet the needs of the business, or years of spreadsheets and manual workarounds may have become difficult to manage. Systems such as Exchequer, Microsoft Dynamics GP and Navision often supported much more than accounting. Before replacing them, businesses need to understand everything the existing system currently manages.

Gross margin is the percentage of revenue left after you subtract the direct cost of making or buying the products you sell. It tells you how much profit you keep on every pound of sales before paying for operations, salaries, or overheads. For growing SMEs, gross margin is the first number to understand. It shows whether your core business model works. A healthy gross margin gives you room to invest in sales, customer support, and growth. A shrinking one signals trouble in y

Exchequer has served thousands of SMEs well. Advanced has officially moved Exchequer to extended support, which means development has stopped. No new features, no cloud functionality, no roadmap. Just maintenance patches for as long as that arrangement holds. Meanwhile, the ERP landscape is evolving faster than at any point in the last decade, with cloud-native platforms pulling further ahead every month as the strongest Exchequer ERP alternative. The SMEs asking themselves w

Growing SMEs are quietly losing time and margin to disconnected software. Here is why cloud ERP for small business is the fix that actually scales.

Until recently, advanced supply chain tech belonged to one group: the giants. Real-time inventory optimisation, predictive logistics, automated warehouses all of it needed dedicated IT teams, six-figure budgets, and months of implementation. If you ran a smaller business, you watched from the outside. That's not the case anymore. AI has flipped the economics. The kind of tools that used to sit behind enterprise contracts are now subscription-based, mobile-friendly, and built

AI is reshaping Irish retail, yet most SMEs lack the data foundation to keep up. Here's why a cloud ERP, not another AI tool, is the smarter first move.