Why the number alone tells you nothing
You are quoted two to four weeks. You will hear the same number from everyone else.
On its own it means nothing, because the estimate rests not on the speed at which code gets written but on the volume of work nobody will be doing on your project. That volume is the thing worth asking about.
What you are not paying for
In any system with staff and customers the same parts repeat. Someone signs in under their own account, they have a role, the role permits some things and forbids others, notifications go out to someone, an invoice goes to someone else, and the whole correspondence has to sit in one place and be findable.
None of that has anything to do with whether you rent out excavators or book physiotherapy. It was written once, debugged on earlier work, and that is why it takes none of your weeks.
There is one exception worth knowing even if you are not the one building. Separation between customers is laid in first or it is never laid at all. Retrofitting it into a system that assumed a single client is the most expensive rework in this business, and it is what turns a four-week project into a three-month one.
What has to be built either way
What is left is the thing you came for: your objects and your process.
A rental business has a unit of equipment, a booking and a dispatch. A property agency has a property, a listing and a deal. From the outside it sounds like the same thing. Inside there is almost nothing in common.
We measured it on ourselves and the figure was inconvenient. We built a rental platform, then a real-estate platform. Adjacent industries, both about an object handed to somebody for a while or for good. Of 113 business concepts, 7 were shared.
About 6%.
That number is here so you know what you are buying. "We already have this, we just need to configure it" is a sentence about the other 94% - the ones the vendor does not have, because they are yours.
When four weeks will not happen
| Sign | How it looks at your end | Where the time goes |
|---|---|---|
| Process undocumented | Three employees describe it three ways | Into weeks of finding out before anything starts |
| Decisions made case by case | The rule is not stated even out loud | Into cases that never came up in the demo |
| Data unreadable by a program | A mailbox, one person's spreadsheet, memory | Into the integration, or into giving it up |
| A requirement nobody else has | "We have always done it this way" | Into building with nothing to build on |
None of these makes automation impossible. Each moves work out of weeks of building and into weeks of finding out, and finding out does not transfer: somebody else's earlier project does not know what counts as a request at your company.
If even one matches, four weeks stays a fair estimate of the build and a poor estimate of the project. That gap is usually what the argument with the vendor is about a month later.
What to ask, to check any of this
One question separates a verifiable estimate from a nice one: which of this have you already written, and which part will you write again for us.
"We build everything from scratch for you" means months, because sign-in, roles and permissions have to be written again. "We have it all ready, we just need to configure it" means a template, and you find out where it does not match in week three. The answer worth hearing names both parts separately and shows where the line runs between them.
Then ask them to lay that line across your own process. Working through it takes a few hours and, before a quote is signed, is worth more than any presentation: how to read an automation quote starts from exactly that split.
What it looks like on real requests is in the rental write-ups: where four hours go in a rental request and what we measured in the week before. If it turns out you are too early to automate, that is a result too: five signs list when waiting is the better call.
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