What does Stone Profit Systems cost?

What it actually is

Stone Profit Systems describes itself as the only ERP solution for the stone industry, covering natural stone, tile, quartz and solid surface. That word ERP is the important one. Moraware and ActionFlow run your jobs; an ERP runs your company, accounting included.

It is web-based and sold in three variants, and which one you are shown changes the product substantially:

• Distributors - multiple sizes per slab, special pricing, landed cost, holds, purchasing and sales through to accounting.
• Fabricators - quoting, job scheduling, shop and field calendars, remnants, and the analysis on top.
• Manufacturers - raw block to finished goods, with block yield analysis, inspection reports and finished-goods costing.

The four things it does that its rivals do not

Most comparisons of this product stop at "it is an ERP, it is expensive". That is not useful. These are the specific capabilities that would actually make someone choose it, taken from their own fabricator feature pages:

• Accounting is inside the system. Not a QuickBooks export - the general ledger lives in the same place as the inventory and the invoices. This is the single biggest structural difference from everything else in the category, and the main reason companies move to it.
• Inward consignment as a first-class concept. Stock you hold but do not own stays your supplier's inventory until it sells. The system keeps consignment payables separate from regular payables, reports exactly what is owed for product consumed, and filters consigned from owned stock while still showing both as available to sell. If you carry consignment slab, nothing else in this trade handles it properly.
• Alternate names. The same colour has one name from your supplier, another in your system and a third the customer asked for. Stone Profit Systems stores all of them against one product, lets you purchase using the supplier's name, search using either, and print a "sold as" name on the invoice. It is a small feature that removes a genuinely expensive class of mistake.
• Remnants that re-enter inventory properly. Add a remnant from within the job as a left L, right L or rectangle, enter dimensions, upload a photo; the system calculates square footage and prints a barcode label. Remnants stop being a pile nobody can price.

The scheduling side is more conventional but complete: a field calendar for templates and installs and a separate shop calendar for digitising, cutting, CNC, edging and polishing, with a stored record of each machine and which staff can operate it, both tied to the job so double-booking is structurally difficult.

Who it is genuinely for

Stone Profit Systems makes sense when at least one of these is true:

• You hold warehouse inventory large enough that not knowing what you own costs real money
• You distribute as well as fabricate, or manufacture as well as distribute
• You run more than one location and want one set of books across them
• You carry consignment material
• Your bookkeeping and your job system disagreeing with each other is a recurring, expensive problem

If none of those are true - and for most one-to-five person countertop shops none of them are - you would be buying depth you cannot use. ERP implementations also cost internal hours, not just money: someone in your business has to make hundreds of setup decisions, and in a small shop that someone is the owner, who is already the estimator and the installer.

Getting a real number out of the demo

Unpublished pricing is not a scandal - it is normal in ERP, where two companies of the same headcount can differ four-fold in complexity. But it does mean the discovery call is a qualification call, and you should arrive with your own questions:

• What is the total first-year cost, not the monthly rate? Licence plus implementation plus training plus data migration. Ask for one figure.
• What is the licence model? Per user, per location, or per company - and what counts as a user. Seasonal and part-time staff are where quotes drift.
• What does implementation include, and how many of my hours does it assume? The hours are the hidden cost.
• Does the accounting replace my current bookkeeping software or sit beside it? If it replaces it, that migration is the project, not a step in it.
• What happens to the price when I add a location, or a fourth user?
• What is the annual increase, and is it capped in the contract?
• Who does the data migration for my existing inventory, and what does it cost?

A vendor that answers those clearly is one you can buy from. One that will not put a first-year total in writing is telling you something.

Where it sits against the others

These are not four products on one shortlist. Moraware quotes and schedules from about $100 per user per month. ActionFlow bundles quoting, scheduling and job tracking from $149 a month, with inventory from $299. Slabsmith does vein-matched slab layout for a $15,000 one-time licence and does nothing else. Stone Profit Systems is the only one of the four that will also close your books.

If you are not certain which category you are shopping in, start with the software map - buying the wrong category is the expensive mistake in this trade, not overpaying within the right one.