One ERP for Fabrication and Manufacturing Shops: Unlimited Users at a Very Low Cost

Small and mid-sized fabrication and manufacturing businesses in India usually fall between two bad options. Big ERPs such as SAP, NetSuite or Dynamics are built for large finance teams and priced per user per month. Small tools, such as an accounting package, a spreadsheet or a notebook, do not know what a work order is, how to price a gate by the square foot, or when the steel in the store will run out. We sat with real shops and found the same pattern each time.

**Quotations were slow and fragile.** Jobs in metal fabrication are priced by area, length, weight or piece, often several on one quote, with a scrap allowance, GST at different rates, and sometimes a costing block the customer should not see. In a spreadsheet, one wrong cell is a wrong price.

**Stock lived in someone's head.** The store keeper knew how much 5 mm sheet was left. Nobody else did, until a job stopped.

**Money was chased by memory.** Part-payments, due dates and "who still owes us" were tracked on paper or in a WhatsApp chat.

**Production was a verbal order.** Cutting, welding, grinding and coating happened in sequence, but nobody could see which step a job was on without walking to the floor.

**Software that fixed one of these broke another.** Accounting software handled bills but not work orders. Big ERPs handled everything but needed a consultant, a large budget, and a per-user fee for each new person.

The brief we set ourselves was two promises: unlimited users (adding a person costs nothing extra) and very low cost (no per-user licence, and a flat cloud bill to run it).

We built Quantiq Systems (https://erp.quantiqautomation.com), one system for the whole cycle of a shop: enquiry, quotation, order, production, stock, bill, payment, and the reminders that chase each step. It runs on a phone and a computer, and each company gets its own private, walled-off space.

**A document engine that understands fabrication.** Price by area, length, weight or pieces, in feet-and-inches, millimetres or metres. A costing block that is shown to the owner but never billed, with a total-weight line, a scrap percentage and a derived rate per square foot. GST by rate, with money stored as whole paise so there are no rounding surprises. The editor preview and the server use the same calculation, so the number you see while typing is the number saved. Quotations flow Draft, Sent, Negotiation, Won or Lost, with revisions and an automatic "what changed" diff, and go out as PDFs with the company's logo.

**Bills, payments and stock you can trust.** Marking a quotation Won creates the bill. Payments are an append-only ledger, overpayments are refused, and corrections are new rows. Stock is a ledger of movements maintained by the database, so the figure cannot be overwritten by hand. A receive order can be shared across several clients, which is how many shops actually buy material.

**Production built for the shop floor.** Work orders with steps such as cutting, welding, grinding and coating, each with its own status, and a phone-friendly shop-floor screen with one big button per step. Manufacturing companies also get Recipes (bills of materials, including recipes that use other recipes), and work orders started from a recipe work out the material list automatically.

**People and payroll.** Employees, attendance, monthly payroll sheets with finalise and reopen, perks, and employee debts that repay automatically from each month's payroll.

**Your own fields, tabs and workflows.** Each company can customize within limits we control: its own tabs and fields (text, number, amount, date, yes/no, dropdown, lookup and formula fields). AutoPilot reacts to events such as a quotation being won or a payment going late, and can update fields (including on related records), draft a mail for a person to review, create a task or call a webhook. Reminders and a mail centre chase late payments from each company's own Gmail, with open and click tracking.

**One app, many companies, three walls.** All companies run in one application and one Postgres database in Mumbai, separated by three independent protections: a company id on every row, composite foreign keys so a record can never point at another company's record, and row-level security, with the application never using the powerful owner database role. Two people editing the same record is handled by version checks: the second save is refused with a friendly message instead of silently wiping the first person's work. Industry packs (Fabrication or Manufacturing) decide which modules a company gets, so nobody has to untick things by hand, and the industry cannot be changed later, on purpose.

**Security and quality.** Passwords hashed with scrypt, server-side sessions, SameSite=Strict cookies, a strict content security policy and HSTS, database-backed login throttling, an audit log, and API routes that must declare who may call them or they will not load. The automated suite has more than 860 passing tests on the file backend, plus database-level tests for isolation, stock, payments, numbering and permissions.

**How a company gets started.** A call to pick the industry and modules; we create the company with only the tabs and actions agreed; the owner learns on sample data with a guided tour; we bring over existing customers, items, vendors and opening stock and set numbering, GST, logo and terms; we customize within agreed limits; then everyone gets a login.

**What it is doing today.** The system runs real quotations, bills, stock and production for early clients. DS House was the first business we built for: their screen quotations, with a per-screen costing block, weight lines, scrap percentage, rounding and a rate per square foot, set the standard for the document engine. Steel Concept, a fabrication business, uses quotations, stock, work orders and the shop floor, which is why production is a shared module and recipes are a separate Manufacturing-only module. A packaging-machine maker shaped the Manufacturing side, where machines are made of bought, in-house and outsourced parts. We have deliberately not published percentage claims, time-saved figures or testimonials, because we do not have measured numbers or approved quotes we could stand behind. Both current clients are early, non-paying relationships.

**Why unlimited users is real.** There is no per-user licence inside the product; a login is a row in a table. There is one application and one database for all companies, so our cost does not grow with each company's headcount. Hosting a live system is about $45 a month in total (Supabase Pro $25 plus Vercel Pro $20, checked on 7 October 2026 and to be rechecked before purchase), which at an assumed 88 rupees to the dollar is roughly 0.5 lakh rupees a year for the whole platform. The app is frugal with data transfer, because that is the first limit a busy cloud app hits. Plan quotas still apply, and a large number of very busy companies would eventually need a bigger plan.

**How the price compares.** Published or partner-derived licence prices for a 10-person company, per year, before set-up and customization: NetSuite about 21.0 to 24.2 lakh rupees (partner-derived estimate); SAP Business One about 9.0 lakh rupees (about 7,500 rupees per user per month); Dynamics 365 Business Central about 6.6 to 7.8 lakh rupees; Zoho One about 1.5 lakh rupees; Odoo Online about 0.7 to 1.6 lakh rupees; TallyPrime Gold about 0.24 lakh rupees but accounting only; ERPNext about 0.1 to 0.5 lakh rupees for hosting only, since the licence is free. At 50 users the per-user products scale roughly linearly, for example SAP Business One at about 45 lakh rupees, Business Central at about 33 to 39 lakh and Zoho One at about 7.5 lakh, while Quantiq Systems has no per-user charge. These figures were gathered in October 2026 from partner, reseller and vendor pages, vendors negotiate and change prices, and Odoo's own price page could not be read automatically, so recheck any figure before relying on it. We do not print a Quantiq price here; we quote per business after a short call.

**What we are not, yet.** We are a small team with early clients. We do not replace deep multi-entity finance or specialised regulated reporting, and we are not trying to replace a multinational's group accounts. A few screens (users admin, business settings, payroll and attendance sheets, custom field definitions) still use last-write-wins instead of the stale-save check, and automatic per-module dashboard widgets are planned rather than finished.

**Talk to us.** See the product at https://erp.quantiqautomation.com, call 94998 88395, or write to info@quantiqautomation.com. Unlimited users, very low cost, priced per business.