CRM COMPARISON WORKSHEET
Horizon Dynamics | 7 October 2026
Companion: https://www.horizon-dynamics.tech/blog/custom-crm-vs-salesforce

This is an editable planning aid, not a product quote or sandbox test result.

FILLED EXAMPLE — FICTIONAL DISTRIBUTOR
Population: 25 internal users, two sales regions, one existing ERP.
Loop: customer > quote > discount approval > ERP order > partial shipment > remaining quantity.
Boundary: ERP owns stock/shipments; existing accounting remains; external portal is optional.
Provisional direction: evaluate configuring Salesforce and connecting ERP before replacement.
Evidence: public product documentation describes sales records, approvals, custom objects,
record access and exports. It does not prove our end-to-end workflow or licence entitlement.
Unknowns: quoted product/API entitlement, ERP interface behaviour, regional access design,
implementation cost, operating cost and ability to reconstruct relationships from exports.
Next check: demonstrate one approved order, repeat after a lost response, record six of ten units as shipped,
display four remaining, deny the wrong regional user and reconstruct an export sample.
Acceptance state: NOT RUN. No configuration or custom implementation has passed these checks.
Decision owner: distributor operations lead (example role, not a named client).
What could change the direction: a mandatory workflow fails the prototype; support burden
is unacceptable; or an equivalent, complete custom proposal provides a defensible advantage.
If unknowns remain: hold the replacement decision. Do not treat unknown as unavailable or zero.

YOUR WORKFLOW
Business outcome / owner:
User groups, regions, record volume and retained systems:
Normal path:
Exceptions:
Mandatory requirements / optional scope:

REQUIREMENT REGISTER
For each row record:
Salesforce: documented mechanism / configuration / development / unknown; exact quoted
product and source URL; validation result with evidence.
Custom: proposed scope / delivery owner / exclusions; validation result with evidence.
Acceptance owner and decision deadline:

1. Customers and pipeline: create a customer, move a deal and retrieve its history.
2. Discount approval: prevent an unapproved discount entering the ERP handoff.
3. Regional access: deny a restricted record to a user from the wrong region.
4. Order handoff: a repeated request creates one order; unresolved failure is visible.
5. Partial shipment: six shipped plus four remaining links to the original ten units.
6. Reporting: totals reconcile at an agreed source cutoff.
7. Export: reconstruct one customer, order and related shipments, including required files.
8. Optional portal: a customer sees only their own orders and documents.
9. Operation: named owners resolve an incident and release a tested change.

COMPARABLE COSTS — ONE IMPLEMENTATION + 36 OPERATING MONTHS
Use the same users, volume, scope, currency and period. Get current quotes; preserve source dates.
For EACH OPTION enter quoted / estimated / unknown, amount, exclusions, source, date and owner:
- Discovery, configuration/development, testing, migration, training and release:
- Licences and paid extensions (quantity x rate x billable months; note renewal assumptions):
- Retained systems and optional external-user access:
- Hosting, storage, usage and environments:
- Administration, monitoring, backups and recovery exercises:
- Support and connector maintenance:
- Defined allowance for future changes:
- Export, documentation and supplier transition:
- Taxes and contingency (explicit basis):
Total known amount:
Unknown cost lines (never count as zero):
Sensitivity: user growth, usage growth, renewal price, change workload:
Do not compare a licence subtotal with a full build-and-operation total.

DECISION
Option: configure / extend / connect / custom build / defer
Evidence reviewed:
Unresolved mandatory requirements:
Acceptance owner and date:
Reason, next check and evidence that would change the choice:
Handover: data/configuration/code access, credentials, deployment docs and support owner: