Waiting since 2012

Key findings

1. 01

   What people ask for most is to change how records relate, and the largest asks are the slowest to arrive. Of the ten most voted customization ideas on one CRM vendor's board, six were delivered only in part and two are marked not planned. The most voted of all, posted in 2006 with 125,570 points, is marked delivered in part, in a release of 2023².

2. 02

   The work links lines; the software links documents. The best-selling add-on that merges deliveries and receipts of several orders in one ERP's store shows 271 purchases. A down-payment add-on shows 202 and progress billing 136³.

3. 03

   Money in parts waits longest. On an accounting vendor's board, deposits on invoices have been asked for since March 2012 and progress payments since October 2012, with 516 and 252 votes. Both are still in development⁴.

4. 04

   Customization is paid for at every upgrade. In one open-source ERP's community, 52.4% of 2,481 modules had been moved to the newest annual version one year after it came out⁵. The vendor's own terms say a database with custom modules cannot be upgraded until they are⁶.

5. 05

   Limits are priced, and the price is often hidden. One vendor lists extra database capacity at USD 40.00 per GB a month⁷. Another allows between one and fifteen lookup fields per module in its paid editions, depending on which⁸.

6. 06

   People will let AI act when a person can still correct it. In a 47-country survey of 48,340 people, 84% said they would trust an AI system more if a person can correct, override or challenge what it does⁹.

7. 07

   On the phone, the first ask is to work without a connection. The top request of a work-management vendor's mobile board, with 4,432 votes, asks for offline use. It was posted in December 2020, and offline creation shipped in 2026¹⁰.

Who changes the system, and why?

An owner, someone in operations, a partner and, less often, a developer. And the reasons are not only missing functions. A study of two companies that changed their ERP package recorded reasons well beyond a missing function. Some functions were absent. But the companies also wanted documents to look right to outsiders, fewer staff hours on daily work, and to keep "existing ways of work that were perceived of value"¹¹.

The same split shows in practitioners' threads. In a long discussion among people who build and run ERP systems, a consultant called customization the most important thing about one, beyond adding fields: overriding how cost or price is worked out. The owner of a manufacturer said he wrote his own order system because nothing fit. Others said management prefers a bounded, predictable way to customize to open-ended changes to the code¹².

Most of that work is bought. A consultancy's poll of 342 people who ran ERP projects between March 2016 and February 2017 found that 74% went over budget¹. In the catalogue where UK public bodies buy implementation services, the rate cards of twelve suppliers price a business architect at GBP 650 to GBP 1,337 a day in the United Kingdom and GBP 180 to GBP 855 offshore¹³. One ERP vendor sells its own consultants' hours in packs from 25 hours for USD 2,400 to 200 hours for USD 15,000¹⁴.

What decides whether it works is not always the money. Asked to price a construction company's rollout, a member of one open-source ERP's forum answered that "successful deployments need an evangelist inside the company"; failed rollouts, he wrote, had handed a specification to an outside developer with nobody inside who understood the system¹⁵.

What do people ask for most?

To change how records relate to each other, and to have numbers that follow those relations. The largest board we read belongs to a CRM vendor and holds ideas back to 2006. Among its 50 most voted ideas of all time, ten are about shaping the system itself. Six were delivered only in part, two are marked not planned, and two were delivered in full².

The same requests appear on every board, in that product's own words. A person linked to more than one company: 64,360 points on the first board, delivered in 2016, nine years after it was posted²; 1,249 votes on a second CRM's board¹⁶; 123 likes on a third¹⁷. More lookup fields than the edition allows: 87 likes, posted in March 2015 and raised in July 2024¹⁷. A value copied from a parent record that goes stale when the parent changes: 80 likes on one board and 82 votes on another, both open¹⁷¹⁸.

Formulas and roll-ups come next, and the complaint is that they are not current. A request that formulas recalculate without the record being edited drew 182 likes and 150 comments before it was delivered¹⁷. One vendor's documentation explains why such complaints arise: a roll-up column is first calculated 12 hours after it is created, then by a job that runs at most hourly, with 50 roll-ups to a table¹⁹.

• Seeing what another person seesThe most liked idea of all 2,756 on one CRM board, 386 likes, asks that an administrator can see the system as a given user does. It was posted in March 2015 and is still marked as being worked on¹⁷. A second vendor's board has the same request twice, with 92 and 85 votes¹⁸.
• Copying what was builtOn the same CRM board, cloning a whole kind of record has 192 likes and has been parked since 2019¹⁷. On one open-source database, copying a built base to another installation is the most reacted issue, with 81 reactions²⁰.

Why do lines matter more than documents?

Because goods, work and money move by the line, and most software links whole documents. A box arrives with twenty positions: five belong to one order, five to a second, ten to a third. The receipt is one document, and each of its lines answers to a line of a different order. The same happens on the way out, when one delivery or one invoice gathers lines of several orders, and in reverse, when one order is split across suppliers, warehouses or dates.

Where a product creates one delivery per order, people buy the rest. In one open-source ERP's add-on store, a search for merging deliveries and receipts returns 32 add-ons, and the best-selling shows 271 purchases at USD 13.40. Invoicing from deliveries returns 33, merging invoices 50 and merging purchase orders 63³. The community that maintains free modules for the same product keeps modules to group deliveries of several orders, to invoice by delivery, and to link each invoice line to the delivery it came from⁵.

Where a product can combine documents, the complaint moves to the line. On the same ERP's forum, a thread asking how to invoice lines of several orders has 17,288 views²¹. In another thread there, a customer refused a single invoice for ten deliveries until each line showed the number of its delivery note²¹. And an accounting vendor's board asks for the customer's purchase order number on invoices (220 votes) and on bills (176)⁴.

Splitting fails at the same place. Asked how to drop-ship part of one order line, a forum answer was blunt: "The shipping address is PO level and not PO line"²¹. On another open-source ERP, three threads posted from 2018 to 2023 say the same, and the advice is to split the line in two¹⁵. On a third vendor's board, a request about the order in which drop-shipped documents are posted has 184 votes and has been under review since January 2019¹⁸.

• Closing what is left of one lineA request to bill the quantity received instead of the quantity ordered, and close the order, has 43 comments and has been under review since August 2017; the vendor's reply that year was that it had no immediate plans to change the flow²². Another vendor answered a 54-vote request to close a partly shipped order that it is not on the roadmap¹⁸.
• Returns and credit against chosen linesReturning goods and crediting money are often two acts, and people want each tied to the line it undoes. An add-on for returns shows 122 purchases at USD 55.83³, and the free modules include one to credit only chosen lines of an invoice⁵.
• A quote that changes, and a quote taken in partHow to revise a quotation has 30,421 views on one forum since 2013, and 27 paid add-ons answer it²¹³. Copying part of a quote to an invoice has waited since September 2015, with 124 votes⁴.
• Hours and expenses that become invoice linesAssigning purchase order lines to a project has 622 votes and was accepted in 2017, with no date given⁴. Turning timesheets into invoice lines has been an open request on one open-source tracker since 2021²³.

Substitution, delivering another item in place of the one ordered, is the one case with little demand on record: no request we found had more than eight reactions or votes²³¹⁸.

What happens when the money comes in parts?

It waits the longest of anything we read, and it is where industry differs most. On an accounting vendor's board, deposits on invoices have been asked for since March 2012 (516 votes) and progress payments since October 2012 (252 votes); the vendor reports deposits live in six countries and fuller progress billing not yet covered⁴. On an ERP vendor's board, invoicing a job in stages of 30%, 30% and 40% has 136 votes and no reply since 2019, and a request for more than one prepayment invoice per order was answered that it is not on the roadmap¹⁸. A third vendor parks progressive invoicing as maybe later²².

Construction shows why. A standard pay application, as a US architects' institute publishes it, carries the contract sum, the work completed and the materials stored to date, the retainage, the previous payments and the change orders, line by line against a schedule of values, and an architect certifies the amount before the owner pays²⁴. It is a cumulative document, not an ordinary invoice.

Retention, the part of each payment held back until the work is done, follows rules that differ by country and change. US federal fixed-price construction contracts allow at most 10% to be retained while progress is unsatisfactory²⁵. In a 2016 survey for the UK government, contractors reported an average retention of 4.8% of contract value, and 71% of those with retentions held had been paid them late²⁶. In July 2026 the UK government proposed to ban deducting and withholding retention payments in construction contracts²⁷.

This is also where the add-ons cost most. In one open-source ERP's store, progress billing returns 70 add-ons; a job-costing invoice add-on sells at USD 308.15 with 94 purchases, and a contracting bundle at USD 2,778.97 with 66³.

Where does a shaped system break?

At the next version. In the one ecosystem where it can be counted, every annual version of an open-source ERP opens between 178 and 231 migration issues, one per repository, and between 2,955 and 4,270 pull requests that each move one module⁵. Two years after one version, 82.7% of the modules listed for it had been moved; one year after the next, 52.4%⁵.

The vendor's own documents put the rule plainly: a database with custom modules cannot be upgraded until a version of those modules exists, and the maintenance of customer-specific code is charged per 100 lines a month⁶²⁸. A paid industry add-on in its store states its own maintenance estimate, USD 492.00 a month³. Outside that ecosystem the evidence is threads. On another open-source ERP's forum, one upgrade stopped because a field already held data of another type, and another because existing data broke a new rule that values be unique¹⁵.

At the limits, and at their price. One vendor lists extra database capacity at USD 40.00 per GB a month, and the most voted idea on its platform board, 204 votes, asked not to pay for the storage of system tables the customer cannot control⁷¹⁸. Another vendor's editions allow no lookup fields on the free edition and up to fifteen per module on the top one, roll-ups only in the upper editions and a test copy of the system only in the top two⁸. In an open-source ERP, a form refused new fields after about fifty custom ones, and deleting fields did not free the space¹⁵.

• Testing before it goes liveWhere a test environment exists, people ask for more of them, for copies with masked data and for a clean way to move a model between them: 53 votes for a copy with randomized data, under review since 2019¹⁸.
• Undoing a changeRolling back a deployed extension has 88 votes on an ERP board¹⁸. Undoing a lead conversion was refused on a CRM board¹⁷. No board we read offers a general way to undo a change to the configuration.
• Knowing where a field is usedOn the largest CRM board, "where is this field used" drew 36,840 points before it was delivered². Elsewhere it shows only as a symptom: people who cannot delete an object because they cannot find what depends on it¹⁸.
• Keeping history when data movesOriginal dates lost when notes were reassigned drew 110 votes and was declined¹⁸. Importing into multi-value fields has been asked for since 2014 and is still marked as being worked on¹⁷; filling the links between records on import was asked for on an open-source tracker²⁰.

What do people want before AI changes their system?

A person who can stop it, a record of what it did, and a way back. In a survey of 48,340 people in 47 countries, 46% said they were willing to trust AI systems. Asked what would make them trust one more, 84% named a person's ability to correct, override or challenge its output, and 82% knowing who is accountable when something goes wrong⁹.

Executives say the same about agents. In a survey of 1,500 executives at organizations with more than USD 1 billion in annual revenue, 74% said the benefits of human oversight outweigh its costs²⁹.

Practitioners read the failures as failures of access, not of the model. In a thread of 1,032 comments on an AI agent that deleted a company's production database, the replies dwell on a credential that could do anything, backups kept beside the data, and no separate test environment; one reads "The real issue is no actual backups."³⁰ In a forum of people who build automations, the line drawn was simple: "the agent can draft it or prep it, but a human fires it"³¹.

What we did not find is demand for AI that builds the model itself. On the issue trackers of the open products we read, no user request for AI that creates fields, objects or workflows had more than a handful of reactions; the items about AI with the most were the makers' own changes²³²⁰.

What do teams, phones and templates need?

A record that shows each kind of work its own fields, a phone that works without a connection, and templates that stay in step. On a work-management vendor's board, fields that belong to one kind of work, not to every record in a list, drew 2,093 votes before they shipped in 2026. Permissions on single fields drew 2,163 and shipped only on the two top plans, which the comments that followed objected to¹⁰.

On the phone, offline use leads every board with a mobile section. The work-management board's top mobile request has 4,432 votes¹⁰; an older request for offline mode on a database product has 121 likes and 219 replies³²; a thread asking an open-source ERP to work offline has 19,148 views and replies across eleven years¹⁵. Next come photos, scanning and signatures captured in the field: a camera barcode scanner drew 334 votes on one ERP vendor's board, photos on warehouse work 230. Editing document lines on a phone has few requests, the largest with 111 votes¹⁸.

A template is usually a one-time copy, and that is the complaint. Applying changes of a master template to everything made from it has 1,990 votes; it was posted in December 2019 and is marked for the future; a commenter in 2026 asked "What is the point of a template if changes are not propagated???"¹⁰ On the boards we read, no high-count request asks for more industry templates.

Industry add-ons show the same gap from the other side. Of the 751 listings in the industries category of one ERP's add-on store, 747 have no rating, and where a purchase count is shown the median is three³. A commenter who ran that ERP wrote that the upgrade path for third-party and custom add-ons "was not defined"³³.

What this does not show

• A vote is not a sample. Every board counts the people who found it and chose to click, and each counts differently: points, votes, likes, reactions. We compare counts within one board, never across boards, and read them for order and age, not for share.
• Several places could not be read. Every request to the largest discussion forum was sent to a login page, so no thread from it is here. The idea boards of three ERP vendors refused us or needed a browser we did not use for them, and a practitioner publication's admin surveys refused us.
• A purchase is a sale, not a need. Add-on counts show what people paid someone else to build. The core product may do part of it, and a module that sells little may sell little because the core already does it.
• The evidence on who customizes is old or thin. The share of projects with no customization comes from a consultancy's web poll of 2016 and 2017. The reasons come from two case companies.
• The AI evidence is about AI in general. The surveys ask the public and executives about AI systems and agents, not about a system that changes a data model. The incidents practitioners discuss are about coding agents and infrastructure.
• Only construction has official evidence of an industry difference. For distribution, manufacturing, services and field work, the evidence is the forum and tracker of one open product and the counts of one add-on store.
• We sell business software. Every product whose board we read is one we could be compared with. Read the selection of requests, and our reading of them, with that in mind.