A number of database solutions that constitute “business needs” have been made available through the latest web application development techniques. Such solutions span return-on-investment, budget, and functionality and so on. However, most of the packaged solutions do not effectively address your business challenges or meet your business needs. Worse still, such solutions also come with additional costs in terms of changing your organizational processes in order to adapt to a particular packaged solution or retraining your staff. In particular, packaged solutions are not customizable enough for your business needs. These solutions are often not scalable, hence they cannot effectively meet your business’ unique needs and expectations.

Business needs often vary depending on the existing processes and systems, nature and size of your business, and so is the specific database solution’s functionality. Whether you want off-the-shelf database solutions or customized database solutions, you need to consider what the solution will accomplish – and – ideally the processes involved. Off-the-shelf solutions are regarded to be “boxed solutions” and they are commercially targeted towards a mass audience. Boxed solutions may be affordable due to the distribution of costs across a much broader audience, but their functionality and features are massively complex or generic. In other words, these solutions are feature-rich and thus they have many features that are not needed in your business.

The fact that boxed solutions are targeted towards a wider audience means that the functionality and features may or may not address the needs and challenges of your business. While packaged solutions have low up-front costs due to their reduced cost of application development, they cost more in the long run due to additional costs in terms of per-seat costs, installation or per-website licenses, annual or monthly licenses fees, software support, and upgrades. In the long run, these fees and additional costs may actually exceed the costs relating to customized database solutions.

Most of the packaged solutions will not perfectly fit into your business. They often require you to change your staff behavior and organizational processes in order to fit the solution. Thus, they present hidden costs in terms of making such adjustments. Unlike custom database, boxed solutions come with pre-ordained flows, functionality, and processes that could rarely match your business operations. They can inflate your budget due to critical missing functionality, slower work rate, and retraining personnel.

Generally, some of the shortfalls of packages database solutions include:

• Boxed database solutions come with per-seat costs, licensing fees, or upgrade costs
• Will not meet or address all your business needs
• May include unnecessary functionality and features
• May have technical or security solutions that are inconsistent with your internal business guidelines
• Platform/infrastructure requirements may not be supported by your business
• Difficult to customize or require additional customization costs
• Cannot evolve with your business and thus you may be required to replace them once they become obsolete

All the above shortfalls of boxed solutions call for custom business database. Here are the 5 tips for building custom business database for your business needs:

1. Faster Integration with Business Platforms

Unlike boxed solution, custom database is readily integrable into other business platforms. They can connect with online payment systems as well as the social media platforms. Custom solutions are able to integrate seamlessly with various other business platforms and hence eliminating the need for additional customization costs.

2. Increased Business Efficiency

Unlike packaged database solutions, custom solutions allows for optimal data management. Custom database provides you with a one-stop destination for managing all your business resources. It enables you to create all your database platforms and applications in a single and more organized place. This streamlines your business operations and hence making them more efficient.

Custom solutions also enable you to link your database applications together. They also facilitate you to slice and dice your data accordingly as well as manage preferences and security. With the ability to link applications together, custom solutions allow your customers, staff, and other key stakeholders to access all the information they need from a single centralized location.

3. Readily Scalable

Unlike packaged solutions, custom database applications are readily scalable. They match the scale, size, and nature of your business in accordance to the needs of your business. With custom database, you can start with a few users and limited features and add more users and functionality as your business grows.

4. Increased Data Visualization

With boxed solutions, data visualization is difficult. In contrast, an online custom database solution provides a variety of reporting packages and tools that enhance your data visualization, facilitating you to track your essential business data. In particular, custom solutions enable you to track various organizational processes such as the volume of sales and orders received in a certain period. In general, custom solutions facilitate you to address the challenges relating to various organizational processes including time sheets, inventory man agent, and productivity.

When all your business data is stored in a single custom database, efficiently and effectively organize, analyze as well as present the data. This saves you the hustle of having to work out the figures manually. In addition to saving the sanity of yourself as well as your staff, custom solutions offer you with a cost-effective mechanism to manage your business’ internal workings.

5. Save Money

If you are a startup or small business owner, the amount of money that you save from any IT project counts. Thus, it is important for you to minimize your spending on IT staff and infrastructure. By opting to develop a custom business website, you are minimizing costs on data security and infrastructure as well as scalability. Custom database applications often charge you in accordance to the functions and features you need, data storage, and number of users. As such, you don’t have to make huge upfront investment for packaged solutions because some of the features and functions in such solutions may not match your business needs. Therefore, custom solutions allow you to pay for only what you need and hence saving money.