Your Brighton seafront group runs four sites, and NetSuite bills you for the winter you barely trade

For a Brighton group running three or four seafront sites, a custom ERP typically costs £55k to £95k, rising toward £120k if you add seasonal payroll and tronc distribution. That buys one consolidated ledger, MTD VAT filing and integrations into your POS and booking systems.

Plan for 18 to 28 weeks from discovery to go-live. Most Brighton builds phase the busiest revenue line first, so you see a working integrated ledger for your restaurant or rooms within three to four months, then fold in the remaining sites.

Yes, and it should be a core requirement. A well-built ERP files VAT directly to HMRC under MTD by pulling every revenue stream into one return, which removes the three-export reconciliation most Brighton operators do by hand each quarter.

Odoo is cheaper upfront, so keep it if it covers your workflow and the gaps are cosmetic. Once you are running four sites and reconciling them in spreadsheets every month, the per-seat and lost-time cost usually overtakes a custom build within three years.

You should own the source code, the database and the hosting outright, with no ongoing licence to the agency. Put this in the contract before work starts, and be wary of any Brighton developer who wants to retain the code or lock you into their platform.

A custom ERP scales access by role and season rather than by permanent seat, so a June starter gets a login that closes in September without a new annual licence. That seasonal model is the single biggest reason Brighton operators move off per-seat vendors like NetSuite.

Yes. The Employment (Allocation of Tips) Act requires fair, transparent tronc distribution, and a custom ERP can allocate pooled tips across your Brighton sites by hours worked and produce the records HMRC and staff expect. Off-the-shelf modules rarely handle multi-site tronc cleanly.

A proper build migrates your NetSuite or Odoo history into the new ledger so you keep year-on-year comparisons, which matter enormously for a seasonal Brighton business forecasting next summer. Migration and cleaning is usually 10 to 15 percent of the project cost.

You either retain the Brighton agency on a support agreement or bring maintenance in-house, and either way you should budget roughly 15 to 20 percent of build cost per year. Because you own the code, you are free to switch maintainers, which is the freedom off-the-shelf vendors do not give you.

Digital Heroes builds custom ERP software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, so an operator in Brighton gets an assigned senior team rather than a local account manager.

Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.

Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.

Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.

Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.

Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.