Your Miami trade ERP closes the month in dollars while half your invoices settled in reais, pesos, and Colombian pesos
For a Miami import-export or trade-finance firm, a custom ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) that handles true multi-currency settlement (USD, BRL, COP, ARS, MXN) and bilingual English-Spanish-Portuguese workflows runs $150k to $240k and 6 to 9 months. Off-the-shelf NetSuite or SAP can be bent to do it for less up front, but you pay the difference every month-end when a shipment booked in reais at one FX rate settles at another and someone in Doral reconciles it by hand.
You bought NetSuite because it was the obvious choice, and for the US side of the business it works. Then a Brazilian buyer pays in reais against an invoice you cut three weeks earlier, the FX rate moved 4%, and NetSuite books the difference into a generic gain/loss account that your CFO has stopped trusting. Your Colombian freight forwarder bills in pesos, your customs broker in dollars, and the same container has three different landed-cost figures depending on which screen you open.
The deeper problem is that the tool assumes one language and one country. Your operations team in Doral works in Spanish, your Sao Paulo counterpart in Portuguese, and your compliance officer needs OFAC and BIS screening on every counterparty before a single dollar moves. Standard ERP treats all of that as a plugin or a manual step, which means the gateway-to-Latin-America part of your business, the part that actually makes the margin, runs on spreadsheets bolted to the side.
Budgeting a erp build in Miami
| Project scope | Typical cost | Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Extend NetSuite or SAP with custom FX-settlement and bilingual modules | $80k to $140k | 4 to 6 months |
| Custom ERP core for multi-currency trade settlement | $150k to $210k | 6 to 8 months |
| Full build with multi-entity LatAm consolidation and sanctions gating | $210k to $240k+ | 8 to 9 months |
The case for owning your erp
A funded Miami trade firm should build custom when the multi-currency and bilingual logic IS the business, not an edge case. A custom ERP can settle each shipment in its native currency, lock the FX rate at invoice and again at payment, post the real spread separately from the timing spread, and present every screen in the operator's language. That is not a NetSuite customization, it is the spine of how a gateway-to-Latin-America operation actually books revenue.
- More than 20% of your settlements happen in a non-USD Latin American currency
- Your operators work in Spanish or Portuguese and you are paying for double-entry to keep an English ledger clean
- Month-end close runs longer than two weeks because FX and landed cost are reconciled by hand
- You run two or more legal entities across the US and Latin America that consolidate today through spreadsheets
- You settle almost everything in USD and only occasionally touch another currency
- Your team is comfortable in English and bilingual UI is a nice-to-have, not a daily friction
- You are under $10M in trade volume and NetSuite's FX module covers your reconciliation needs
- You need to be live this quarter and cannot wait six months for a build
What your build should include
ERP services we deliver in Miami
The engagements Miami teams bring us most often: ERP API integration, ERP implementation, ERP integration, NetSuite customization and SAP integration.
Delivery, week by week
Exactly what you get
You get an ERP that books a Sao Paulo shipment in reais, a Cartagena one in pesos, and a Miami domestic sale in dollars, then rolls all three into one consolidated close your CFO can sign without a spreadsheet underneath. Every operator sees their own language, every counterparty clears sanctions screening before an order opens, and every container carries one landed-cost number reconciled across the broker, the forwarder, and the duty. The interfaces to your bank, your customs broker, and your supply chain platform are part of the build, not a later phase. Where it connects to your CRM (Customer Relationship Management), accounting, and inventory, the data moves once and stays consistent.
How to choose a developer in Miami
Hire the team that asks to see your chart of accounts and your entity map in the first call, not the one that asks for a feature list. Multi-currency trade ERP lives or dies on how the spread is booked, so make them whiteboard a single BRL shipment from invoice to settlement to close before you sign anything. Favor a shop that has shipped at least one bilingual financial system and can name the customs or banking integration they built. In a market this connected to Latin America, the right Miami developer treats Spanish and Portuguese as first-class, not as a localization checkbox bolted on after launch.
- One landed-cost number per container, reconciled across customs (USD), forwarder (COP/BRL), and your ledger automatically
- FX rate locked at invoice and at settlement, with the real spread and the timing spread booked to separate accounts your CFO can read
- Bilingual UI (English/Spanish/Portuguese) so Doral and Sao Paulo operators work in their own language with no double-entry
- Sanctions screening (OFAC, BIS) wired into the order gate, so a flagged counterparty stops the workflow before money moves
- Multi-entity consolidation across your US, Brazilian, and Colombian books in one close instead of three reconciliations
- You take on maintaining FX rate feeds and sanctions-list updates yourself, which NetSuite would have shipped and patched for you
- A custom ERP has no marketplace of pre-built connectors, so every bank and customs integration is a project line item
- If your trade volume drops to a single currency and US-only flow, you have overbuilt and a $30k SaaS seat would have done it
- Year-one cost lands well above an off-the-shelf subscription, and the payback is in close-time and error reduction, not headline price
- !They demo multi-currency by changing a display symbol; ask how they book the spread between invoice-rate and settlement-rate
- !They have never integrated a US customs broker or a Latin American bank; ask for one named example
- !They treat bilingual UI as a translation file at the end; ask how language is modeled in the data layer, not the view
- !They cannot explain OFAC vs BIS screening; ask which lists they gate on and how often they refresh
- !They quote a fixed price before seeing your chart of accounts and entity structure; ask what assumptions that number hides
Teams investing in erp in Miami usually scope it next to internal tools, shopify, inventory management, since these systems share data and budgets.
Rohan advises mid-market and enterprise teams on ERP, CRM and custom software, and has led delivery on dozens of business-software builds.
Writes for Digital Heroes, shipping business software for 2,000+ brands across 55+ countries since 2017.
Frequently asked questions
Can NetSuite handle multi-currency for a Miami trade firm?
NetSuite handles display and basic revaluation in multiple currencies, but it books FX differences to a general gain/loss account and does not lock rates per shipment at both invoice and settlement. For a firm where a third of settlements are in reais or pesos, that gap is exactly what forces the manual reconciliation. A custom ERP separates the real trading spread from the rate-timing spread so your CFO can read both.
How much does a custom trade ERP cost in Miami?
A custom multi-currency, bilingual trade ERP runs $150k to $240k and 6 to 9 months. Extending an existing NetSuite or SAP install with custom settlement and language modules can come in at $80k to $140k. The biggest cost driver is not the UI, it is the FX-settlement logic and the customs and banking integrations.
Do we need Portuguese as well as Spanish?
If you move goods to or from Brazil, yes. Reais settlement and Portuguese-language operators are common enough in Miami trade that treating Portuguese as an afterthought means your Sao Paulo counterparty re-keys data into English, which is the double-entry you were trying to kill. Model all three languages in the data layer from day one.
How does sanctions screening fit into the ERP?
It should be a hard gate, not a report. When an operator creates a counterparty or opens an order, the system checks OFAC and BIS lists in real time and blocks the workflow on a hit. Bolting screening on as a nightly batch means a flagged party can already be mid-transaction, which for a Miami firm moving money to Latin America is a compliance exposure you do not want.
Should we build or extend our existing NetSuite?
Extend if NetSuite already runs your US operations well and the gap is only FX and language; that path is cheaper and faster. Build new if multi-currency and bilingual workflows are the core of your business and you are consolidating two or more LatAm entities, because at that point you are fighting the platform on every screen rather than adding to it.