Below, you'll find what SMEs encounter in practice, where the figures come from, and which costs are missing from almost every quote.
Two bills, two companies
This distinction is the key to the answer:
- AFAS charges you monthly for the license. That amount depends on the number of employees and the modules you subscribe to. AFAS only publishes the price of AFAS SB, its entry-level bookkeeping package: € 59 per month. AFAS does not publish a price for Profit — you can request one.
- The partner handles the setup: translates processes into the system, transfers data, and trains people. That is almost always a one-off project, followed by ad hoc hours or a punch card for any changes that need to be made.
If someone mentions a "AFASDutch ERP package for administration, HR and payroll. Many SMBs have their single source of truth in it.-partner per month" amount to you, it's usually about a management or support contract on top of the license — or about a quote in which the implementation amount is spread over a period.
What the ranges mean
Public sources vary widely, because they measure different things. What you realistically encounter in the Dutch SMB:
- License: somewhere between € 30 and € 180 per user per month, depending on modules and company size. Smaller numbers of users pay the most per person.
- Implementation by the partner: one-off, roughly € 5.000 to € 25.000 for a straightforward SME project; complex organizations are more expensive.
- Management or support afterward: often not a subscription but billed afterward, at an hourly rate in the region of € 95 to € 150.
Treat these figures as a guide, not a quote. Always request price estimates from at least two partners: margins and approaches vary considerably, even though the software is the same.
The way it works now
- The appointment is in one colleague's mailbox
- Data is manually retyped from one system to another
- The person who knows is on vacation
- No one can see afterwards why this decision was made
As it is
- The agreement is stored with the client, findable for everyone
- Once entered, information flows through to the rest
- Work continues, even if someone is absent
- Every decision has a source, an owner, and a date
The costs that aren’t in the quote
This is where SME projects end up costing more than budgeted in practice.
- Your own hours. An implementation takes time from your key users, accounting staff, and managers. Even a mid-sized project can quickly involve hundreds of internal hours. Those don’t appear in any quote.
- Clean up data. What you bring over from the old system determines how much the migration costs. Duplicate customers and incomplete product files are expensive.
- Integrations with what you’re keeping. Webshop, time-tracking app, scheduling: they don’t disappear when you adopt AFAS. See what an AFAS integration costs.
- Lost productivity around go-live. Almost every team works more slowly during the first few weeks. Plan for it instead of fighting it.
When a partner pays for itself
A good partner pays for itself in two places: they prevent you from setting up the system the way you used to do it, and they ensure that your people actually work with it. An implementation that is technically correct but that the team continues to work around is the most expensive variant there is.
Practical tip: ask for the assumptions behind the price with every quote. How many days are budgeted for setup, how many for migration, and how many for training? A partner who doesn't break that down doesn't know yet either.
What we do in this
We are not an AFAS partner and we do not sell licenses. We are usually approached by companies that already have AFAS and are not getting enough out of it, or who are unsure whether they need it. In both cases, we first look at the work itself: where is time being wasted, and will software solve that? Often a connection between the systems you already have turns out to be cheaper than a new package.
Want to know where your business is losing time? Take the Fresh Look — the online scan is free and takes about six minutes.
Frequently asked questions
To AFAS itself. The partner invoices for their own work: configuration, migration, training and ongoing support.
For the entry-level AFAS SB package, that works just fine. For Profit with multiple modules, it's rare among SMEs: configuring it requires expertise you rarely have in-house, and mistakes at the start cost the most later on.
In SMEs, you’ll typically see € 95 to € 150 per hour. More important than the rate is the number of hours someone needs—that’s where the difference lies, not in ten euros an hour.
From knowing to doing
This article helps you get oriented. Then view the concrete approach for connecting systems in SMEs.