Software demos are designed to show a product's happy path. Evaluations that follow the demo therefore compare three happy paths, which tells you nothing about how each product behaves on the day your sales manager needs to restructure a schedule for a buyer who has paid four instalments late. The fix is to evaluate on scenarios you define, scored against criteria you write down before the first meeting.
The scoring sheet
Weight these to your own situation; the weights matter more than the scores.
| Criterion | What to actually check |
|---|---|
| Category fit | Does it model units, kisti schedules, land records and JV natively, or as custom fields? |
| Scenario completion | Can it complete your three scenarios without a workaround? |
| Data migration | Who does it, what does the reconciliation report look like, what does it cost? |
| Reporting | Can you get a new report yourself, or is every report a change request? |
| Integrations | SMS, WhatsApp, payment gateway, accounting export — which exist today? |
| Access control | Can you restrict discount approval, hold release and schedule edits by role? |
| Audit trail | Can you see who changed a price, a schedule or a unit status, and when? |
| Support | Response times in writing, and who answers — the implementer or a queue? |
| Total cost | Year one and year two, itemised. See what a real estate ERP costs |
| Vendor stability | How many live customers of your size, and can you speak to two? |
The eleven questions vendors would rather you did not ask
- Show me a buyer ledger with a restructured schedule and a partial payment.
- Show me the audit trail for a price change made last month.
- What happens when the same unit is opened by two users at once?
- Can a sales executive see another executive's leads? Show me the setting.
- Show me a project-wise profitability report with land cost allocated.
- How does an MFS payment with no reference get matched?
- What does your data migration reconciliation report contain?
- Which of these five reports can we build ourselves without you?
- What is a change request, and what is included in support?
- What is the year-two cost, in writing?
- Can I speak to two customers of my size who went live in the last eighteen months?
The answers matter less than the ease of answering. A product that does these things routinely produces them in the meeting.
The three demo scenarios
Give every vendor the same three, in advance, and ask them to run them on data shaped like yours:
Scenario one: the messy buyer. Booked in month one with a 3 percent discount approved by a manager, paid two instalments late, one partial payment, requested a restructure in month nine, then paid an advance of three instalments. Produce the ledger, the ageing entry and the current outstanding.
Scenario two: the JV unit. A landowner's unit is blocked, then released for sale under a power of attorney, then sold with the proceeds settled against the landowner's entitlement. Show the entitlement before and after.
Scenario three: month-end. Produce collection versus target, ageing by bucket, unit inventory status and project profitability for one project, and show where each number came from.
Any product that completes all three without a spreadsheet is a serious candidate. Most will not.
Reference calls are worth more than the demo
Ask each reference two questions: what took longer than expected, and what do you still do outside the system. The second answer tells you where the product's real boundary is, and it is never in the brochure.
What to do next
Write your three scenarios before contacting any vendor. They will take an hour and they will be the most useful hour of the whole evaluation — see how the category is structured for Bangladeshi developers.