In three years, when this CRM has to do something different, who changes it?

Somebody has asked for the fourth of next month. You have said yes for now. Nothing is signed and no deposit has moved. To everybody else, the date is simply gone. It is not a deal, not a contact and not a calendar entry. You can make a product hold it. What that costs is configuration, and somebody owns that configuration every time the process changes again.

Left unconfigured, it lands wherever it fits worst. Then count where the same booking lives: enquiry, hold, proposal, deposit, event, invoice. Somebody at the desk assembles the whole guest by hand, across screens, every time the phone rings.

Here is a one-minute test for any product you are looking at. Name the object your process has that nobody else has. Open the product and try to store it without using a notes field. If the notes field is the only place it fits, the product cannot hold your process. It can hold a description of it, and your team spend their day translating between the two.

The quieter half of this is worth saying once. Whoever signed for the last system is the person who has to account for the next one.

Two things the chart cannot carry, both from the same study. Overruns and underruns are about equally frequent, so an estimate is roughly as likely to be beaten as missed. And terminated projects are absent from the dataset, so these figures are a floor on the risk.

That changes where your attention is worth spending. There is little to win by arguing an estimate down before anything has been written. What is worth having in writing is what happens on the day the estimate turns out to be wrong.

It is ISO/IEC/IEEE 14764:2022, Software engineering. Software life cycle processes. Maintenance, issued jointly by ISO, IEC and IEEE. It carries a clause numbered 8.7 and titled Early involvement in development. The standard is purchasable rather than free, so the clause titles are what you can check without buying it. It is a maintenance standard rather than a handover standard, which is worth knowing before you go looking.

So you have one question for everybody bidding, and it works on us too. Who is designated to maintain this after launch, and do they stay with it once it ships? A firm that has not thought about it will answer with a document they promise to write later.

These systems outlive everybody. In July 2025 the US Government Accountability Office reviewed 11 of the federal government’s most critical legacy systems. They ran from about 23 to 60 years old, median 41. GAO picked those 11 as worst cases, so read them as the far end rather than the norm.

Our own answer starts with people: the team that built the system supports it after launch. The people who did the work continue with it, rather than handing it to a separate support group who did not. The plan below is where what outlives us gets written down.

Whichever product you are considering, find its support lifecycle page before you sign. It sets out the phases the product moves through and what a customer can still ask for in each one. Read the row for the phase you would be buying into.

Two things about what you will find there. The first is that it is a reasonable document. No vendor with very large numbers of users can take design requests from everybody and hold one product together, and security fixes running to the end of the line is the right call.

The second matters more to you. Check what those phase dates are anchored to. Where they run from the product’s own release, the clock has been running since before you bought, and a product in its fourth year has already spent four years of it. That is the year-three question, answered on the other branch, in the vendor’s own words, for free, today.

Concentration belongs to your own market rather than to hospitality generally, so that shape is not automatically yours. Take the same Eurostat series in the same year. The peak month carries 24.6 percent of the year in Croatia and 20.6 percent in Greece. In Italy it is 14.4 percent, in Spain 14.0 percent. Italy also peaks in September rather than August. Those four shares are our arithmetic on the published points, not a Eurostat finding.

Which is why we ask for your window instead of offering you ours. A system that arrives after your season has opened has missed the year. Tell us the month you cannot be behind, and the plan gets built against that month.

We build bespoke CRM from scratch. It is designed and written for one company, rather than configured out of somebody else’s product. We have delivered it for hospitality businesses and for event-management businesses. That is where the held date, the guest who comes back and the enquiry-to-invoice chain all sit inside one operation.

Now the limit, and its two halves have separate reasons. Our clients are private by default, so we do not publish their names. Outcome figures are a different question: what we have on the record for this work is the class of it, and any number beside that would be one you have to take on trust. A number you cannot check will not survive the first question in your own board meeting.

That is the rule you can hold us to on everything above. Both charts carry a named publisher, a stated population and a unit. They come from outside and you can go and read them. Anything we say about our own work carries none of that, so treat it as our claim and test it in the conversation.