We built Optiviera because we kept watching small businesses run their operations on tools that were clearly wrong for the job — either wildly over engineered enterprise systems, or spreadsheets patched together with hope and emailed ZIP files.
There's a well documented gap in the ERP market between "too much" and "not enough." We decided to build in the middle of it.
Where the gap is
Small businesses — let's say 5 to 50 employees — have real operational needs: inventory management, invoicing, purchase orders, customer and supplier records, basic financial reporting. These aren't exotic requirements. Every business with physical goods or services has them.
SAP Business One starts at licensing costs that put it firmly out of reach for this segment. Microsoft Dynamics is similarly positioned. The next tier down — dedicated small business tools like Lexware, Debitoor, or various SaaS platforms — tends to handle one or two of these needs well and the rest poorly, or requires significant integration work to cover the full picture.
Şenay identified this pattern clearly. Her industrial engineering background meant she'd spent time inside these operations, seeing where data fell between the cracks. The fragmented tooling wasn't just inconvenient — it was generating real errors, delays, and invisible costs.
The design decisions that shaped Optiviera
Web based from day one. No installation, no version management, no IT ticket required to add a user. The browser is the universal client. This wasn't a debate.
Eight modules that actually connect. Inventory, invoicing, purchasing, CRM, warehouse management, production planning, reporting, and user management — all sharing the same data model. An invoice updates inventory. A purchase order creates a payable. Nothing lives in a separate spreadsheet.
Eight languages. We serve clients in Germany, Turkey, and across Europe. Language coverage isn't a nice to-have when your warehouse manager and your finance team don't share a native language. Building the i18n infrastructure properly from the start meant we could add a language without touching business logic.
14-day free trial, no credit card. Enterprise software is sold through demos and salespeople. That model protects bad software. We want people to use Optiviera before they pay for it — if it doesn't solve their problem in the trial, they shouldn't buy it.
What we learned building it
The hardest problem wasn't the feature set — it was the data model. ERP systems that grow incrementally end up with brittle schemas that make new modules expensive to add. We spent a disproportionate amount of time early on getting the core data structures right: how inventory items relate to purchase orders, how invoices relate to CRM contacts, how multi currency works across all of it.
That investment paid off. Adding the production planning module to an existing installation took weeks, not months, because the foundation was solid.
We also learned that small business owners don't want configuration options — they want correct defaults. Every menu item you have to explain is a barrier. Optiviera's UI is designed around the most common workflow first, with advanced options accessible but not prominent.
Where it is now
Optiviera is live, actively used, and under continuous development. We run it ourselves — for internal operations and for client project tracking — which means we feel every rough edge directly. That's intentional. Dogfooding is the most efficient QA process we've found.
If you're running a small business on spreadsheets and sense that you've outgrown them, the 14-day trial is a genuine offer. Set it up, import your data, run your operation through it for two weeks. If it works for you, it works.