Before Jack Ducat and his brothers, Sam and Tom, built Gojee, one of Xeroâs fastest-growing apps for job & inventory management, they lived through a true ERP nightmare.
Jack first saw the downsides of ERPs in his familyâs construction company. What started as an effort to âprofessionaliseâ became a costly, complex system that obscured the real picture. By the time he joined, cash flow was a mystery. The tool meant to bring control had taken it away.
It wasnât until 2013, when Jack discovered Xero, that everything changed.
Suddenly, the team could see what was happening in real time, with no consultants, no complexity and no confusion.
This sparked a realisation: if this system could empower their business to grow with ease, could they enable other businesses to stay on Xero without switching to an ERP?
Out of that question came Gojee, an app built for job, staff & inventory management, integrated seamlessly with Xero, enabling full ownership and control.
The family business
Jackâs parents started their family business, Ducats Earthmoving, over 50 years ago.
âIt is a mixed business: concrete, civil earthworks, material supply, workshop; a lot of moving parts.â
The company wasnât massive, but operational complexity was.
âIt wasn't a huge company, but there were a lot of different things coming together: staff, machinery and materials all moving at once, which brings complexity.â
They had 40 staff and a handful of casuals, and were having to manage multiple revenue streams, scheduling, plant ops and payroll.
âThere was pretty heavy admin and lots of paper-based processes. They had two bookkeepers managing the accounts and payroll.â
The trusted advisor & the ERP pitch
It was the early 2000s, and Xero wasnât yet on the scene.
The family accountant, a trusted advisor, suggested a full ERP system as the path to âprofessionaliseâ.
The pitch was compelling: less admin, more visibility, better control.
âThe ERP sales pitch was that it would be seamless and provide full visibility. The idea was to make the business more streamlined, with less double data handling, and give my parents as business owners more oversight. It sounded great!â
It was decided.
Implementation was handled through the accountantâs firm. This involved placing a consultant in the business full-time for 12 months.
âMy parents had to pay the wage of this person who was not even experienced in the ERP system we purchased. He was learning it at the same time as trying to set it up and train us!â
Disaster
Everything that could go wrong, did.
âEverything was a disaster. There was very little support from the actual ERP vendor themselves, so it wasnât set up for success.â
The system was unstable and deeply technical.
âWe were left in a situation where implementation was incomplete. We literally couldnât run a profit and loss with any level of confidence.â
Only one person, one of their bookkeepers, had received the training to know how to operate it.
âOur bookkeeper was the only person who had any idea how to run the system. It's a very complicated, technical and non-user friendly system. It takes a lot of training to understand.â
This bookkeeper became their single point of control.
âShe was generating her own reports for management to show how things were going. That created a huge problem because nobody had any oversight."
The result: no reliable profit and loss, no visibility and no confidence in the numbers.
From bad to worse...
When Jackâs parents retired, his brothers took over, and Jack eventually joined to focus on figuring out some cash flow issues.
âNumbers were good in terms of revenue, but we had no cash flow.â
It didnât take long before Jack noticed something was off.
âThings just werenât stacking up.â
Ultimately, Jack discovered that fraud had been taking place. A lack of visibility within the ERP meant that this had gone unnoticed.
âIt became clear that there were transactions happening that shouldn't have been.â
The culpable bookkeeper had to be let go.
âWe had to go through the whole process of getting rid of this person and everything associated with that.â
The issue then was that nobody knew how to use the ERP anymore!
"We were left in a situation where we had a system that no one now in the business knew how to use.â
Also, because it was an on-premise system, things became even more difficult.
âEvery now and then the system would have issues due to the dusty environment and the server would just drop, which was catastrophic.â
They reached breaking point.
âWe had this extremely basic system working on a hugely expensive implementation. We had to look at the situation and think, right, can we continue on with this?â
But, by this stage, they had hit the sunk cost conundrum:
âHundreds of thousands of dollars have been sunk into this thing that's meant to do everything... It's hard to walk away from.â
Discovering Xero
It just so happened that around this time, in 2013, Jack came across Xero.
âIâd heard about Xero: this new, simple, easy system. We held off for a while and then eventually thought, letâs try it.â
The difference was instant.
âIt wasnât complicated to set up. We very quickly had a basic PnL working with a bank account that could be reconciled easily. Suddenly we could actually see what was going on!â
He describes the moment vividly:
âIt was like this huge cloud had lifted. There was simplicity instead of complexity. I actually thought we must be doing it wrong because it was too easyâŚâ
And so, the business went cold turkey on the ERP:
âWe dropped the ERP, pulled out the data, and moved to Xero.â
Identifying gaps, building solutions = Gojee!
Xero had solved the core issues, but issues around staff scheduling remained.
They decided to build a custom tool with the help of local developers.
âWe built a primitive scheduling and job tool. It punched well above its weight, costing a fraction of the ERP and providing full control.
It wasnât long before other local businesses started to take notice.
âItâs a small town; everyone talks. People started asking what we were using.â
Interest snowballed, and they began to wonder whether they could offer their tool to others.
That curiosity was the spark that became Gojee, a cloud-based platform for job, staff & inventory management, integrated seamlessly with Xero.
Having battled the same operational chaos in their family business, Jack and his brothers understood exactly what small and medium-sized teams needed.
Gojee now
Now trusted by thousands of teams around the world and recently named Xeroâs App of the Month, Gojee continues to deliver.
Its latest feature, Autobill Reconciliation, automatically connects purchase orders, supplier bills and inventory using integrated OCR tools, turning what used to be a full-time manual task into a fully automated process.
âOne client had a full-time employee doing this manually, now itâs automatic. Itâs saving huge amounts of time: literally an entire FTE in one business.â
Lessons learned
Looking back, Jack sees his ERP nightmare as a blessing in disguise.
âWe would never have built Gojee if we hadnât gone through that ERP nightmare. It was the worst experience, but it pushed us to build something better.â
His takeaway is simple:
âControl and clarity come from ownership and simplicity, not complexity.â
For Jack and Gojee, that lesson became the foundation of an entirely new business, built on visibility, empowerment, and the belief that technology should work for people, not the other way around.
đ If youâre an ERP Survivor, weâd love to hear your story.
Reach out to emily.lockyer@getmayday.com
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