The benefits of using custom software is that it is tailored to your organization, not a generalization of it’s customer base. There are many great pieces of off the shelf software available. Most need to address a range of needs from it’s customers wide enough to allow for a comfortable user base. Most organizations do not use the full functionality of a piece of software. This is often because there are items of functionality that are not relevant to the organization. Oftentimes when organizations use off the shelf software, they need to perform operations on several pieces of software and pull the various results together to create the item they actually need. Also you need to license and train for these sometimes disparate pieces of software. Custom software is made to reflect your business, instead of trying to wrap your business around a piece of software.