TCO thinking requires accounting for all hidden costs beyond the "implementation cost." Commonly overlooked expenses include: employee learning and adaptation time, post-launch system maintenance and upgrade fees, data cleansing and migration labor, and the burden of running both legacy and new processes in parallel during transition. Also consider opportunity costs—does business operations suffer during implementation? Another frequent miscalculation is underestimating the cost of "actually getting people to use the system": purchasing software is not enough; you also need resources to drive process change, conduct training, and handle exceptions. Only by including all these elements can you make a realistic comparison with expected benefits, rather than relying solely on the purchase price.