The gap between the organizational needs and the extent to which an ‘off‐the‐shelf’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) system can meet these is called a misfit. A framework is developed to distinguish actual from perceived misfits. This is used to analyse the ERP implementation at four small‐sized and medium‐sized enterprises. The results show that they prefer to adjust the ERP system to their business processes when needed but often unnecessarily change the system to solve perceived misfits. The framework is a first step to prevent this unnecessary work in the future.