Chart of accounts
Fewer accounts than you have now, with dimensions doing the work sub-accounts used to. Every report you will ever run inherits this, and changing it after go-live means restating history.
Guide
Most ERP buying advice is about choosing a product. The evidence says the product is the cause of failure roughly four percent of the time — so this guide is mostly about the other ninety-six: the decisions you settle before you shortlist, and the questions that actually separate vendors.
Send your requirements or a vendor quote. We will tell you plainly where we think the selection is going wrong.
Before you look
If these are unresolved when configuration starts, the project will produce work that has to be redone. This is the largest single cause of failure and it happens before a vendor is even chosen.
Fewer accounts than you have now, with dimensions doing the work sub-accounts used to. Every report you will ever run inherits this, and changing it after go-live means restating history.
What is an entity, a department, a location, a class, a project. Most struggling implementations encoded three of these into one field because nobody chose.
Who approves what, at what threshold, with what delegation when they are away. Vague here produces a workflow everyone routes around within a quarter.
What happens on which day, who owns each task, what the sign-off asserts. A close designed during selection runs; one improvised afterwards does not.
Someone with authority can state each one in a sentence, and nobody in the room disagrees. "We will decide that during testing" means it is not settled, and nothing that shapes the data model can be decided during testing.
Where time goes
Requirements, scenario demos, and references. Each one is cheap relative to implementation and each one is routinely compressed to make a date.
Feature checklists do not discriminate — every product in this category will tick almost every box, and the ones they cannot tick they will roadmap. These eight are harder to answer well and the answers vary enormously.
Every vendor has three delighted customers ready to take your call. Asking for customers who left is a different question, and the response tells you more than the reference would. A vendor who names two and offers an introduction is confident. One who says nobody has left is either very new or not answering.
A scripted demo proves the software works on the vendor’s data, which was never in doubt. Send a real chart of accounts, a month of real transactions, and three workflows that are awkward in your current system. Ask them to run those, live.
What you are testing is not whether the product can do it — it usually can — but how much configuration or customisation it takes, and whether the person demoing understands accounting or only understands the software. That second one predicts implementation quality better than anything else available to you at this stage.
The most common and most expensive mistake in this process is signing the licence and then scoping the implementation. Once the software contract is signed, every ounce of leverage you had is gone, and implementation is where the larger and less predictable number lives.
Negotiate both, from both parties, before either is signed. Get the implementation scope in writing with a fixed price or a hard cap, get the assumptions listed, and get the change-order rate agreed in advance. A partner unwilling to fix a price has told you their scope is not settled, which is information.
Two more things worth insisting on: a defined exit — what you get, in what format, if you leave in three years — and a named implementation lead who will still be there at go-live, written into the statement of work.
A meaningful share of companies that start an ERP search should not finish it. If your close works, you have one entity, and the specific pain is a reporting gap or manual AP, those are solvable without replacing your ledger and for a fraction of the cost and risk.
The honest test: write down the three things that would be different a year after go-live. If all three are reports, you have a reporting problem. If they are all about manual work, you have an automation problem. Neither requires a new general ledger, and both are cheaper to fix directly.
We sell an ERP platform and implementation services, so this guide is not disinterested. It is written from rescue engagements rather than from marketing, and where our advice would cost us a sale — buy nothing, keep your current system, take a reference from a customer who left — we have said so anyway.
Questions
Send your shortlist, requirements, or a vendor quote. We will tell you plainly what we would do differently.