Go live has come and gone, and the finance team still closes the month in spreadsheets. Month end takes longer than anyone expected. Figures are checked twice before anyone will share them. Reports are rebuilt in Excel because the ones in the system don't quite show what is needed. Only one or two people know how it all fits together, and a simple question from the board can take a day to answer.
The good news is that this rarely calls for a new system. Business Central can do far more than most teams have been shown. The biggest gains tend to come from fitting the setup to how the business works today, training the team on it and testing for the exceptions.
The Setup
Every Business Central system is shaped by decisions made early in the project.
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How sales and costs are coded to the accounts.
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How income is split by department or site.
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How stock is valued.
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How customer payments are matched to invoices.
Those decisions are made with what was known at the time, often before the people who run the month end were involved. Some are left at the standard settings because there was no time to question them.
The business then changes. It opens a new site, sells through a new channel or takes on a new product range, and the setup stays where it was.
The team does what good finance teams always do. They work around it. A spreadsheet here, a manual journal there. Within a year the workarounds are the process. It is easy to blame the system, or the partner. More often, the setup simply no longer fits how the business works.
The Training
Most teams are trained once, a few weeks before go live. Then the system goes live and the real month end arrives with questions nobody could have covered in advance. People learn the rest from each other. Each handover loses a little. A shortcut one person found becomes the way everyone does it. When someone leaves, part of the knowledge leaves with them.
Training before go live is hard, because nobody yet knows which questions they will need answered. It does mean many teams use a fraction of what Business Central can do.
The Testing
Testing before go live usually follows the main path through each process, because that is what the team was shown in training. The main path works, and the tests pass. The difficulty is the exceptions every business has, such as:
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A customer who wants one invoice for several deliveries
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A supplier who credits part of an order weeks later
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Stock that moves between sites before it is sold
Nobody thinks to test them, because nobody has met them in the new system yet. They turn up after go live, one at a time, and often at month end.
That isn't the team's fault. It is hard to test for a situation you haven't met yet, and nobody can list every exception in advance. Most only show themselves once the business is running on the new system.
Why replacing it rarely helps
A new system brings a new setup and new training. If the same decisions are made in the same way, under the same time pressure, the same issues come back. The business has paid twice and the spreadsheets are still there.
Changing partner can feel like the answer too. Usually, the issue was never the partner's skill. It was decisions taken early, with the information available then, that nobody has revisited since.
Where to start Before asking whether to replace Business Central, look at how it was set up, how the team was trained and what was tested. List every spreadsheet the finance team keeps beside the system and what each one does. Each is a sign of a setup that doesn't fit, or a feature nobody was shown. Then compare the setup with how the business trades today, not how it traded at go live.
Train the team on their own setup, with their own data, after the fixes are made. And make changes in the right order, away from month end, with each one tested before the next.
Most of the businesses we see that start here never need a new system. They need Business Central set up for how they work today and a team that is confident using it.
If you would like an independent view of your setup, book a Straight Answer Hour. It is a free hour with a Business Central specialist who is also a qualified accountant and you get a straight answer, even if that answer is that you don't need us.
Booking link: https://www.smarterd365.com/contact