7-part guide
Leaving Sage or NetSuite is rarely a software decision, it is a CFO decision dressed up as an IT one. Renewal quotes climb, customisations age into liabilities, and the second-quarter board...
Why this matters
Leaving Sage or NetSuite is rarely a software decision, it is a CFO decision dressed up as an IT one. Renewal quotes climb, customisations age into liabilities, and the second-quarter board meeting starts asking why ERP is the second-largest SaaS line item. The seven strategies below are the ones we use on every Sage...
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Every successful migration we have run follows the same six phases: discovery → mapping → configuration → data migration → parallel run → cutover. The non-negotiable that protects the project is the 90-day legacy read-only window kept live after cutover. Sage or NetSuite stays accessible for historical lookups, audit...
2 of 7
For a single-entity, single-country business, a big-bang cutover is defensible. For anything multi-entity, multi-country, multi-currency, inter-company, it is the most common reason ERP projects miss their go-live date by a quarter. Phase by entity or by module. Sequence the smallest, lowest-risk entity first (often a...
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The single most common source of overrun on a Sage or NetSuite migration is the assumption that every legacy customisation has to be rebuilt. It does not. The first deliverable of the discovery phase is a customisation inventory with three columns: rebuild (genuine operational need), drop (used once a year by one...
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Garbage in, garbage in production. Three datasets must pass a cleanup gate before they enter the migration pipeline: chart of accounts (consolidated, mapped, no orphan accounts from a 2018 acquisition), customer master (deduplicated, the same customer never appears as ACME, ACME Inc., and ACME Corporation), and item...
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Parallel run is where finance gets confidence and where most ERP projects either land or unravel. The protocol that works: two weeks minimum, both systems live, every transaction posted in both, reconciled daily (not weekly) by a named accountant. Each day produces a tolerance report, variances under threshold are...
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The biggest hidden risk on a legacy migration is not the technology, it is the commercial model. Time-and-materials is a budget vacuum on Sage or NetSuite exits because there is no incentive for the partner to compress scope, drop unused customisations, or finish discovery efficiently. Insist on a fixed-price scope...
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The first thirty days after cutover decide whether the project is remembered as a success or a war story. Day 1 to Day 30 is hyper-care: a named senior engineer on-call for the project team, not a shared support ticket queue and not a help-desk SLA. The named engineer joined discovery, configured the modules, and ran...
Bonus
The features matter; the partner shipping them matters more. Eight checks separate the partners who deliver from the ones who learn on your budget:
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Full guide on octurasolutions.com