Best Month to Go Live with a New ERP

Hi Everyone,

A common question is: “what is the best month or time to go live with a new ERP?”

Here are some points to consider:

• You do not want to go live on the last period of your fiscal calendar! If you do, you will need to close the period in both systems. That is an unneeded pain.
• The end of the first period is OK; however, be aware that any adjustments that you make to the previous period (year-end) will need to be made in both systems. Year-end seems to drive more adjustments than any other period.
• The further you get away from year-end the fewer adjustments you need to make in both systems; however, be aware that you will need to decide how granular you want to be with your GL (opening balance) imports in your new ERP.
• At a minimum, you need a single GL import to create your opening balances. This will ensure you can create accurate financials from that point forward.
• A more preferred option is to create an import for every period between year-end and the period at which you go live. Here is an example:
  • Lets assume your fiscal calendar ends in December.
  • Your ERP implementation projects yields a go-live date of July.
  • At a minimum, you need to import your current balances as of the day you go live. This will give you the ability to create financials for July through Dec of that year.
  • An alternative is to import trial balances for each period of the fiscal year prior to your go live date. This situation would yield separate imports for Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, and June. This obviously means more work; however, you gain the flexibility of creating financials for any period in your current fiscal year in your new ERP system.
• Do you need to go live at the end of a month? No. Whether you transition on the 2nd of the month or the 31st of a month, you will close your period in your new ERP system (not your old one). The earlier you transition in a given period, the more challenging your close will be. This fact is simply due to the volume of transactions.

I hope this helps!! If you are considering a new ERP system, I highly recommend you look at ADempiere or iDempiere, Open Source ERP. For the right company, it represents a drastically improved way to drive efficiency, accuracy, productivity and insight. To learn more about open source ERP, look through getting started section.

ADempiere vs iDempiere vs Openbravo vs Compiere

Please note that ADempiere, iDempiere and Openbravo are forks or copies from Compiere. Therefore, they have similar abilities mentioned above. The biggest difference is that ADempiere and iDempiere are pure open source. There are no features held behind a commercial or paid license.