Most groups replace a finance system once a decade, so nobody in the team has done it recently and every page that ranks for the question is selling the next product. This series is the other thing: what the decision actually turns on, what a replacement involves from the first workshop to the second live close, and the mistakes that are only visible with hindsight.
When to replace and when to stay. A vendor's support date is a prompt, and rarely more than that - see the end-of-life series for what each vendor has actually published. The stronger reasons are the ones you can measure: a close that has stopped shortening, a consolidation nobody but one person can run, an acquisition the current model cannot absorb, a board pack still assembled by hand. Score those first; the 2-Minute Snapshot puts a level and an annual value on each of them, and that is the number a replacement case is built on.
What it involves, and how long. On the implementations we have delivered, a group consolidation of twenty to thirty entities across several ledgers is roughly a hundred build days and five to six months from contract to the first live close, run as two parallel closes before the old process is switched off. A mid-market planning model with budget, forecast and a strategic plan sits in the same range of build days and runs in releases over a year. In both cases the build is about half the effort: requirements and design, data and history, testing, project management and go-live make up the rest, and the share your own team can take (reports, validations, data entry forms, mapping tables) is the biggest lever on cost.
What to migrate. Less than you think. Mappings, ownership structures and two years of history usually earn their place; consolidation rules, report layouts and most journals are better rebuilt than carried, because carrying them carries the reasons you are leaving. The articles below take each of these questions in turn, product by product where the product matters, and end with the requirements checklist we use at the start of every replacement.
We do not recommend a destination and we do not rank vendors. Where a product is named it is because the searcher named it first, and the answer is about their position, never about where to go next.
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