How to Prepare for an Accounting System Implementation

Most of what decides how an accounting system implementation turns out is settled before anyone configures a thing. This post covers how to prepare for an accounting system implementation: learn how your work gets done today, decide what to keep and what to change, and get the groundwork in place before setup starts.

Why Preparation Comes Before Configuration

Setting up a financial system means making a long run of decisions. How do approvals route? Who can see and change what? How are accounts, departments, and reports structured? Each one is a choice about how your organization works, and a good choice depends on knowing how it works now.

Skip that step and those decisions get made on assumptions, or copied from the old system by default. The new software then carries the old problems forward in a new package. Preparation is also the answer to what to do before switching accounting software: understand what you have before you decide what replaces it.

Document How Work Gets Done Today

Start with the process, not the software. For each core area, such as payables, receivables, payroll, month-end close, and reporting, write down how the work actually happens. That is often different from what the procedure manual says.

Capture these for each area:

• Who does each step, and who approves it
• Where work is handed between people or between systems
• The exceptions, and who handles them
• The spreadsheets, side files, and workarounds that keep things moving
• The reports people rely on, and where the numbers in them come from

Talk to the people who do the work, not only the people who manage it. The workarounds and unwritten rules live with the staff, and they are exactly what a system setup misses if nobody asks. This step also shows you where one person is the only one who knows how something works.

Decide What to Keep, Fix, and Drop

Once the process is on paper, sort it into three groups. Not everything needs to change. Some of your processes have worked for years and should carry over untouched.

• Keep the processes that work, are well understood, and give you the control or speed you need.
• Fix the ones that work but cost more time than they should, such as data entered twice or reports rebuilt by hand every month.
• Drop the workarounds that exist only because the old system could not do something.

This sorting is the heart of a process review, and the reason to do it before the software is configured. A workaround you drop is one less thing to rebuild in the new system. A process you keep is one you can protect during the move instead of losing by accident.

Define What the New System Must Do

Your keep, fix, and drop decisions become your requirements. Where a process stays, the system must support it. Where a process changes, the system must support the new version. Where a workaround goes, the system needs to do nothing.

Write each requirement in terms of the work, not a feature name. "Route invoices over a set amount to a second approver" tells a vendor or an implementation team far more than "needs approval workflows." Then rank the list: must have, should have, and nice to have. That ranked list is what you compare software against, what the implementation team configures from, and the start of your accounting system implementation plan.

Get the Rest Ready Before Setup Starts

A few other items are worth settling early:

• Chart of accounts. Decide whether to carry yours over as is or restructure it. A new system is a natural time to fix one that has grown untidy.
• Data. Clean up duplicate vendors and customers, inactive accounts, and old balances before they are carried over, and decide how much history needs to move.
• Owners. Name one person who owns the project and one owner for each area of the process.
• Training. Plan the time for it, especially for the people who will use the system most, and schedule it before go-live rather than after.

The people side of the project, from resistance to communication, deserves its own plan. We cover it in Overcoming Financial Software Implementation Challenges.

When an Outside Review Helps

You can do this work yourself, and for a simple setup that may be enough. An outside review helps when your team is too close to the process to see it, when the work crosses several departments, or when the findings need to stand up in front of a board, a lender, or a funder.

A Financial System Audit includes a process review of this kind. It starts with a meeting to understand your business and what is holding you back, followed by discovery interviews and a needs assessment questionnaire. We then work through the areas of concern, evaluate the solutions and rank them by impact, and share our recommendations in a discussion of next steps. It comes in three levels, depending on how many of your key people are involved and how much detail you need.

ACDEN is an example. They knew their financial processing needed to change but did not know where to start. After a Financial System Audit, Asyma presented recommendations that included potential benefits and savings in excess of $540,000, as described in ACDEN's case study. ACDEN then replaced its accounting system and worked with us to configure the new one to its exact requirements. Their CEO, Graeme Ramsay, said we provided "a good analysis of our processing requirements."

A Preparation Checklist

Use this as the starting point for your accounting system implementation plan. Before the project starts, each of these should be done:

• Core processes written down as they actually run
• The staff who do the work consulted, not only their managers
• Each process sorted into keep, fix, or drop
• Requirements written in terms of the work and ranked
• Chart of accounts and data decisions made
• A project owner and an owner for each area named
• Training time planned before go-live

Why Preparation Matters as Much as the Software

I often say, "Software is only 50% of the solution." The other half is knowing what the system needs to do, how it is set up, how well your team is trained, and who supports you after go-live. Preparation is where the first of those happens, and it is the part no software can do for you. The rest is the work of an implementation partner.

Learn More

If you are planning a move to a new system, the Financial System Audit page explains what a review of your current processes includes.