Should You Wait to Add an Automated Financial Close Platform Until After Your ERP Migration?

Blog post

Short answer: no. Waiting to introduce a financial close platform until after an ERP migration or upgrade means giving up a huge opportunity to reduce risk, improve data quality, and make the migration itself simpler. Putting automation and standardized workflows in place before and during the move helps you migrate cleaner data, keep control of month-end activities, and get to the new system faster — with auditability and fewer surprises.

Having Trintech in place prior to starting our ERP project has been hugely beneficial. It provides a sense of consistency amidst significant changes, particularly with balance sheet reconciliations. Since the process is already standardized and familiar, it reduces the burden of additional adjustments for our teams during the transition. If we didn’t have Trintech, we might spend an additional six months after the ERP project looking for a similar solution, delaying control improvements and visibility. Trintech’s solution ensures continuity of oversight during the migration, minimizes disruption, and allows us to focus on other aspects of the ERP project. It also provides clarity when working with solution partners, making it clear what functionality we need to retain. Overall, it’s been a vital anchor during this period of change.”

The Wonderfield Group

Why “Later” Rarely Pays Off

It’s tempting to think: “We’ll finish the ERP project first, then focus on our controls and close processes.” In reality, ERP migrations are among the most disruptive times in your finance tech stack. That disruption is exactly when you need repeatable processes, automated checks, and a single source of truth for reconciliations and journal approvals — not more manual spreadsheets and ad-hoc workarounds.

Introducing an automated financial close platform sooner delivers three quick wins:

Cleaner source data for migration. Standardized reconciliation and journal templates reduce inconsistent entries and orphaned balances that create headaches during mapping and conversion.
Continuous auditability. A system that captures who did what, when, and why keeps your activity traceable through the migration. That eases external and internal reviews.
Less rework and faster cutover. Automation keeps month-end activities predictable so that your team can focus on migration tasks instead of firefighting accounting exceptions.

Before You Migrate: Standardize and Prepare

Treat the period leading up to a migration as the perfect time to build discipline in your close activities. The goal is to make your source systems and processes predictable, so the migration team has reliable inputs.

What to Do:

Create company-wide templates. Standard reconciliation schedules, balance sheet templates, and journal entry formats reduce variance across business units.
Enforce a single approval workflow. Automated routing and approval rules make sure every adjustment is reviewed and recorded consistently.
Use the platform to validate the data. Run reconciliations, identify stale or unusual balances, and remediate issues before the conversion. That lowers the volume of manual mapping needed later.
Document and capture exceptions. Instead of conversations in email or ad-hoc spreadsheets, record exceptions in the system so they aren’t lost during migration.

Business impact: fewer unexpected adjustments in the target ERP, a faster mapping/conversion phase, and less time spent fixing data issues after go-live.

During the Migration: Stay in Control

A migration is not a pause for the financial close — you still have monthly deadlines, intercompany activity, and regulatory obligations. An automated close platform that integrates with your ERP and other enterprise systems can act as the control plane during cutover.

How it Helps:

Maintain uninterrupted close cycles. Keep reconciliations and journal approvals flowing even as the ERP is being cut over.
Provide oversight and visibility. Centralized dashboards let finance leaders see progress and identify bottlenecks across legacy and target systems.
Reduce manual handoffs. Automated workflows and integrations mean data moves with fewer touchpoints and less risk of human error.
Keep an audit trail through change. Every adjustment and approval remains traceable even while accounts and ledgers are being migrated.

Result: your team meets reporting obligations without adding migration risk, and stakeholders have confidence in the numbers throughout the transition.

After the Migration: Harmonize and Scale

Once the new ERP is live, the automation platform becomes your engine for continuous improvement and control.

What to Expect:

Rapid harmonization. Use industry standard templates and the lessons learned during migration to drive consistent close practices across regions and entities.
Prioritized risk work. Automation surfaces high risk items so people spend time on value-add analysis instead of low value reconciliation tasks.
Localization with consistency. Configure the system to meet local requirements while keeping global controls intact.
Faster, safer reporting. Built-in controls and an auditable activity record make it easier to produce reliable financial statements.

In short: post migration is where you realize the long term ROI of earlier automation — faster closes, lower risk, and more time for strategic finance work.

A Simple Implementation Roadmap to Adoption

Assess close activities. Map current reconciliations, journals, and approval points.
Standardize templates and rules. Build company templates and approval workflows in the platform.
Pilot with a control group. Try the templates on a subset of accounts or a single entity to validate configurations.
Integrate and test. Connect to source systems and run dry runs to confirm data flows and mappings.
Run parallel operations during cutover. Continue close activity while migration occurs, using the platform to log exceptions and keep approvals moving.
Harmonize after go-live. Apply lessons learned across the enterprise and tune automations for scale.

Top Five Reasons Customer Choose to Implement Now (Rather than Later)

Lower migration risk — fewer bad data surprises and a clearer mapping effort.
Continuous control — month-end doesn’t stop for migration, and neither should your audit trail.
Faster ROI — the efficiency gains and error reduction start earlier.
Smoother change management — teams adopt standardized processes before they learn a new ERP.
Easier audits and compliance — consistent documentation and approvals through the whole lifecycle.

Final Thought

An automated financial close solution is not a “nice to have” after your ERP migration — it’s a strategic enabler that makes the migration less risky, more transparent, and ultimately more successful. Implementing automation early gives you cleaner data, a reliable audit trail, and a predictable close that reduces pressure on your team during one of the most challenging IT projects an organization undertakes.

Written by: Nicole Tallman