Qubit perspective
Your new ERP is configured. Training is booked. The launch date is in the diary. Then finance asks whether opening balances agree, operations finds duplicate product codes, and sales cannot tell which orders will still be open on Monday.
These are business questions hidden inside a technical workstream.
For an SME or mid-market company, a successful migration should leave people able to trade, fulfil orders, collect money and explain the numbers. An import marked “successful” tells you very little about those outcomes.
Before approving go-live, ask for evidence that the business can operate with the migrated data. The following checks give that conversation a practical structure.
1. Decide what the business actually needs
Start with the first working day. Which customers, suppliers, products, orders, stock records and outstanding balances must be available for people to do their jobs?
Separate those needs from the desire to copy everything. Decide what belongs in the new system, what should remain accessible in an archive, and who will retrieve older records when required.
Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 guidance distinguishes setup information, such as currencies and tax codes, from business records and open transactions being migrated.[1] That distinction is useful when asking whether both the system and its contents are ready.
For each record group, agree an owner, a source, a destination and a check. “Customers loaded” is vague. “Active customers loaded, duplicates reviewed and payment terms checked by the credit-control owner” gives someone a clear responsibility.
2. Check the relationships, not just the rows
A list of products may load correctly while orders refer to the wrong product codes. A customer may appear twice under slightly different names. A supplier record may exist without the information purchasing needs.
Ask the people who use the records to help select test cases. Include awkward cases as well as routine ones: a part-delivered order, a credit note, an inactive product still held in stock, or a customer with several delivery addresses.
Use these examples to check whether related records still connect and retain their intended meaning.
For example, in an illustrative wholesaler migration, the decisive question is whether an open order still points to the right customer, delivery address and remaining quantity. A matching order count would not answer that question.
3. Reconcile amounts and quantities
Agree the checks before importing. Otherwise, teams can end up debating what “correct” means after the result is already on screen.
Depending on the business, checks might cover outstanding receivables and payables, opening balances, stock quantities by location and remaining order values. Agree the same date, scope and treatment of adjustments on both sides.
Compare overall totals, then investigate differences at a useful level. A matching stock total could hide excess units in one warehouse and missing units in another.
Keep a short reconciliation record: what was compared, any difference, its explanation, the owner and the decision. Where a difference is expected because of an agreed transformation, document that reason. Where it is unexplained, keep it visible until resolved.
4. Rehearse the switch
Ask for a timed rehearsal of the move into live operation, often called cutover. Include extraction, preparation, loading, validation and the decision to proceed.
Microsoft’s go-live checklist recommends repeated migration tests, business sign-off and checks that the work fits the available cutover window.[2]
Your rehearsal should also expose the gaps between tasks. Who stops changes in the old system? How are transactions created after the rehearsal captured for the final move? What happens if a check fails near the deadline?
Record actual timings and named owners. Agree a workable contingency before launch, including how any transactions entered in the new system would be handled if the switch has to be delayed or reversed. Returning to the old system should not be assumed to be simple.
5. Test a complete working day
Give users ordinary business tasks using the migrated records: raise an order, receive stock, issue an invoice, allocate a payment and produce the reports needed to manage the operation.
Adapt the sequence to your business. A service company may need to test projects, time entries and billing rather than warehouse movements.
Check the systems around the ERP too. If the CRM, e-commerce platform or reporting tools remain connected, confirm that information passes through correctly and that failures are noticed. Microsoft’s testing checklist covers connected integrations and realistic migrated data, alongside user acceptance testing.[4]
Ask users to record whether they completed the task, what blocked them and what needs correcting. Their answers should influence the launch decision.
Make go-live an evidence-based decision
Put the essentials on one page: unresolved data issues, reconciliation results, rehearsal timings, critical workflow tests and the owners accepting any remaining risks.
Decide in advance what would stop the launch. An unresolved customer balance, a broken order-to-invoice process or an untested recovery plan deserves a clear decision.
Microsoft’s cutover guidance calls for a defined go/no-go decision and a transition into operational support.[3] Apply that discipline to the first week: agree who receives issues, who prioritises them and when finance and operations will repeat their checks.
The outcome is a shared basis for deciding whether the business is ready to work in the new system.
Discuss your migration requirements
Preparing for an ERP change? Discuss your ERP & CRM migration requirements with Qubit and identify the data, integration and readiness questions to resolve before go-live.
References
Primary Microsoft guidance checked on 5 October 2026. These sources describe Dynamics 365 implementation practices. The broader buyer checklist, illustrative example and commercial framing are original editorial recommendations, not guarantees or claims of platform equivalence.
- Manage configuration and migration data for Dynamics 365 projects — Microsoft Learn.
- Use the go-live checklist to make sure your solution is ready — Microsoft Learn.
- Transition to new solutions successfully with the cutover process — Microsoft Learn.
- Checklist for your test strategy plans — Microsoft Learn.