Business Central implementation: practices that keep projects on track

Most Business Central projects that struggle do so for organisational rather than technical reasons. Requirements are captured as feature lists instead of business processes, and decisions about data, ownership and scope are deferred until late in the project.

Start with process discovery. Walk through order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, inventory and record-to-report with the people who do the work. Map each step against standard Business Central functionality before writing a single line of AL code.

Treat data migration as its own workstream. Agree early which master data and open transactions will move, who cleans them, and how many trial loads you will run before cut-over.

Finally, plan user acceptance testing around real scenarios, not menu items. Key users should be able to complete a full day of work in the test environment before go-live is approved.