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How Finance Teams Evaluate ERP Software Before Buying
John Iwuozor
Content Lead, Finance and Research
John Iwuozor
Content Lead, Finance and Research
John Iwuozor leads content, finance, and research at DualEntry. He writes for the people who actually close the books: controllers running month-end, CFOs weighing an ERP migration, accountants buried in reconciliations. Before DualEntry he spent five years covering B2B SaaS and fintech for Forbes Advisor, Ramp, and Infosecurity Magazine. He builds every piece on primary data, including benchmarks, practitioner interviews, and product testing, rather than recycled advice. He is also an avid chess player.
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Last updated
September 16, 2026
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Summarize this article
For many, buying an ERP these days comes with a horror story attached, and everyone knows how it goes – the harrowing saga of a drawn-out implementation, the ugly migration, the long slog of hauling an entire finance function from one system to another, etc.
What is remarkable is how thoroughly the industry has acclimatised to the ordeal. By rights it should have been hard to stomach; instead, it’s become the cost of doing business, with research suggesting that more than a quarter of ERP projects run over budget and almost a quarter run over schedule.
Now of course, some of the blame belongs to the happy path. ERP demos tend to show the system at its cleanest, while the cracks only appear once it meets the messiness of the real business. By then, the contract is signed and the buyer is already committed.
At DualEntry, we built NextDay Migration to bring that moment forward, letting finance teams move their own transaction history and financial documents into a working sandbox while they are still evaluating the system.
That gives us a first-hand view of how buyers test an ERP before they commit.
How deep do finance teams actually go?
In our latest rolling 90-day window, the median finance team spent 21 minutes of active pre-close time in a DualEntry sandbox. The average was 62 minutes, or about 2.9x higher.
That means roughly half of the teams spent <25 minutes in the sandbox, while a smaller group stayed in much longer and pulled the average sharply upward.
The teams that buy tend to go deeper
In the outcome data, finance teams that ultimately bought DualEntry averaged 138 minutes of active pre-close time, compared with 51 minutes among teams that did not buy, or about 2.7x as much.
If the extra time were mostly a sign of hesitation, you would expect the opposite. Instead, the teams that eventually committed were the ones spending longer in the product before making the call.
Treat migration as part of the evaluation
Among finance teams eligible for migration, 44% had already migrated data into a sandbox while evaluating DualEntry.
That flips the usual order. Migration is normally treated as the work that starts after the buying decision. Here, nearly half of eligible teams were using it as part of the decision itself.
The logic is simple: the best time to find out whether an ERP can carry your books is before you’re depending on it to do so. That means testing it with your own data, your own workflows, and the messiness that comes with both.
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John Iwuozor
Content Lead, Finance and Research
John Iwuozor leads content, finance, and research at DualEntry. He writes for the people who actually close the books: controllers running month-end, CFOs weighing an ERP migration, accountants buried in reconciliations. Before DualEntry he spent five years covering B2B SaaS and fintech for Forbes Advisor, Ramp, and Infosecurity Magazine. He builds every piece on primary data, including benchmarks, practitioner interviews, and product testing, rather than recycled advice. He is also an avid chess player.
