Microsoft is retiring Great Plains. What's your next move?

Great Plains migration, defined.

A Great Plains migration is the process of moving your finance and accounting operations off Microsoft Dynamics GP — which is reaching end of life — onto a modern, supported platform such as QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, or NetSuite, including platform selection, data conversion, integrations, and change management, so the transition strengthens your finance function rather than disrupting it.

Capital Advisors is your migration home.

We are not tied to a specific platform, and we don't start with the software. We start with your business — where you are today, where you're headed, and which platform best supports that journey.

The honest case: why most GP customers should leave the Dynamics path.

When support ends, Business Central is Microsoft's preferred next step — but "stay inside the same vendor" is rarely the same as "best fit for your business." For a lot of former Great Plains customers, the better outcome is a purpose-built cloud platform.

Here's the reasoning we walk clients through:

• The migration is roughly the same effort either way. Moving from GP to Business Central is still a re-implementation and data conversion — not an upgrade. If you're doing the work regardless, the question becomes which destination is genuinely best, not which is most familiar.
• Financial reporting is often stronger elsewhere. Finance-led organizations frequently get cleaner multi-entity consolidations, dimensional reporting, and close speed from Sage Intacct or NetSuite than from a general-purpose Microsoft ERP.
• Simpler businesses are over-served by any mid-market ERP. If you're a single entity with modest complexity, QuickBooks is faster to implement, cheaper to run, and easier to staff — and you stop paying for ERP depth you never use.
• Avoid choosing by default. The most expensive mistake isn't picking the "wrong" brand — it's letting the incumbent vendor's roadmap pick for you, then discovering the fit is poor after implementation.

Read the full breakdown: Dynamics GP vs. QuickBooks, Sage Intacct & NetSuite →

Start here: what should you replace Great Plains with?

The right platform depends on business complexity (entities, locations, inventory, reporting), growth plans (acquisitions, expansion, PE ownership), and finance requirements (consolidations, forecasting, board reporting, compliance). We focus on the three platforms we know deeply.

The library.

Platform guides, the case for leaving Dynamics, cost and timeline planning, and the end-of-life facts you need to plan around.

How we help.

Capital Advisors guides the whole decision — not just the software.

• Evaluate options objectively across QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite
• Build a migration roadmap tied to your business and growth plans
• Help select and manage the implementation partner
• Prepare data, the chart of accounts, and processes for conversion
• Manage change so the team actually adopts the new system
• Reduce implementation risk and avoid an expensive wrong turn

What a migration actually looks like.

A platform change is a re-implementation, not a software update — and most of the risk lives in the decisions made before any data moves. Here is the path we run with you, from first question to a finance team that has actually adopted the new system. We lead the strategy and manage the implementation; we are not tied to any one platform or conversion vendor.

• 1. Discover. We map where your finance operation is today — entities, locations, inventory, reporting needs, integrations, and the customizations buried in GP that may have no direct equivalent elsewhere. This is where the real requirements surface, before any vendor demo frames them for you.
• 2. Select. We evaluate QuickBooks, Sage Intacct, and NetSuite against your actual complexity and growth plans, and help you choose — objectively, before you commit to an expensive implementation. The decision matrix is where this starts.
• 3. Prepare. We get your data, chart of accounts, and finance processes ready for conversion — deciding what history moves live, what gets archived, and how the new structure should be built so it strengthens reporting rather than replicating old limitations.
• 4. Convert. We select and manage the implementation partner, oversee the data conversion, and validate the result with side-by-side testing — trial balance, P&L, and balance sheet on the new platform reconciled against GP — so you trust the numbers from day one.
• 5. Adopt. We manage the change so the team actually uses the system: training, new close and billing processes, and the reporting the platform was chosen to deliver. A migration the team works around is a migration that failed.

How long does it take?

Timeline is driven by destination platform, data complexity, and how many integrations and entities are in play — not by a calendar you can compress at the end. As a planning guide:

• GP → QuickBooks Online or Enterprise: typically 6–12 weeks for a single-entity environment with standard data. The fastest, lowest-cost path when QuickBooks is genuinely the right fit.
• GP → Sage Intacct: typically 3–6 months, driven by multi-entity consolidations, dimensional reporting design, and integration work.
• GP → NetSuite: typically 6–12+ months for operationally complex or multi-entity, acquisitive companies — full ERP scope takes full ERP time.

The decision and preparation phases often take as long as the conversion itself, which is why moving sooner matters: support and ecosystem expertise erode before the deadline, and late movers negotiate from weakness. If you need to move quickly, an expedited path is sometimes possible — but speed trades against historical-data depth and testing, and we will tell you honestly where that line is.

What actually moves — and what doesn't.

One of the first questions every GP customer asks is "what happens to all our data?" The honest answer: you rarely move everything, and you usually shouldn't. A clean migration is a chance to leave behind years of accumulated mess, not to faithfully reproduce it. Here is the general shape, regardless of destination platform.

Moves with trade-offs — decide deliberately:

• Historical transaction detail. Multiple years of line-item history can be converted, but it adds cost and time. Often the better move is to bring summary balances into the new system and keep full GP detail in an archive you can still query.
• Payroll history. Most platforms do not import detailed payroll history directly; prior payroll is commonly brought over as journal entries rather than line-level records.
• Customizations and integrations. GP customizations rarely have a one-to-one equivalent. Each one is a decision: rebuild, replace with native functionality, or retire.

We help you separate what you need live in the new system from what you need accessible in an archive — a distinction that materially affects cost, timeline, and how clean your new platform is on day one. Keeping fifteen years of detail live because "we might need it" is one of the most common and expensive migration mistakes.

Great Plains migration: common questions.

The dates that matter: as of April 1, 2026, no new Dynamics GP licenses can be purchased by new customers. Mainstream support — enhancements, regulatory and tax updates, and technical support — ends December 31, 2029. Security updates continue only until April 30, 2031. The software keeps running past these dates; the support ecosystem around it does not.