If you use Microsoft Dynamics GP, you’re likely thinking about your next ERP solution already. Microsoft recently ended extended support for Dynamics GP 2016, and for anyone still on that version, it turned a planning conversation into an urgent one. For everyone on GP 18.x, the next marker is December 31, 2029, when Microsoft ends product support and updates for the all versions of GP.
So the question most GP customers are wrestling with now isn’t whether to move. It’s how to move without the project going sideways, and that’s where budgets tend to come apart. Panorama Consulting’s 2026 ERP Report found that more than a quarter of organizations exceeded their project budgets, most often because they uncovered additional technology needs partway through. The surprises, not the software, drive the overruns.
Skill Creations took a different route. The North Carolina community-based care provider completed its Dynamics GP to Business Central migration with more than twenty years of financial history intact and without a single disruption to the care it provides. What makes the story worth your time is why it worked, because most of the reasons were set in motion years before anyone said the word “migration.”
When the Stakes Are People, Not Just Numbers
For 40 years, Skill Creations has delivered residential, in-home, and community-based support to people with developmental disabilities across North Carolina. When a finance system stumbles at an organization like that, the fallout doesn’t stay in accounting. Payroll, vendor payments, and funding reports all connect back to the staff and residents who depend on steady operations every single day, so “we’ll sort it out after go-live” was never an option.
The Partnership Started With a Silence
In 2018, Stacy Garnett, CFO and President at Skill Creations, found herself in a spot plenty of GP customers will recognize. Their consulting partner had gone quiet. The GP instance still needed care, the SQL Server infrastructure underneath it still needed managing, and the integrations layered on top of both still needed someone who understood how all the pieces fit together.
Stacy met our team through a chance recommendation at Community Summit, and she selected ACE Micro as Skill Creations’ Dynamics GP consultant. Early on, the focus was on keeping GP healthy, optimizing the platform, and coordinating new integrations as their needs grew, all backed by responsive day-to-day support.
Why the Groundwork Mattered When the Migration Came
By the time Skill Creations was ready to move to Business Central, they had more than twenty years of financial history sitting in GP. That’s a lot of data, and it forces decisions that no migration tool can make for you: what to consolidate, what to carry forward as full journal entries, and what can live in an archive that people only open during an audit.
The options on the tooling side will be familiar to most GP teams by now. The cloud migration process can bring GP history into Business Central and store detail-level transactions in a historical snapshot, and you can choose how many years of GL and transaction history to migrate. Some organizations also copy the full GP database to Azure Data Lake so older records stay reachable without keeping a server running on-premises. What’s harder is choosing the right mix for how your team actually uses its history, which is why a clear GP to Business Central migration plan matters more than any single tool.
This is where eight years of working together paid off. We already knew how Skill Creations used its data, which integrations fed which reports, and where the quirks lived in the GP setup. Nobody had to spend the first two months of the project learning the environment from scratch, and that head start shaped everything that followed.
Weekly Validation, Then Months in the Sandbox
The migration followed a rhythm that sounds simple but takes real discipline. We assigned a team of consultants who met with Skill Creations every week to migrate and validate the GP data. Anyone who has lived through a conversion knows validation is the step that gets squeezed first when timelines tighten, and also the one that decides whether your first month-end close in Business Central feels calm or chaotic. Making it a standing weekly commitment with Stacy’s team kept that from happening.
Once the data work wrapped up, Skill Creations’ internal team spent several months refining the system in a Business Central sandbox environment. Sandbox testing is hardly a new idea, but few organizations give it that much runway, and Skill Creations made the choice deliberately so their team could run real processes against real data until the rough edges were gone.
The payoff showed up at go-live. Because the team had already worked through the major issues during sandbox testing, the staff rollout took far less time than anyone expected. More importantly, residents and staff never experienced a disruption in care, and for a human services provider, that’s the measure that counts most.
What Other GP Customers Can Take From This
The lessons here travel well, whether you run a care organization, a distribution company, or anything in between. If you’re still deciding whether it’s time to move at all, our look at the signs a business has outgrown Dynamics GP makes a useful gut check.
Start with the partner you have today, because the partner you have before the migration shapes the migration. A team that has managed your GP environment for years walks in already knowing where the tricky spots are. If your current support feels thin or slow to respond, fixing that now will make the eventual move far easier, even if the move is still a couple of years away.
Then think about those budget and timeline overruns. Most of the time, they can be traced back to surprises found midstream, and the best defense is simply having fewer surprises: a partner who already understands your environment, and pricing you can see before you sign anything. That’s exactly why we publish upfront pricing for Business Central projects, and it’s a fair question to ask any partner you’re considering.
Treat historical data as a business decision rather than a technical one, too. Your controller and your auditors should weigh in on how much history belongs inside Business Central and how much can sit in an archive. Skill Creations brought twenty years forward thoughtfully, and that only works when the people who rely on the data help decide its shape.
And protect your testing time. On a project plan, the months Skill Creations spent in the sandbox might look like a delay. In practice, they’re the reason go-live felt almost anticlimactic, which is exactly how a good go-live should feel. Afterward, keep adjusting; Skill Creations later added a modern reporting tool to replace what they’d relied on from Management Reporter, a next step you can read about in our client stories.
Hear It From Stacy
Eight years in, Stacy sums up our relationship simply: “Their customer support is second to none.” It’s a short line, but coming from someone who once lived through a partner going silent, it means a great deal to our team. You can watch her tell the story in her own words, and download the full written case study, on the Skill Creations client success story page.
Ready to Plan Your Own Move?
If Skill Creations’ experience sounds like the kind of migration you’d want, the easiest first step is a conversation with us. We offer a free one-hour discussion on moving from Dynamics GP to Business Central, where you can talk through your environment, your history, and a realistic timeline with a team that has guided this move many times. Prefer to see the destination first? You can explore Business Central demos on your own schedule.
And if your GP support has gone quiet the way Stacy’s once did, you don’t need to wait for a migration to fix it. Get connected with our team today, or visit acemicrotech.com to see how we can support you, from day-to-day GP care all the way through a smooth landing in Business Central.
President and VP of Business Development
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