Why the first 90 days decide everything
Go-live is when the project team celebrates. For everyone else, it's day one of using a new system under real pressure — orders to ship, invoices to send, a month to close. The habits formed in the next 90 days tend to stick: either the team trusts the system, or they quietly rebuild their spreadsheets around it.
This checklist works for NetSuite and Dynamics 365 alike. Use it whether you're fresh off an implementation or realizing, months later, that you never really stabilized.
Days 1–30: Hypercare
- One issue log, one owner. Every problem goes into a single list with severity, owner and status. No side-channel emails.
- A 15-minute daily triage with finance, operations and your consultant. Blockers first, annoyances later.
- Validate opening balances. AR, AP, inventory and bank balances should tie to the legacy system. Find differences now, not at year-end.
- Watch the first of everything: first invoice, first payment run, first purchase order, first work order, first bank reconciliation.
- Fix roles and permissions quickly. Access problems are the fastest way to push users back to workarounds.
Days 31–60: Your first real close
- Write the close checklist down, task by task with owners. NetSuite's period close checklist and a shared task list both work.
- Reconcile subledgers to the GL — AR, AP, inventory, fixed assets. Expect small differences; investigate every one.
- Build exception searches: unbilled shipments, unreceived POs, negative inventory, unapproved bills. Review them daily near period end.
- Get management reports right. If leadership is still asking for the old Excel pack, the reports aren't finished.
- Lock the period when it's closed — and hold the line on backdating.
Days 61–90: Optimize and hand off
- Retire the workarounds. List every manual step invented during hypercare and decide: automate, redesign, or accept.
- Second-round training, by role. People learn far more once they've used the system for a month.
- Document the "how we do it here" guide — short, screenshot-driven, owned by your team.
- Prioritize the backlog of enhancement requests by business value, not by who asked loudest.
- Move to a steady-state support model — an internal admin, a support partner, or both — with clear response expectations.
How to know you're stable
| Measure | Warning sign | Healthy at day 90 |
|---|---|---|
| Days to close | Getting longer each month | Trending down, predictable |
| Open issues | Growing, or stuck "in progress" | Few, and mostly enhancements |
| Manual journal entries | Used to fix system output | Only for genuine accruals and adjustments |
| Shadow spreadsheets | Multiple teams rely on them | Retired, or formally replaced by reports |
| User confidence | "Just ask the consultant" | Teams solve routine issues themselves |
Stabilizing a system you didn't implement
Plenty of companies reach day 90 — or day 900 — without stabilizing. The good news: it's rarely too late. A focused health check, a clean first close and a short list of process fixes usually turn things around faster than people expect.
Post go-live support is the core of what we do, whether or not we did the original implementation.
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