110 Don’t waste your GP migration Frank Hanzlik is vice president and general manager of global partner development at Avalara As Dynamics GP support winds down, Avalara argues the migration to a modern Dynamics platform is a chance to rebuild compliance, not just rehost it Barb Cullinan ran finance at ProviNET Solutions, an IT services firm outside Chicago. Every month, her team pulled tax data from one system into Microsoft Dynamics GP, then reconciled the two by hand. Exemption certificates lived in a binder on her desk. It worked, in the way these things tend to work. Until it didn’t. Her story isn’t unusual. It’s the compliance reality most Dynamics GP customers have lived with for years. But with support ending in 2029, these customers will all have to move to a modern Dynamics platform. The question is no longer if they will move. It is whether they use the move to change anything that matters. It’s easy to see the migration from GP as a rebuild exercise: reestablish the chart of accounts, re-point the integrations, keep the lights on – and done. This would be a mistake. This is the one clean chance you have to eliminate many of the manual processes that make compliance a chore. For as long as I’ve been in this industry, tax has been bolted on at the end, outside of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, relying on people to import rates, chase exemptions and run audits. That held up when business moved more slowly, but not when you sell across dozens of states and the rules never stop changing. Manual processes typically run at 25 to 30 per cent accuracy – which is where the penalties come from. What’s changed, and why I’d tell any GP customer to think bigger, is agentic AI. On a modern Microsoft Dynamics platform, Avalara doesn’t bolt on – it plugs in natively. That’s what lets our agentic layer, Avi, do real work. Instead of waiting to be told, it does the job: a jurisdictional notice gets resolved before anyone sees it. You expand into a new state, and no one has to file an IT ticket. I understand why using AI makes some finance leaders nervous. Nobody wants a black box near an audit. But Avi isn’t guessing. It’s deterministic, so the same inputs produce the same defensible answer, and every result is explainable with an audit trail. Moreover, you decide how much autonomy it has. Some teams want Avi to recommend while a person approves: “That acquisition just tripped nexus in three new states; want me to update your filing status?” Others set the parameters and let it act on its own. There’s no single right answer – and confidence grows over time. Either way, a human is always in control. You’re just deciding where that control sits: signing off on each decision or setting the rules Avi operates inside once it has earned your trust. This is proven and repeatable, running in production today, not a demo we’re hoping will pan out. “Companies that modernise now are positioned for the future. The ones nursing GP along will be revisiting this same migration later” VIEWPOINT
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