KhaqanWhat is ERP health check?
An ERP health check is a structured review of an ERP system that tests whether its data, customisations, integrations, backups, performance and user access are sound, and produces a prioritised list of risks and fixes before they turn into outages or wrong numbers.
An ERP rarely fails all at once. It degrades: a scheduled job stops silently, a custom module blocks the next upgrade, a backup has not been restored in years, a former employee's account still has administrator rights, and month-end takes a little longer each quarter. A health check is a deliberate walk through those areas with evidence rather than opinions, so that the business knows where it stands.
The areas I cover are the same every time. Data: duplicates, negative stock, unreconciled bank lines, open orders that will never ship. Customisation: an inventory of every custom module and edited core file, and which ones would break on upgrade. Integrations: what talks to the ERP, over which credentials, and what happens when it fails. Infrastructure: database version and support status, a backup and restore test, point-in-time recovery, monitoring. Security: who has what access, single sign-on, two-factor authentication, audit logs. Performance: the slowest reports and screens, measured. Process: how long the month-end close takes and what happens outside the system.
The most telling single test is the month-end close. If the finance team exports to spreadsheets to produce the accounts, the ERP is not the system of record, whatever the licence says. An example finding is a manufacturer whose stock valuation drifts further from the general ledger each month because of a costing method changed years ago; nobody was wrong, but nobody had looked.
The common mistake is asking the implementer to do the check. They audit their own work, and they find what they expect. A health check is more useful when it is done by someone who does not sell the fix.
Related terms
- month-end close (as an ERP health test): Month-end close is the accounting routine of finalising a month's transactions, reconciling bank and control accounts, posting adjustments and locking the period; used as an ERP health test, it asks how much of that work happens inside the ERP and how much in spreadsheets.
- ERP customisation risk (upgrade-safe customisation): ERP customisation risk is the danger that changes made to fit an ERP to a business (custom code, edited core files, database tweaks, undocumented workflows) will break, block or inflate the cost of the next upgrade; upgrade-safe customisation is the discipline of avoiding that.
- point-in-time recovery (PITR): Point-in-time recovery (PITR) is a database backup method, standard in PostgreSQL, that combines a base backup with a continuous archive of write-ahead log (WAL) files, so the database can be restored to any chosen moment, not only to the time of the last backup.
- Odoo: Odoo is a modular, open-source ERP and business application suite from Belgium, written in Python on PostgreSQL, that covers accounting, inventory, manufacturing, sales, CRM, HR, websites and more, available as a free Community edition and a paid Enterprise edition.