ERP Implementation Checklist: The Items Everyone Tracks, Plus the Staffing Ones Nobody Budgets

Last updated: September 29, 2026

By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1

An ERP implementation checklist lists the work across eight phases, from contract and design through cutover and hypercare, and a useful one also budgets the people, meaning who covers each borrowed employee’s day job and what that cover costs. Most published checklists stop at the first half. The second half is where the money leaks out, quietly, into department budgets nobody connects back to the project.

Most of the ERP searches that reach my desk at KORE1 are not for consultants. They are for the people who keep a company running while its own staff sit in a conference room arguing about how returns should post.

In March, the controller at a plastics molder in Fort Wayne, Indiana, called us eleven days into user acceptance testing. Her quarter close had landed on top of the second test cycle. Two of her accounts payable clerks had worked every Saturday for five weeks, and the overtime alone came to a little over $9,400. Nobody had put that number anywhere in a $610,000 implementation budget. Nobody had put her close calendar on the project plan, either. We had a contract senior accountant in her office by the following Wednesday, which helped. It did not give her the five Saturdays back.

The checklist her implementation partner handed her at kickoff was a good one. Forty-some lines, phase by phase. Every line was about the software.

That is the pattern with nearly every ERP checklist you will find online. Vendors publish them. So do implementation partners. They are accurate about configuration, data loads and go/no-go criteria, and they are almost silent on the labor that a mid-market company has to find, pay for and schedule on its own side of the table. A backfill line, if it shows up at all, is one bullet that says “consider backfilling key staff.” That is the whole entry.

Consider it with what money, though?

My interest in this is not hidden. KORE1 fills a lot of those cover seats, so a checklist that budgets for them tends to send work our way. Several of the items below cost nothing but a name written next to a line, and I would put them on your list even if we never spoke.

The Half of the Checklist Everyone Already Keeps

An ERP implementation checklist is a phase-by-phase list of the decisions, deliverables and sign-offs a company must complete to move its finance, inventory and operations processes onto a new ERP system, with an owner and a date against each item. It usually runs from contract signature through the first weeks of live support.

Here is that standard half, compressed. It is vendor-neutral on purpose. NetSuite, SAP S/4HANA, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Acumatica and Epicor projects all move through the same eight phases even when the vocabulary changes. If NetSuite is your platform, our NetSuite implementation guide maps these phases to the specific seats that platform needs, and our ERP consultant staffing desk covers the rest of the platforms named above.

Nothing wrong with that table. Keep it. Now read only the right-hand column. How many of those owners already hold a full-time job at your company? On most mid-market projects, every one of them except the partner. Every one. Who sits in each of those seats, and for how much of the week, is covered in detail in our piece on ERP implementation team structure, and the week each seat should start is mapped on our ERP program team staffing page. This article is about the bill that follows from those percentages.

Thirteen Staffing Lines That Never Make the Budget

These are in roughly the order the costs arrive. Some are large. A few are nothing more than a signature. None are exotic. Each one is a thing I have watched a client find out about in the middle of the project instead of at the start of it.

1. A Name Next to Every Assumption in the Proposal

Implementation proposals carry an assumptions page, and every line on it is work your side has agreed to do. One NetSuite integration proposal we reviewed this summer, written for a mid-market pharma manufacturer, assumed the client would turn documents around in 10 business days and approve test protocols in 5. Business experts on call for every workshop and every test cycle. A production-copy sandbox, kept current, start to finish. The proposal was explicit that waiting on the client earns the vendor schedule relief, while rework caused by the client earns the vendor money.

Fair terms. Honest ones. They are also a staffing plan with no names on it. Read it that way. Write a person, not a department, next to every assumption before you sign. The same document named a client approver at engagement start, a seat that almost never shows up on the client’s org chart.

2. Someone to Write What the Vendor Will Not

That same proposal excluded authorship of the client’s requirements, its standard operating procedures and its change control procedures. The vendor would supply templates and help. The records belonged to the client. Plenty of fixed-fee ERP quotes draw the same line, and it is a reasonable line, because only you know how your business actually runs. Somebody still has to sit down and write forty pages of it, in the first month, while also doing their job. Usually the controller.

3. Cover for the People You Borrowed

This is the big one. Your controller, your AP lead, your buyer and your production planner are the process owners, and each of them will spend somewhere between a fifth and two fifths of the week on the project, with bursts close to half during design and testing. Those hours are borrowed. They come from month-end close, vendor payments, purchase orders and the production schedule.

Price the cover at wage cost first, then add markup if a staffing firm provides it. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, through O*NET, shows accountants and auditors earning a median $40.23 an hour as of May 2025. Bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks sit at $24.36, and production, planning and expediting clerks at $28.68. Covering half of a controller’s week for six months, which is 520 hours, comes to roughly $20,900 in wages before anyone’s margin. Half of an AP lead’s week over the same stretch is about $12,700. Pay runs higher in some metros, and our salary benchmark assistant shows the local numbers.

Small numbers next to a partner invoice. Which is exactly why they get cut first, and why the controller ends up doing 130 percent of a job until that person either burns out or leaves. Our backfill staffing team handles those searches, usually on a contract staffing basis because the seat has a known end date. Controller and senior accountant cover runs through our accounting and finance staffing desk.

4. Overtime, When the Borrowed People Are Hourly

Clerks, schedulers, warehouse leads and most AP staff are non-exempt. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, they are owed time and one-half for hours over 40 in a workweek, and “we were testing the new system” is not an exemption.

Run the arithmetic on a six-week test cycle. Six AP and billing clerks at the $24.36 median, each working eight extra hours a week, cost about $1,750 apiece in overtime at $36.54 an hour. Roughly $10,500 for the group. It lands in payroll, not in the project. The project manager usually never sees it. Payroll does.

5. The Close Calendar, Printed on the Project Plan

Put your month-end and quarter-end dates on the implementation schedule before the test cycles are set. Sounds obvious. I have seen it done perhaps twice, and both times it was because the controller had been through a bad go-live somewhere else and refused to sign the plan until the close dates were printed on it in red.

6. Tester Hours, Counted in Scripts Rather Than Weeks

“Two weeks of UAT” is a calendar statement, not an effort estimate. Count the scripts instead. All of them. A mid-market scope covering sales orders, purchasing, inventory and the monthly close can easily produce 350 test scripts. At 40 minutes each, run twice because the first pass always finds defects, that is about 470 hours of your people’s time, and those people are the same process owners from line 3. If the partner’s consultants are also the ones executing the tests, read our note on why ERP projects fail before you sign off on anything they built.

7. Somebody Who Owns the Sandbox

Test environments go stale. Quickly. A sandbox that has not been refreshed from production since design will fail tests for reasons that have nothing to do with the build, and the team burns a day proving it. Name the person who requests refreshes, reloads test data and resets user access afterward. On a small project that is a few hours a month. On a project with integrations to Shopify, Salesforce and a 3PL, where every refresh breaks a connection token and somebody has to re-point three endpoints before the testers can log back in on Monday morning, it is a real slice of somebody’s week.

8. Training Time Is Payroll

End-user training delivery was excluded from that pharma integration proposal, and it is missing from many others, so read your own before assuming. Even when a partner does deliver it, the hours your employees spend in sessions are hours they are not shipping, billing or closing. Take 140 users at eight hours each and a wage near $28, about where payroll and timekeeping clerks and planners sit, and you have roughly $31,000 of productive time. Real money. It rarely appears on a budget line with the word ERP next to it.

9. Cutover Weekend Is a Shift Schedule

Freeze windows, final loads, a physical inventory count, opening balances and the first live orders on Monday morning. Every one of those needs people on site at hours they do not usually work. Nights, mostly. Plan for it the way a plant manager would plan for a line changeover, with who, which shift, what they are paid and who covers anyone out sick.

• Block paid time off for the core team across cutover and the first two weeks of hypercare, and tell them now.
• If the warehouse is counting inventory the weekend before go-live, temp labor for the count is cheaper than pulling pickers off open orders.
• Weekend differentials, meals and hotel rooms for anyone traveling in.
• One person with authority to call no-go at 2 a.m. Not a committee.

10. The Administrator You Hire Before You Need One

Hire the permanent ERP administrator about 60 days before go-live so the configuration gets explained to someone who will still be on payroll next year, while the partner is still in the building. That is two months of salary spent before the system does anything useful. It is also the cheapest two months on the project. Wait until after go-live and the hypercare period tends to stretch, because the only people who understand the setup are billing by the hour.

11. A Person for Each Release, Twice a Year

NetSuite ships two scheduled version upgrades a year, with minor releases in between, and the other cloud ERPs run a similar cadence. Somebody has to read the release notes, retest the processes you care about and update the documentation. For an ordinary account that is about a week of work, twice a year. For a validated integration in a regulated plant, Foretopia, the NetSuite consultancy that wrote that pharma proposal, benchmarks the regression and documentation work at 120 hours and $31,046 a year. Different scale. Same obligation. Either way it belongs on the checklist with a name beside it, because after go-live the project team is gone and nobody else will volunteer.

12. Retention for the People Who Now Know Everything

This one I can speak to from the other side of the phone. A controller or super user who has just lived through a successful go-live is suddenly one of the most recruitable people in your company. Their profile now says NetSuite, or Dynamics 365, with a real project behind it, and recruiters, including recruiters like me, go looking for exactly that.

A distributor in Tulsa, Oklahoma, lost its two strongest super users within four months of going live last year. Both went to companies about to start implementations of their own. More money, naturally. One of them had written half the pick-and-pack procedures the warehouse still uses, and her replacement burned most of a quarter piecing the reasoning back together out of saved searches, a shared drive nobody had pruned since 2019, and whatever the forklift drivers happened to remember. One retention bonus, paid in two installments across the first year, would have cost far less than rebuilding that knowledge from a stack of training decks. Decide before go-live who gets one. Not after the resignation letter.

13. Turning the Contractors Back Off

Every contractor, consultant and backfill you brought in has a login, and some have admin roles in the new system and the old one. Offboarding them is a checklist of its own, and we wrote it up in our contractor access and offboarding checklist. Add a single line here that points to it, with a date.

All thirteen, short enough to paste into your plan:

• A named owner for every assumption in the proposal
• An author for requirements and procedures
• Day-job cover for each process owner, priced in hours
• Overtime budget for non-exempt staff during testing
• Close dates on the project calendar
• UAT effort counted in scripts
• A sandbox owner
• Training hours as a payroll cost
• A cutover shift schedule and PTO blackout
• An administrator hired 60 days early
• A named owner for each release cycle
• Retention terms for super users and process owners
• Contractor access removal, with a date

What the People Lines Add Up To

Here is one illustrative project. A distributor around $150 million in revenue, a nine-month rollout, three process owners pulled at half time for six months, a six-week test cycle and 140 trained users. Every figure uses the BLS median wages quoted above. None includes a staffing firm’s markup, payroll tax or benefits, so treat the total as a floor.

The administrator and release rows use the BLS median for computer systems analysts, $105,850 a year or $50.89 an hour, as a stand-in, since BLS has no separate code for ERP administrators and a strong NetSuite or Dynamics admin will cost more.

About $112,000, then. That is before markup and before retention bonuses. On a project where the software and the partner might run $500,000 to $700,000, that is a meaningful share of the true cost. Partner rates by platform are broken out in our guide to ERP consultant hourly rates. The part I would underline is the last column. Five different budgets absorb it, which is how a CFO can look at the ERP line at year end, see it came in on plan, and never learn that the project actually cost a sixth more than anyone reported.

Pushback When the Budget Owner Reads the List

What belongs on an ERP implementation checklist, at minimum?

At minimum, eight phases of work (scope, design, build, data migration, testing, training, cutover and hypercare), each with an owner and a date, plus the people costs of covering the staff pulled onto the project.

The phase items are well covered by vendor and partner checklists. The people items are the ones you usually have to add yourself.

How much should a mid-market company set aside for backfill?

$40,000 to $60,000 in wages is a realistic floor for three process owners covered at half time over six months, before any agency markup.

Scale that by the number of process owners you are pulling. Four owners at half time is not the same project as two at a fifth. And if one of them is the only person who can run payroll, cover that seat first, whatever the math says.

Can our people just absorb the extra hours?

For a few weeks, usually yes. For nine months, the hours come out of close accuracy, vendor relationships or the people themselves.

Salaried managers absorb it until they quit. Hourly staff absorb it as overtime you are legally required to pay. Neither one is free, and only one of them shows up on a timesheet.

Whose checklist is it, ours or the implementation partner’s?

Yours. The partner owns the build tasks, but the staffing lines sit entirely on your side, and no partner can hire your backfill or approve your overtime.

Ask the partner to merge their task list with yours in one plan. Good ones will. Some grumble first. It also makes the assumptions page from line 1 visible to everyone who has to live with it.

When do the backfill contractors actually need to start?

Two to three weeks before design workshops begin, so each person covering a day job overlaps with the employee they are covering.

A week of overlap is workable. Zero overlap means the contractor spends the first month rediscovering how your AP process works while the process owner is locked in workshops, and you pay for both.

Does any of this change for SAP or Dynamics 365 compared with NetSuite?

The thirteen lines stay the same, although larger platforms and longer timelines multiply every hour in them.

An SAP S/4HANA program that runs 15 months instead of nine holds the same process owners out of their day jobs two thirds again as long. The wage math scales with it. So does the overtime. Release cadence differs by vendor, too, so check each platform’s schedule before you put a number on line 11.

Price the People the Week You Price the Software

Take the partner’s checklist and keep every line of it. Then add the thirteen above, put a name and a dollar figure next to each, and bring the total into the same meeting where the software contract gets approved. The number will be smaller than the partner’s invoice. Much smaller. It will also be the one that decides whether your controller is still with you next spring.

If you would like help pricing the cover seats, or filling them, send the plan to our ERP recruiting desk. Include your close calendar. We will mark which seats need cover and which do not, and we will say so when the answer is none. KORE1 has staffed finance, operations and ERP roles since 2005, and the figure I care about most is the one measured a year out. At twelve months, 92 percent of our placements have not gone anywhere.