Post-Acquisition Systems Integration Staffing, Built Around the TSA Clock
We staff the integration leads, ERP consultants, data engineers and identity specialists who move an acquired business off the seller’s systems and onto yours before the transition agreement stops being cheap.
Post-acquisition systems integration staffing places the integration leads, ERP consultants, data engineers and identity specialists who move an acquired company off the seller’s systems and onto yours, averaging 17 days to first qualified submittal and 92% one-year retention.
Last updated: August 23, 2026
The deal closed on a Friday. Monday morning, none of it has moved.
That’s the normal shape of an acquisition, and it’s fine for about a week. The acquired business keeps running on the seller’s ERP, the seller’s payroll provider, the seller’s email tenant and the seller’s warehouse system, because a transition services agreement says it can. Somebody signed a schedule listing every service, a duration and a monthly fee. Reasonable so far. Then the integration plan gets written against that schedule, and everybody agrees the ERP move lands in month nine. Nine feels generous.
It lands in month twenty-two, and months thirteen through twenty-two cost extra.
Nobody is being lazy. Most TSA schedules give IT twelve months and ERP about ten, which sounds generous until you count what actually has to happen inside it. PwC puts a typical TSA exit at more than 1,500 design decisions, most of them dependent on each other, which is why the revisions eat the calendar rather than the build work does. The revisions are the work.
And the people who could do it are already busy running the business that just got bought. Same twelve people.
KORE1 has placed enterprise systems talent since 2005. This page covers one window, the stretch between close and the day the acquired business is fully inside your perimeter, and it sits inside our wider ERP consultant staffing practice.
What an Integration Team Does That Your Own People Can’t
Your team knows your systems cold. They’ve never seen the acquired company’s, and they still have a month-end to close. Both, at once. That gap is the whole reason this staffing category exists.
The first four to six weeks are inventory and entanglement work, which is unglamorous and decides everything after it. Somebody walks both estates and writes down what exists. Every integration, every scheduled job, every shared service the seller quietly provides that never made it onto the TSA schedule. Every certificate, every SFTP account, every EDI trading partner ID, every carrier account number, every report a controller built in 2019 that finance still runs on the third business day.
Then the sequence gets set. The sequence is the product.
Payroll and identity move early because they’re bounded and the failure mode is loud. Loud is useful. Order to cash moves last because it touches revenue, and moving it wrong means an invoice doesn’t go out. Between those two ends sit the decisions that actually cost money, like whether the acquired entity’s chart of accounts gets mapped into yours or rebuilt from scratch, and whether you’re keeping their WMS for eighteen more months because retraining a shift is worse than paying the fee. Sometimes it is.
None of that is a tooling question. It’s judgement, applied at a specific company, by someone who has done it before and doesn’t need the org chart explained twice. That’s the hire.
Six Systems, One Ring Fence, and the Two That Are Always Still Outside
At close, the acquired business is ring-fenced. It runs on the seller’s estate under the transition agreement while you work out what to keep. Each system below is drawn twice, an outer boundary that belongs to the seller and an inner one that belongs to you. The gap between them is what you’re still renting. This is the pattern we see on mid-market deals, not a specific client. A shape, not a case study.
Payroll, time and benefits
Almost always first across, because the deadline sets itself. Employees get paid on a date, and the first run after close is the one nobody forgets. Payroll sets its own deadline. Two to three months is normal if the acquired headcount is under a few hundred and nobody is trying to harmonize benefit plans in the same motion.
Identity, email and devices
A tenant-to-tenant move with two mail domains running side by side for a while, plus laptops that have to enroll somewhere. Bounded, well-trodden, and the one place a good specialist finishes ahead of schedule. Rare and welcome. It also unblocks everything else, because until people are in one directory, every downstream permission model has two answers.
Warehouse, shipping and carrier accounts
Physical work. It can’t pause for a weekend. Carrier accounts and rate agreements move on the carriers’ timeline. Not yours, and a WMS swap means retraining a shift that is already picking to a number. Plenty of acquirers deliberately leave this one on the seller’s system for the full term and take the fee.
Financial consolidation and the chart of accounts
The acquired entity keeps its own ledger and rolls up, which works until the first quarter where two account structures have to produce one board number. Mapping their accounts into yours takes a controller and a systems person sitting together for a week, and it is the cheapest week in the whole programme. Book it early.
Order to cash and the ERP itself
This is the one that overruns. Every time. It carries revenue. Pricing, tax, credit terms, open orders, all of it. And it can’t move until the master data has been reconciled, which nobody scoped, because reconciling master data doesn’t look like a project until somebody opens the customer table and finds the same account four times under three spellings.
EDI and trading partner connections
Every retailer, distributor and 3PL the acquired business trades with has to be re-onboarded against your identifiers, and each one has its own certification queue and its own testing window. You don’t control any of those queues. Not one. On a distribution deal with forty partners, this single line has pushed the ERP cutover a full quarter more than once.
Four of those six are inside the fence by month ten on a well-run deal. The two carrying revenue are the two that slip, and they slip for reasons that were visible in week one. Week one. That’s the argument for putting a dedicated team on this instead of adding it to a director’s existing job.
Four Seats That Carry a Post-Acquisition Programme
Most mid-market deals need three of these four, staffed on contract for the length of the window rather than hired. Titles vary by company. The work does not.
Owns the sequence and the TSA exit dates. Usually an ERP or transformation programme manager who has run a cutover before and will say no in a steering meeting. Saying no is the job.
Configures the receiving platform for a second entity. Subsidiaries, tax nexus, intercompany, pricing books, approval routing. When the receiving platform is NetSuite, multi-subsidiary consolidation in OneWorld decides how painful the first close is. NetSuite, Dynamics 365, SAP or Epicor depending on where you land.
Reconciles two masters into one, builds the load, and runs the counts that let finance sign off. Deduplication, survivorship rules, opening balances, historical transactions. Counts, not opinions.
Rebuilds the interfaces that were pointing at the seller. EDI maps, API relays, warehouse and carrier connections, and the temporary bridges that keep both estates talking until cutover. Most get deleted.
Why Leaving the Fence Up Is the Expensive Option
Two numbers explain most of the urgency. Neither is ours.
The first is the meter. TSA fees are usually priced with step-ups, so each extension period costs materially more than the initial term, and that escalation is deliberate. It exists to make you leave. By design. PwC’s work on TSA exits puts around 5% to 7% of additional deal value on the table for acquirers who get out early, and argues a well-planned exit can land in 6 to 12 months against a typical 12 to 24.
The second is when the value actually turns up. EY-Parthenon research on technology integration found that in a conventional buy-and-integrate deal, up to 70% of technology synergies are realized 18 to 36 months after close, with technology itself the third-largest transaction cost driver at about 2.5% of deal value. Put those next to a twelve-month TSA schedule and the mismatch is the whole problem. The savings show up a year after the meter was supposed to stop. Sometimes two.
“The software is almost never the hard part. Somebody has to decide whose customer record wins, and that person has a day job.”
Against those, contract integration talent is a small line. A senior integration lead runs roughly $110 to $175 an hour in the mid-market, an ERP consultant $95 to $160, and a migration engineer $85 to $140, with regional spread on top. Foretopia’s 2026 delivery benchmarks put a blended specialist rate near $215 an hour on regulated work, which is the ceiling rather than the norm. One month of avoided TSA extension usually covers a quarter of the team. Run that math first.
How a Twelve-Month Exit Is Actually Sequenced
Ranges below assume a single acquired entity under roughly $150M in revenue with one ERP and one warehouse. Multi-site or multi-country deals stretch stages three and four, not stage one.
- 01
Inventory and Entanglement
Weeks one through six. Both estates walked and written down, including the shared services nobody put on the TSA schedule. Ugly and non-negotiable.
- 02
Sequence and Exit Dates
Weeks four through eight, overlapping. Every service gets a target exit date, a dependency list and an owner. Trading partner outreach starts here, well before a cutover date exists. Start early.
- 03
Early Exits
Months two through five. Payroll, identity, email, devices, expense and anything else that is bounded. Fee reduction starts landing on the P&L while the hard work is still in design. Real money, early.
- 04
Build, Reconcile, Rehearse
Months four through ten. Receiving platform configured for the new entity, interfaces rebuilt, master data reconciled, then at least two full dress rehearsals with real volumes and a real rollback plan. Two, minimum.
- 05
Cutover and the Last Exit
Months ten through twelve. Order to cash moves, hypercare runs four to six weeks, and the final TSA service gets terminated in writing. Terminate it in writing or it renews.
When You Want This Desk, and When You Want a Different One
This one is scoped to the deal window, and it starts where diligence stops. Before you sign, the question is what you are buying, which is technical due diligence for M&A. After you sign, it becomes what you do with it.
If your problem is six systems that disagree and no acquisition attached, the merge itself is the job and that’s business systems consolidation and data migration staffing. Different desk.
Individual pieces have their own benches. Moving history and reconciling masters is ERP data migration staffing. Rebuilding the interfaces that pointed at the seller is API and integration architect staffing, or NetSuite integration specialist staffing if you’re landing on NetSuite. The weeks after the cutover weekend belong to go-live and hypercare support, which is the stage acquirers underestimate most reliably. Reliably.
If the acquired business is a distributor or a DTC brand, its order flow is its own animal and ecommerce and wholesale ERP staffing covers that shape. Manufacturers land on manufacturing ERP staffing. And if what the programme really needs is a leader for eighteen months rather than a plan, a fractional CIO for ERP and digital transformation is the cheaper answer than a search.
Reviewed by Colin Boothe, CIO at Foretopia
Colin has spent eight years in ERP and business operations consulting, most of it inside NetSuite, connecting ERP, WMS and AI stacks for companies that outgrew their systems. He came into his current role through an acquisition, which is a different vantage point from advising on one. He was the acquired side. He stood up a full tech stack for a wholesale and ecommerce business scaling past $250M in about seven months.
The delivery benchmarks and the integration detail on this page come from his practice, anonymized. Placement figures and contract rate ranges are ours. His standing position is that the systems are rarely the constraint, that the org chart and the process usually are, and that the fastest integrations are the ones where somebody was given authority to decide whose record wins on day three instead of month seven. Day three.
Three Ways Acquirers Buy This
The bench is the same in all three. What changes is who carries the plan and how long you keep the seat after the last exit.
Contract Team, Deal-Length
Three or four specialists on KORE1 W-2s for the length of the window, scaling down as services exit. Then it ends. Ends when the last TSA line terminates.
Contract Staffing →Scoped Project
One workstream with a defined end. A payroll and identity exit, an EDI re-point, or a single ERP cutover, priced to the milestone rather than the month. Fixed end date.
Project Staffing →Convert the Seat
Serial acquirers keep the integration lead. If you’re buying again in eighteen months, that knowledge is worth more permanent than rented.
Direct Hire details →Common Questions
When should we start staffing the integration, before or after close?
Before. Sign-to-close is when the inventory and sequencing work should happen, so that day one of ownership starts on a plan rather than on a discovery exercise you’re now paying TSA fees to run.
Antitrust rules limit what the two teams can share pre-close, and a good integration lead knows exactly where that line sits. Ask early. Plenty of the work is on your side of it anyway. What does your receiving platform need to accept a second entity, and who on your team is losing half their week to this.
How long does post-acquisition systems integration usually take?
Six to twelve months for a single acquired entity with one ERP and one warehouse, and eighteen to twenty-four for a multi-site or multi-country business. Payroll and identity exit in the first quarter. Order to cash almost always goes last.
Duration tracks the number of trading partners and the state of the master data far more than it tracks revenue. Partners and data. A $60M distributor with sixty EDI partners is a longer programme than a $300M services business with none.
Can our internal IT team just do this?
They can do part of it, and they should own the decisions. What they usually cannot absorb is the eight to fourteen months of full-time execution on top of running the business, which is where the schedule quietly slips.
The pattern we see is a director who takes it on, does well for a quarter, then gets pulled into a system outage or an audit. Progress stops for six weeks and nobody notices until a TSA date passes. Then it’s a fire. Contract capacity around your own people is usually the cheaper structure, not a replacement for them.
What does a post-acquisition integration team cost?
A three-person contract team runs roughly $55,000 to $85,000 a month all-in at mid-market rates, and most mid-market programmes need that team for eight to fourteen months with the headcount tapering as services exit.
Set it against the meter. TSA extension fees commonly step up 15% to 30% per extension period, so a single quarter of avoided extension on a mid-sized schedule tends to cover a meaningful slice of the team. That’s the comparison a CFO will actually run. Run it.
Should we move the acquired company onto our ERP or leave it where it is?
Leave it only if you have a written reason and a review date. Running two ERPs permanently means two closes, two master data sets and a consolidation layer somebody has to maintain forever, which is a real cost that never shows up as a line item.
Some reasons to wait hold up fine. A different regulatory regime, a genuinely better system on their side, or a second acquisition already in diligence that changes the target platform. Those hold up. What sinks acquirers is drift, where nobody decided and eighteen months later it’s just how things are. Drift is the enemy.
What gets missed most often?
Shared services that never made the TSA schedule. A seller-hosted SFTP endpoint, a certificate on a seller-owned domain, a reporting server, a carrier account in the seller’s name. Each is small. Together they’re a month.
Second place goes to trading partner re-onboarding, because the queues belong to other companies and cannot be compressed by paying more. Third is the historical data question, which people defer until a finance leader asks for a three-year comparison two weeks before cutover. Two weeks.
Do you staff carve-outs and divestitures too, or only acquisitions?
Both. A carve-out is the same work run backwards, standing up systems for a business that has never existed on its own, and it’s usually harder because there’s no receiving platform waiting.
On the sell side the constraint is different again. You’re the one providing the services, so somebody has to run somebody else’s operation to an SLA while your own team is being reduced. We staff that seat as well. It wants a steadier operator than a cutover specialist.
Send us the TSA service schedule and the two system names. We’ll tell you on one call which seats you need and which of your own people should keep the decisions.
Contract, contract-to-hire or direct hire. First qualified submittals typically inside 17 days.
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