What an ERP Health Check Involves - and What It Costs
By Lee Nash · 28 July 2026 · 7 min read
An ERP health check is a structured, time-boxed review of your ERP system — its data, configuration, licensing, security, integrations and how people actually use it — that ends in a prioritised findings report telling you what's wrong, how much each problem is hurting you, and what it would take to fix. A proper one takes between two and ten working days and costs somewhere between £1,500 and £8,000 depending on scope and system size. A genuinely free review exists too, but it's a two-hour scan, not the same thing — and I'll be straight about the difference below.
Most vendors won't publish that cost. We think hiding it is the tell. If a firm won't give you a range before they've seen your system, the "health check" is usually a sales funnel wearing a lab coat.
What a health check actually examines
A real review is a checklist, not a conversation. Here's what a thorough one looks at, and the kind of red flag each area surfaces.
| Area examined | What it checks | Typical red flag it surfaces |
|---|---|---|
| Data quality | Duplicates, orphaned records, blank mandatory fields, stale master data | 4,000 duplicate customers; 30% of items with no posting group |
| Chart of accounts & dimensions | COA structure, dimension design, posting rules | Dimensions used as a substitute for a proper COA; unbalanced analysis |
| Configuration vs best practice | Setup against the standard baseline for your version | Manual workarounds baked in because setup was never finished |
| Licensing fit & spend | Licence type, user count, Premium vs Essentials, unused seats | Paying Premium for users who only need Team Member |
| Security & permissions | Permission sets, admin sprawl, segregation of duties | One "SUPER" login shared by finance; no SoD between AP and payments |
| Integrations | Connectors, sync failures, error logs, retry behaviour | A bank feed silently failing for six weeks |
| Performance | Slow pages, report run times, database bloat, locking | Month-end reports timing out; oversized change-log tables |
| Process fit & adoption | Whether the system matches how the business runs | Half the team working in spreadsheets alongside the ERP |
| Reporting | Report accuracy, source-of-truth conflicts, manual rekeying | Three versions of the same P&L that don't agree |
The point isn't to produce a 90-page audit nobody reads. It's to find the handful of issues costing you real money or real risk, and to rank them.
What you actually get out of it
The deliverable is a prioritised findings report, not a lecture. A good one gives you, for every finding:
- The issue, described in plain terms with evidence — a screenshot, a record count, a query result.
- The impact — financial, operational or compliance — rated high/medium/low.
- The effort to fix — hours or days, and whether it's config, data cleanup or development.
- A recommendation — do it now, plan it in, or leave it alone.
That impact-versus-effort ranking is the whole value. It lets a finance director walk into a board meeting and say "these three things cost us four days a month; fixing them is six days of work." Everything else is noise.
Free review vs paid in-depth check — the honest difference
Both have their place. What matters is not pretending one is the other.
| Free review | Paid health check | |
|---|---|---|
| Duration | 1–2 hours | 2–10 days |
| Depth | Surface scan, guided demo | Hands-on, evidence-based |
| Access needed | A screen-share | Read access to your environment |
| Data analysis | Eyeballed | Queried and quantified |
| Output | Verbal summary, a few notes | Written prioritised report |
| Cost | £0 | £1,500–£8,000 |
| Honest purpose | Qualify whether a deeper check is worth it | Give you a decision-grade action plan |
A free review is genuinely useful for spotting the obvious — a licensing mismatch, an unused module, a glaringly broken integration. If your problem is one big obvious thing, the free version may be all you need, and a decent consultant will tell you so rather than upsell you.
Where free reviews fall down is anything that needs measurement: data quality percentages, security exposure across permission sets, performance profiling, dimension design. You cannot assess those by watching someone click around for an hour.
Realistic cost and duration
For a single-entity Business Central setup with a handful of users, budget £1,500–£3,000 and two to four days. For a multi-company, multi-currency environment with integrations and 30-plus users, it's more like £4,000–£8,000 and five to ten days. Sage 200 and NetSuite sit in similar territory; the variable is complexity, not the badge.
If someone quotes £15,000 for a "health check," they're selling a re-implementation scoping exercise and calling it something friendlier. If someone quotes £300, you're getting an hour of someone's time and a template.
When you do NOT need one
This is the part most firms leave out, so here it is plainly. Skip the paid health check — or start with the free review — if:
- You already know the problem. If month-end is slow because you close manually and you know it, you don't need us to confirm it. Read our guide on how to speed up your month-end close and act. A diagnostic that tells you what you already know is money wasted.
- You went live under six months ago with a reputable partner. Your configuration is probably sound; give adoption time to settle before auditing it.
- You're already committed to replacing the system. Don't pay to diagnose something you're retiring. Spend the money on requirements for the new one instead.
- It's a training problem, not a system problem. If the software works and people aren't using it well, you need enablement, not a health check.
- The issue is a single named integration or report. Point a consultant at that one thing for a day. You don't need a full sweep.
A full health check earns its fee when you have multiple nagging symptoms, no clear cause, and a decision to make — invest in the current system or move on. That's the situation it's built for.
Frequently asked questions
What does an ERP health check cost?
Between roughly £1,500 and £8,000, driven by system complexity, number of companies and how many integrations you run — not by how big your logo is. We give you a range before we start and a fixed price once we've seen the scope. Anyone who won't put a number to it before the sales call is the one to be wary of.
How long does it take?
Two to four days for a straightforward single-company setup; five to ten for a complex multi-entity environment. We need read access to your system for a few of those days, plus about two hours of your finance and IT people's time for context.
Is the free review actually any good, or just a teaser?
It's genuinely useful for the obvious stuff — licensing waste, a broken feed, an unused module — and sometimes it's all you need, in which case we'll say so. What it can't do is measure data quality, security exposure or performance, because those take hands-on analysis. Treat it as triage, not a diagnosis.
Will it just be a pitch to sell me more work?
The report stands on its own, and plenty of findings will be things you can fix yourself — we flag those as such. We make our recommendations impact-first, including "leave it alone." If a health check only ever concludes "buy more consulting," it wasn't a health check.
Ready to talk it through?
If you've got the nagging symptoms and no clear cause, start with a free review — we'll tell you honestly whether a deeper check is worth your money. No obligation, no hard sell.
Talk to our team and we'll give you a straight answer.
© 2026 Amplio Solutions Ltd · Written by Lee Nash · Built by Amplio SolutionsFollow us on LinkedIn