How legacy ERPs became a liability for CFOs

In recent interviews with finance leaders, a consistent theme emerged: The platforms built to unify their operations are now holding them back. Legacy ERPs, once positioned as engines of efficiency, have become barriers to speed, insight, and growth.

Here, we detail these challenges in the leaders’ own words. You’ll hear direct quotes from:

If their experiences sound familiar, it’s time to consider that the ERP that got you here won’t get you there. 

I’m always closing and never in control

Businesses invest in an ERP to bring order to complexity. But for many CFOs, these built-to-be-standard platforms can’t keep up with the lived reality of global operations. Instead of making them more agile, these systems trap those finance teams in managing sprawling spreadsheet workarounds. 

Take taxes, for example. Data from the 2024 Tax Complexity Index shows that since 2016, tax complexity for multinationals has increased in 53 of 98 countries. According to the finance leaders we spoke to, their ERPs can’t keep up. 

Said one CFO of a 60,000-person manufacturing company operating in 40 countries:

“A lot of ERPs say they are equipped to deal with foreign currency exchange and they are far from capable of doing that. They just have one line that says ‘wins and losses’ for the exchange rate, but that also has a special taxation in some geographies.” 

The result is a constant scramble to catch up with shifting regulations. It’s like trying to avoid an oncoming car by looking in the rearview mirror. 

“ You are assuming you are paying the taxes, you're assuming things are being done correctly … ‘Hey, I didn't pay those taxes. It's not that I didn't do it on purpose, it's simply that for some reason, somebody changed the legislation yesterday.’” 

Legacy ERPs increase your risk exposure because hardcoded software is too brittle to respond to today’s mercurial fiscal policies. 

“The tariffs are just complicating everything … it’s literally like breaking your products into Lego pieces. These parts of the Lego have a tax, and these parts of the Lego don't have a tax. And that is all manual.” 

Everyone has numbers, but no one has the truth

The irony of legacy ERPs is that the systems built to create order have only added to the chaos. Instead of delivering a single source of truth, they obfuscate it. 

“Whenever I wanna see the results for the percentage of completion, I literally have to have three screens of SAP at the same time to make them make sense. Why don't I have a single view of my P&L?” 

The biggest issues are inconsistent data and fragile integrations. Most finance teams layer dozens of point solutions onto their ERP to handle things like subscription billing or asset management—functions the legacy system wasn’t built to support. The result? A dozen or more conflicting data models weave a tangled web of (mis)information.

And there’s a gap between systems that integrations can’t bridge. CRMs track contacts and opportunities. ERPs track accounts, orders, and SKUs. Sync issues are inevitable. And since legacy platforms weren’t built to support open APIs, integrations rely on fragile batch uploads, causing data latency. “Real-time” anything is out of the question. 

Rather than granting flexibility, these platforms lock you into their ecosystem. You’re forced to use their tools rather than the best-of-breed solutions that actually make your team more effective. 

A VP of Finance Operations for a logistics enterprise operating in over 70 countries described it this way: 

“ [Our previous ERP] was very constricted in terms of what customized workflows you can create. Even their integration API is not great … they still try to cross-sell you their products, versus some ‘best-of’ products that might [better] conform to your business processes.” 

The data you need exists, but it's buried under stale, inconsistent, and conflicting numbers. Try to answer a simple question like, “What’s our projected cash flow next quarter?” and the net result is an infinite sprawl of questions. When you can’t trust your data, you can’t lead with confidence. 

A senior finance executive for a Fortune 500 equipment manufacturer feels this pain acutely. 

“As of today, 2025, people still ask me, when I do the forecast, ‘How the heck did you come up with that number?’”

My automations need constant supervision

The tools meant to automate finance now depend on human labor to function. As workloads rise and headcount stalls, CFOs are hiring people to do what their ERP promised to do automatically.

The financial leaders we interviewed say manual effort shows up everywhere, from tax reconciliation: 

“I was hiring a lot of people to get copies of all the invoices to verify that things were matching. So it was a lot of useless work.” 

And operational analysis: 

“... Customer level detail, item level detail, inventory management, stuff like that … I literally had to hire somebody internal to focus on going into these individual ERPs to get to this level of detail.”

To more strategic efforts like reporting back to the business: 

“FP&A is a very manual piece right now … how can you get into dashboarding and having reporting that doesn't require you to manually build it yourself?”

An ERP should make you faster, sharper, and more confident in your numbers. Yet ERPs meant to save time now create more work. Training new hires on how to use the system becomes its own full-time job. 

“How quickly you teach everyone the software is the biggest hiccup in that process… What the heck is a ‘transaction’? How do you use it? … That probably is the biggest challenge of them all. … They don't understand the accounting principles, but they have to use [our ERP].”

Technical debt is an opportunity cost 

If these pains resonate, the fix isn't more people or better processes. It's better infrastructure. Maybe replacing your ERP sounds like voluntarily setting fire to years of sunk implementation costs. But the effort might be worth it if your ERP is dragging your finance team under. Ask yourself these questions:

Can my system handle the world as it actually works? 

If a country changes its tax code on Tuesday, can you adjust by Wednesday? Or are you hardcoded into last year's regulations? When tariffs shift, can you model the impact without painstakingly assessing every SKU? If not, you need a platform designed to adapt to global markets. Look for native support for localization capabilities like multi‑book consolidation, multi‑currency, and local statutory compliance.

Will I have one version of the truth, or a dozen competing ones? 

Open your primary reporting dashboard. Now open your CRM. Are those the same numbers? If you're triangulating across systems to answer basic questions, you need a unified data model. Not patches and bolt‑ons, but one system that delivers a single source of truth. The options are straightforward: Either invest heavily in a modern data warehouse strategy or adopt an ERP that gives you all the functionality you need out of the box. 

Does the automation actually work, or redistribute the work? 

Count the people on your team whose job is essentially "make the ERP do what it's supposed to do." You’re likely delegating work a better platform would make invisible. Look for features like automated reconciliations and consolidations, live dashboards and reporting, continuous audit logging, integrated compliance management, and AI-assisted transaction processing.

Every manual workaround you build, every person you hire to patch over system gaps, every board meeting where you hedge on the numbers because three systems tell you three different things, your ERP wastes valuable resources you could invest in more meaningful work.