Change management

What it means

Change management is making a change actually stick: new software, a different invoice approval route, moving to electronic invoicing, switching accounting providers. The technical part is usually the smaller half of the work.

It covers who owns the change, who it touches, the sequence and the date, what happens to the old data and how people are trained. Without that, a change decays into old and new procedures running side by side.

Change management is not the same as project management. A project ends on go-live day, when the system is installed and the data migrated. A change ends only when people work the new way and stop drifting back to the old one. That is why it helps to set a measurable KPI for after launch, such as the share of invoices approved in the new system.

How it works in practice

In a handover of the books, change management is what decides the outcome: the cut-off date, how documents are transferred, system access and the workflow for the coming months.

Writing the new routine down as an SOP and walking through it with everyone affected works well - the stakeholders are not only the accountants but sales and the warehouse too.

When a client moves from paper envelopes to sending documents through an app, we set a short transition period in which we accept both, then clearly close the paper route. During the document digitisation we send a monthly list of missing documents, which shows who is not yet using the new routine.

What to watch out for

The commonest mistake is going live on the first of the month with no overlap. An accounting change is made as of a date with a closed period and agreed balances behind it; otherwise the errors migrate into the new system along with the data.

Another mistake is introducing several changes at once: new software, a new approval route and a new provider in the same month. When a problem appears, nobody can tell what caused it, and people blame everything on the novelty. Stage the changes with a clear milestone each and let one settle before starting the next.