Don't Rebuild Your Workarounds in Dynamics 365: A Guide for Distributors
How ERP workarounds multiply, and how to keep them from following you into Dynamics 365 Business Central or F&SCM.
The fastest way to waste a Dynamics 365 project is to recreate every spreadsheet you're trying to escape. We see it in distribution implementations all the time: the old workarounds get written up as requirements, then rebuilt as customizations. The monsters move into the new house.
Avoiding that starts with understanding how workarounds grow, then sorting them before design begins.
How a Quick Fix Turns Into a Monster
Workarounds follow a predictable path. The quick fix: the old ERP can't spread a new tariff across receipts, so someone builds a landed cost sheet. The habit: the sheet runs every week, and a second person starts using it. The dependency: only one person understands it. The monster: opening a new warehouse or channel means rebuilding it, and warehouse and finance stop agreeing on inventory value.
The cost is real but scattered. With the BLS median for bookkeeping and accounting clerks at $24.36 an hour (May 2025), one six-hour weekly workaround costs about $7,600 a year in wages, and five cost about $38,000. (Illustrative: 6 hours x $24.36 x 52 weeks.) The exposure is bigger still: merchant wholesalers held $964.2 billion in inventory in August 2026, and much of the decision-making behind that inventory runs through side spreadsheets.
Why Workarounds Survive an ERP Project
Workarounds become requirements because they're how the team describes its work. "We need a tab that calculates duty by container" is really a description of a landed cost need. If nobody asks what problem the tab solves, the project builds the tab.
They also affect what's possible next. Census Bureau data shows 32% of U.S. firms with 100 to 249 employees used AI as of May 2026. Copilot and other AI features work from the data inside Dynamics 365, so every workaround you rebuild outside the standard data model is data those features can't use.
What a Useful Workaround Inventory Captures
A list of file names is not enough. For each workaround, capture five things: who owns it, how many hours it takes each week, which system data it pulls from, what decision or transaction it supports, and what breaks if it stops. That last question separates the workarounds that hold the business together from the ones that only exist out of habit.
Bring the inventory into fit-gap sessions. When a team asks for a custom report or a new field, the inventory shows the problem behind the request, and the conversation shifts from "rebuild this tab" to "which standard feature handles this?" In our experience, that one change keeps scope tighter and go-live cleaner than almost anything else in a distribution project.
Breaking the Cycle During and After Go-Live
Inventory every workaround before design and put an owner and hour count on each. Map each one to standard capability. Decide on the remainder: process change, extension or accept it. Retire the old files on a set date after go-live. Guard against new ones by giving every new spreadsheet an owner and an expiration date.
See the Seven Most Common Distribution Workarounds Replaced
Western Computer has implemented Microsoft business applications for nearly 40 years, with 1,750+ implementations. Join us to see the seven workarounds distributors bring to us most, and how Business Central and F&SCM replace each one. Our Business Central vs. F&SCM guide for distributors is a good primer. Register for 7 Questions That Haunt Every Distributor on Thursday, October 29 at 2 pm ET. Every registrant gets the recording.