Codestone Group

An ERP change rarely stays inside finance, and at Cytoplan it reached the warehouse, the courier desk, the bank reconciliation and the web store, which made the go-live date the least of it.

Cytoplan are now live on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, having moved across from SAP Business One, which had carried the business for years. Around the core migration and re-implementation sat warehouse optimisation with Tasklet and Kardex, courier and shipping automation through ShipIT365 and Nshift, a Magento integration, banking automation with Continia, and customisations shaped around how Cytoplan works.

Delivered end to end by Diego Lother, Kelton Adams, Umer Azam and Sweta Singh. Thank you to Mitesh Thanki, Kat Mazurek, Tracy Palmer, Gabriel Long, Kelly Longmore and Jenny McArthur at Cytoplan for the trust.

A platform that was doing its job fine last quarter turns into an agenda item because a roadmap changed somewhere else. Mid-market finance and IT leaders running SAP Business ByDesign are there this year. ByDesign came off the new-sales price list in April, which changed what SAP sells to new customers while existing systems carry on running, and left a timing question with no deadline on it.

More than 80% of SAP's customer base is midsize companies, according to its own newsroom, which is a signal of where the investment is going. Toralf Andersson gives the commercial view on what the shift means for businesses weighing their next move, and Ian Merry covers the technical side: what changes, what doesn't, and where the real decision points sit.

Read the full breakdown, link in the comments.

SAP Business ByDesign to S/4HANA: what the move involves SAP removed ByDesign from its new-customer price list in 2026. Here is what moving to SAP Cloud ERP actually involves, where projects go wrong, and what success looks like.

Ask a finance team why a forecast moved and the honest answer is often that they will know by the end of the week.

That lag is what SAP's FP&A Partner Blitz kickoff was about, and Sam Ferri and Simon Lewis-Head were there for Codestone. The focus was financial planning and analysis with AI embedded in it, giving finance leaders real-time insight into their business so they can react quicker as markets change. SAP EPM is where that sits.

SAP are running a session on 8 October for finance leaders who want to see it working. Registration is in the comments.

If your team still spends its day in the SAP Business One desktop client, it is usually because the Web Client could not yet do the work. FP2608 closes that gap, and its 130 new features land on the things that kept people on the desktop: MRP, Pick & Pack, bank and internal reconciliations, recurring journals, price lists, stock revaluation and General Ledger reporting. Your bespoke add-ons can move over too, converted by our team, and Ask AI will answer questions from your business data. The more of the team working this way, the fewer Remote Desktop and Azure Virtual Desktop sessions you pay for. David Knight walks through it on Thursday 1 October at 2pm, in 30 minutes, with a live look at the highlights.

Business ByDesign came off SAP's price list for new customers on 20 April 2026. That got read as a shutdown. It wasn't, and the product's own release history says so: the 26.08 update went live in August with the updated German annual VAT return, France-compliant e-invoicing through SAP DRC, Austria's new 4.9% tax rate and matching tax codes, and Form 131 for TDS certificates in India. That's a live platform doing current statutory compliance work on a quarterly cycle, not one being wound down.

What's changed is where SAP is putting its own investment for new customers, which is a fair reason to review your options even without a deadline forcing the decision. We've written up what a switch to a new ByDesign partner looks like, week by week, including the contract questions worth asking before you sign anything.

Read the full article below

The month end fear is reasonable. Seamless is not a plan. You know the support is not good enough. What stops you is a picture of month end going wrong with your name on it. Here is what a ByDesign handover actually involves, including the awkward parts.

Only 19% of UK finance functions call their own digital maturity advanced, and 42% describe themselves as basic or early stage. At the same time, 53% of finance leaders expect AI to be the most influential force on their own role, according to Wolters Kluwer's 2026 Future Ready CFO Report.

That gap, between where the ambition sits and where the foundations are, is the one worth reading closely. The same UK respondents scored strongly on collaboration across the CTO, CFO, CIO and CSO, 90% against 84% globally, which suggests the will to fix it exists. What's less clear is whether that collaboration is pointed at the right starting problem yet.

Codestone is CCH Tagetik's first and highest-status UK partner. The UK regional cut of the report is worth 20 minutes if AI readiness is somewhere on your agenda this year. Link in the comments.

Welcome to Codestone, Pete Beesoon.
Pete has joined us as Support Team Lead, taking on the team our clients reach first when something needs sorting. Knowing when to step in and when to let the team handle it is what good leadership on a support desk looks like.

Great to have you with us, Pete.