A well-managed Microsoft Dynamics GP (Great Plains) migration starts long before the project does. The planning window, the training time, the ability to choose an implementation partner without deadline pressure: these are assets that erode the longer the decision gets deferred.
The upgrade-versus-migrate question is where that deferral usually happens. Treated as a straightforward cost comparison, it’s easy to pick the cheaper quote and push the harder question down the road. But that harder question has a way of returning.
This article is a decision framework for GP customers who want to think through the full picture before committing to either path.
What you'll take away:
- Why upgrade and migration costs are closer than they appear, and what that means for the decision
- The hidden costs on both sides that don’t show up in a vendor quote
- The variables that determine where your business lands in this analysis
- When Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC) is the right destination, when Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (F&O) is the better fit, and when staying on GP makes sense for now
- Why the depth of your implementation partner’s knowledge across all three platforms determines the quality of the advice you get
The cost of a GP upgrade is getting harder to justify
The visible costs are the licence renewal, implementation fees, testing cycles, and downtime. Most businesses budget for those. But it’s easy to underestimate everything else:
- Annual maintenance and support, which continues indefinitely as long as you stay on GP
- Hardware refresh cycles, which for on-premises installations recur every few years.
- IT overhead: patching, backups, access management, SQL performance, penetration testing, security hardening. That all falls on your internal IT team on-premises. With Business Central, Microsoft handles this.
- Workarounds for the cloud gap: remote access configurations, manual process workarounds, integration compromises that accumulate over time
- Productivity drag from a system that wasn’t built for how businesses operate today
Add to this the fact that GP’s talent pool is shrinking. That’s a strategic cost that doesn’t show up in a quote. The specialist developers and consultants who know the system deeply are gradually retiring or moving on. As this continues, support will become rarer and more expensive, well before the 2031 Extended Support deadline arrives.
How does the cost of a migration to BC compare?
A Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central migration is a project, and it carries real costs: scoping, implementation, data migration, testing and UAT, training, and change management. None of that is free, and any honest assessment should include it.
There are also costs businesses consistently underestimate:
- Testing and UAT. This is where most migration timelines slip. Adequate testing takes time, and compressing it creates risk.
- Training and human resources. Staff need time to acclimatise to a new system. There will be a productivity dip. The earlier the migration happens (and the better the training), the shorter and shallower that dip tends to be.
- Third-party add-ons. GP customisations and add-ons don’t automatically carry across. Some won’t exist in BC at all. Businesses need to audit what they have and plan for replacements or rebuilds.
- Encumbrance accounting. BC doesn’t include this out of the box. Braintree has developed workarounds, but it needs to be surfaced early, not discovered mid-project.
Reporting tools need special attention
Two GP tools that cause the most friction in migrations are Crystal Reports and the Management Report Writer. Recreating Crystal Report functionality in BC takes developer time. BC’s own reporting tools are powerful. They’re also among the most underutilised features in the system, which means businesses often don’t realise what they’re gaining until they’ve invested in learning it properly.
For some businesses, the complexity of their operations pushes them past BC toward Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. This isn’t determined by user count. It’s driven by the complexity of financial operations, multi-entity structures, regulatory requirements, and process depth. Both paths are worth understanding before committing to either.
What the choice is really between
Option A: Pay 80-85% of a migration’s cost to extend your time on a platform Microsoft is winding down. Then migrate anyway, under more pressure, closer to end-of-life, with fewer skilled consultants available, less planning time, and a weaker negotiating position with implementation partners.
Option B: Invest now, on your own timeline, with full control over planning and resourcing, and start capturing the upside of a modern platform from day one: cloud-native infrastructure, native Microsoft 365 integration, Power BI, Teams, and Copilot capabilities built in.
What your GP environment specifically brings to this calculation
No two GP installations are identical. The factors below determine where a specific business sits in this analysis:
- Customisation depth. Heavily customised GP installations increase both upgrade cost and migration complexity. The more has been built on top of GP over the years, the more that needs to be assessed, rebuilt, or replaced.
- Hardware cycle timing. If you’ve made a significant infrastructure investment since 2023, a BC migration conversation probably doesn’t make sense yet. If you haven’t, it almost certainly does, because a hardware refresh and a migration are two costs heading your way, and sequencing matters.
- Your Microsoft roadmap. If Copilot, AI-assisted workflows, and Power Platform automation are on your strategic agenda, staying on-premises carries a cost beyond the financial. GP is not built for that future.
- Technical debt. Skipped upgrades and deferred patches compound over time. The longer a GP installation has been running without maintenance, the higher the hidden cost embedded in it.
- Integration requirements. GP’s integration capabilities were designed for a different era. BC is built for the connected, API-first environment that modern businesses operate in.
Not every GP customer should migrate right now
There are scenarios where upgrading GP is the more rational near-term choice, primarily where a recent infrastructure investment makes the timing genuinely wrong for migration. Any advisor telling you otherwise isn’t giving you the full picture. Braintree’s job is to help you understand where you actually sit, not to push you toward a predetermined answer.
December 2029 is the deadline, but your migration timeline starts well before that
GP Mainstream Support ends in December 2029. Extended Support runs to April 2031. Those dates sound comfortable from where most businesses are sitting today. They won’t feel that way in 2027.
The businesses that migrate early get:
- A structured, properly planned project rather than a compressed one
- Time to train staff before the system goes live, not during
- The option to phase the migration if needed
- A stronger negotiating position. As 2029 approaches, demand for qualified GP migration partners will increase. Capacity will tighten and costs will rise.
Some businesses have waited too long and committed to a competitor platform, only to find that critical functionality wasn’t there. Getting back to GP, or finding an alternative path, came at a significant cost in time, money, and disruption.
GP expertise is rare. BC and F&O expertise is hard-won. Having all three is rarer still.
Most GP consultants know GP. Most BC or F&O partners know the destination. Braintree knows both, with deep, active practices across Dynamics GP, Business Central, and Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. That matters for one straightforward reason: the advice you get on whether and when to migrate, and where to migrate to, is only as good as the advisor’s knowledge of all three systems.
Braintree’s Seer is a diagnostic tool that takes your specific business requirements and generates a percentage fit score for BC versus F&O. It’s a structured, data-driven output that tells you which platform your business is actually built for, before you commit to a project.
The framework is the same, but the numbers are yours
The numbers and variables in this article are a starting point. The Discovery Assessment is where they become yours: specific to your GP installation, your complexity, your timeline, and your strategic direction.
If you’re a GP customer weighing your options, that’s the conversation worth having. The earlier you have it, the more choices you’ll have when it matters.
Book a Discovery Assessment with Braintree to understand where your business sits in this framework.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Microsoft ending support for Dynamics GP, and what does that practically mean for my business?
Microsoft is ending support for Dynamics GP to concentrate investment on cloud ERP, principally Dynamics 365 Business Central. GP will not be developed further. For your business, this means a fixed deadline. After GP’s end-of-support dates, Microsoft will stop issuing tax and regulatory updates, security patches and technical support. Your system will still run, but over time it will fall behind on compliance, become harder to secure, and grow more difficult to integrate with modern tools. The longer you stay on GP past those dates, the more those risks compound.
Will we lose our historical data and reporting when we migrate from Dynamics GP to Business Central?
Which data and companies can be migrated using Microsoft’s GP migration tool and what happens with older GP versions?
- Upgrade to GP 2015 first, then use the standard migration tool
- Go straight to a full Business Central implementation, bypassing the migration tool entirely
What are the main technical risks in a GP to Business Central migration (integrations, customisations, add-ons) and how do you manage them?
- Customisations and add-ons built for GP often have no direct equivalent in Business Central. Some can be replaced by native BC functionality or AppSource solutions, others can’t. The risk is discovering this too late.
- Integrations to payroll systems, CRMs, ecommerce platforms or industry-specific tools are frequently undocumented and complex. When they break post-migration, the impact is immediate.
- Data quality is the most consistently underestimated risk. Years of accumulated inconsistencies don't migrate cleanly and can corrupt reporting and opening balances.
