Blue Column Consulting BLUE COLUMN CONSULTING

ERP INTEGRATIONS & SYSTEM AUDITS

The pillar of support that holds up your business.

Blue Column Consulting is an independent ERP practice. I connect the systems your business runs on, prove that access and data hold up under scrutiny, and automate the work nobody should be doing by hand — working directly with you, not through a delivery team.

Senior-level work, no handoff to juniors

Fixed scope, retainer, or hourly advisory

Cloud, on-prem, and custom-built systems

Every project leaves behind documentation

SERVICES

Six ways I take weight off your ERP.

Most engagements start with one of these and grow from there. If what you need sits next to this list rather than on it, ask — ERP work rarely arrives in tidy categories.

01

ERP system integrations

Getting your ERP talking to the systems around it — CRM, WMS, banks, payroll, e-commerce, homegrown tools. Built to be monitored, not babysat.

02

License & access role audits

A clear picture of who holds which license, what each role can actually reach, and where you are paying for access nobody uses.

03

Segregation of duties reviews

Conflicting permissions found, ranked by real risk, and written up so auditors, IT, and the business all read the same story.

04

Large-scale data analytics

Custom analysis across millions of rows — full-population testing, trend work, and the questions your standard reports cannot answer.

05

Reconciliations

Subledger to GL, system to system, pre- and post-migration. Repeatable routines instead of a spreadsheet only one person understands.

06

Task automation

The month-end exports, uploads, and rekeying that quietly eat your team's week — handed over to a process that runs on schedule.

ENGAGEMENTS

Flexible by design, not by accident.

One person, no bench to keep busy. That means the shape of the engagement can follow the shape of the problem.

Scoped project

A defined deliverable with a written scope and a fixed fee. Best for integrations, audits, and migrations with a clear finish line.

Typically 2–10 weeks

Fractional support

A standing block of hours each month for the ERP work that never stops arriving. Predictable cost, no headcount.

Monthly retainer

Advisory & overflow

A second opinion before you commit, or specialist capacity behind an implementation partner already on site.

Hourly or subcontract

HOW A PROJECT RUNS

1

Intro call

Thirty minutes on what is breaking and what you have already tried. No pitch deck.

2

Written scope

Deliverables, access needed, assumptions, and price — on one page, before any work starts.

3

Build & validate

Short check-ins, tested against your real data, with your team seeing results as they land.

4

Handoff

Documentation, runbooks, and a walkthrough so the work survives without me.

PLATFORMS & SYSTEMS

Named systems, and the ones without a name.

A good share of ERP work happens in software that was written in-house fifteen years ago. That counts too.

Full platform list →

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Finance & Operations, Business Central

Sage

Intacct and the Sage 100/300 family

Custom on-premises systems

SQL Server, Oracle DB, flat-file interfaces

Data warehousing

Warehouse builds, ETL, and reporting layers

Also comfortable in cloud middleware, API-first integrations, Power Platform, and scripted automation.

founder headshot

ABOUT

You will be working with me, start to finish.

Blue Column Consulting is a one-person practice, and that is the point. The person on your intro call is the person writing the integration, running the audit, and sitting with your controller at month-end. Nothing is translated through a delivery team.

{{ founderName }} has spent {{ yearsExperience }} years inside ERP implementations, upgrades, and audits — enough of them to know that the technical problem is usually the easy half. Based in {{ location }}.

More about how I work →

SERVICES

What I do, and what you get for it.

Six areas of work, each scoped and priced on its own. Engagements often combine two or three — an access audit that turns into a role redesign, or an integration that surfaces a reconciliation problem worth fixing first.

01

ERP system integrations

Your ERP rarely stands alone. I build and repair the connections between it and everything else, so data moves once and arrives correct.

WHAT IT COVERS

API and file-based interfaces between ERP, CRM, WMS, and e-commerce

Bank, payroll, tax, and third-party feed integrations

Middleware configuration, retry logic, and error alerting

Rescuing interfaces built by someone who has since left

You end up with: a working interface, a monitoring plan, mapping documentation, and a test log showing what was validated.

02

User license & access role audits

Licensing gets decided once and then drifts for years. This is the review that tells you what you are actually paying for and who can actually do what.

WHAT IT COVERS

License type versus actual usage, user by user

Dormant, duplicate, and departed-employee accounts

Role and privilege mapping down to entry point level

Right-sizing recommendations ahead of renewal

You end up with: a user-level license register, a role-to-privilege map, and a prioritised list of changes to make before you renew.

03

Segregation of duties reviews

Where one person can create a vendor and pay it. Found, ranked by exposure, and written up in language your auditors accept.

WHAT IT COVERS

A conflict ruleset built around your processes, not a generic template

Conflicts tested against live role assignments

Compensating controls where separation is not practical

Remediation sequencing so the business keeps working

You end up with: a conflict matrix, a risk-ranked findings report, and a remediation plan you can hand to IT and to your auditor.

04

Large-scale data analytics

Analysis that runs against the whole population instead of a sample, on datasets too large for a spreadsheet to hold.

WHAT IT COVERS

Full-population testing for audit and compliance work

Duplicate payment, pricing, and margin analysis

Custom extracts and models across multiple source systems

Data quality profiling before a migration or warehouse build

You end up with: the analysis, the query or script that produced it, and a written note on method and limitations so the result holds up when questioned.

05

Reconciliations

Making two systems agree, and building the routine that keeps them agreeing after I leave.

WHAT IT COVERS

Subledger to general ledger, system to system

Pre- and post-migration balance and record-count proofs

Root-cause work on recurring variances

Repeatable month-end routines with exception reporting

You end up with: a clean reconciliation, an explanation of every material difference, and a routine your team can run without me.

06

Task automation

The recurring manual work that has quietly become someone's job description. Moved onto a schedule, with a log of what it did.

WHAT IT COVERS

Scheduled imports, exports, and journal uploads

Report generation and distribution

Approval and notification workflows

Retiring the spreadsheet that sits between two systems

You end up with: the automation running in your environment, a runbook, and an owner on your side who knows how to change it.

Adjacent work is fair game. Upgrade readiness reviews, report rebuilds, master data cleanups, training a team on a system they inherited — if it lives near your ERP, start the conversation.

How engagements work

ENGAGEMENTS & PRICING

Three ways to work together.

No minimum contract, no seat you have to fill, no bench being kept busy behind the scenes. Pick the shape that fits the problem — and change it later if the problem changes.

FIXED FEE

Scoped project

A defined deliverable, a written scope, and a price agreed before work starts. The most common way engagements begin.

GOOD FOR

A single integration, end to end

A license, access, or SoD audit

A migration reconciliation

Automating one painful process

HOW IT WORKS

Fee quoted per scope, not per hour

Billed in two or three milestones

Scope changes re-quoted in writing

Typically 2–10 weeks elapsed

MONTHLY RETAINER

Fractional support

A standing block of hours each month. For companies that need ERP capability but not another full-time salary.

GOOD FOR

A steady queue of small ERP asks

Month-end and quarter-end support

Covering a vacant ERP analyst seat

Keeping integrations healthy

HOW IT WORKS

Agreed hours per month, one rate

A shared, visible work queue

Monthly summary of hours used

Cancel or resize with 30 days' notice

HOURLY / SUBCONTRACT

Advisory & overflow

Short, sharp input when you need a specialist opinion — or an extra pair of hands behind a partner already on site.

GOOD FOR

Reviewing a vendor's proposal or estimate

A second opinion on a stalled project

Interview support when hiring ERP staff

Implementation partners needing capacity

HOW IT WORKS

Hourly, billed to the quarter hour

No minimum, no retainer required

White-label work behind your brand

NDAs and partner paperwork welcome

HOW PRICING IS SET

You get a number before you commit.

Every quote comes from the same three questions, and I would rather tell you a scope is bigger than you hoped than discover it halfway through.

1

How clean is the data?

The single biggest driver of effort on anything involving history.

2

How many systems?

Each additional system adds mapping, testing, and people to coordinate.

3

Who signs off?

Decision-making speed on your side shapes the timeline more than the build does.

What I need from you

Read access early, write access only when needed

One named decision-maker who can approve scope

An hour of the person who knows the current process

A test environment, if one exists

When I am not the right fit

A full ERP implementation needing a large team

Day-to-day helpdesk and end-user support

Statutory audit opinions or attestation work

Anything I would be learning on your budget

Implementation partners: I take white-label subcontract work on integrations, data conversion, and access-control workstreams — happy to sit behind your brand, your PM, and your client relationship.

PLATFORMS & SYSTEMS

Cloud, on-premises, and the system nobody documented.

Deep experience in a few platforms, and a working method for the rest. Much of ERP work is reading an unfamiliar schema carefully — the pattern travels even when the product name does not.

CORE PLATFORMS

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Finance & Operations and Business Central — security roles, data entities, integrations, and the reporting layer around them.

Role, duty, and privilege modelling

Data entity and OData integrations

License type analysis

Sage

Sage Intacct and the Sage 100 and 300 family — dimensions, imports, and the interfaces that feed them.

Dimension and chart structure design

User, role, and permission reviews

Scheduled imports and reconciliations

Custom on-premises

In-house systems on SQL Server or Oracle, often with the original developer long gone and the documentation optimistic.

Schema discovery and mapping

Flat-file and SFTP interfaces

Extraction for migration or reporting

Data, warehousing & reporting

ERP data becomes useful once it lands somewhere it can be joined, tested, and trusted.

Warehouse builds

Dimensional models, staging layers, incremental loads

ETL & pipelines

Scheduled extracts, transformations, and load monitoring

SQL & scripting

Query work, stored procedures, and repeatable analysis scripts

Reporting layers

Report rebuilds and self-service datasets your team can extend

Integration tooling

REST and SOAP APIs, cloud middleware, webhooks, message queues

Automation platforms

Power Platform, scheduled jobs, and scripted workflows

Your system is not on this list?

Say what it is. Access audits, reconciliations, and analytics work translate across platforms — and if the learning curve makes me the wrong choice, I will say so on the first call.

ABOUT

One consultant, accountable for the whole thing.

Blue Column Consulting is a deliberately small practice. You get direct access to the person doing the work, and the work does not get handed down.

founder headshot

{{ founderName }}

Founder & principal consultant

The technical problem is usually the easy half. The hard half is understanding how a business actually works before you change the system it runs on.

{{ founderName }} has spent {{ yearsExperience }} years inside ERP implementations, upgrades, integrations, and audits — on the build side and the review side. That combination is the reason this practice exists: most integration problems are really control problems wearing a technical costume, and most audit findings are really design decisions nobody revisited.

Blue Column Consulting works with mid-market finance and IT teams, and as a specialist subcontractor behind implementation partners. Based in {{ location }}, working remotely with clients across [region], on site when a project genuinely needs it.

The name is the promise: a column does not draw attention to itself, it just holds the weight.

CREDENTIALS

[Certification], [Certification], [Degree] — send me your real list and I will drop it in.

INDUSTRIES

[Industry], [Industry], [Industry] — placeholder.

HOW I WORK

Say the number early

Scope and price in writing before work starts, and re-quoted in writing if the scope moves.

Leave the lights on

Documentation and runbooks are part of the deliverable, not an upsell.

Least privilege, always

Read access first, elevated access only where the task requires it, and a log of what I touched.

Decline the wrong work

If a project needs a team or a specialism I do not have, I will tell you and point you somewhere better.

FAQ

The questions that come up on the first call.

If yours is not here, ask it directly — a straight answer costs me one email and saves us both a meeting.

You are one person. What happens if you are unavailable mid-project?

Every engagement is documented as it goes, so nothing lives only in my head. For time-critical work I will tell you up front where the risk sits, and I keep relationships with other independent ERP consultants I can bring in or hand to if something happens.

How quickly can you start?

Usually within one to two weeks for a scoped project, sooner for advisory hours. Because there is no bench to schedule around, small work does not have to wait behind big work.

Do you need production access?

Read-only access to production is usually enough to start. Changes are built and tested in a sandbox where one exists, and any elevated access is requested for a named task, time-boxed, and logged.

Can you work alongside our existing ERP partner?

Yes, and it is common. I can work as a client-side specialist reviewing their work, or as a subcontractor inside their workstream. Either way the reporting lines get agreed before anything starts.

Is a segregation of duties review the same as an audit?

No. This is advisory work: I identify conflicts, rank them by exposure, and recommend fixes in a format your auditors can use. I do not issue audit opinions or attestations, and I am not a substitute for your external auditor.

Our ERP is a custom in-house system. Can you still help?

Often yes. If there is a database I can read and someone who remembers how the process is supposed to work, reconciliations, analytics, access reviews, and integrations are all workable. I will tell you after a short look whether the effort is reasonable.

How do you handle our data?

Data stays in your environment wherever possible. When extracts are needed they are limited to what the task requires, held only for the engagement, and deleted at handoff. I sign your NDA and your security paperwork.

What does an engagement cost?

Projects are quoted as a fixed fee against a written scope; retainers are a monthly rate for an agreed block of hours; advisory work is hourly with no minimum. You will have a number before you commit to anything.

CONTACT

Tell me what is not adding up.

A few sentences about the system and the symptom is enough. I reply to everything within one business day, including the ones I am not right for.

Send a note

Nothing here is required except an email address and a sentence about the problem.

Opens your email client with the message drafted — nothing is stored here.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

1

A reply within one business day, from me.

2

A 30-minute call about the system and the symptom. No slides.

3

A one-page scope and price, or an honest referral elsewhere.

Tell me what is not adding up.

Send a few sentences about the system and the symptom. If I am not the right person for it, I will tell you that too.

Send a note