Most companies arrive here one of three ways, and the way is chosen to fit the company — a small business is never walked through the full ceremony:
- Express is self-serve: you sign up, the setup wizard builds your company from a business profile, you bring your data in (16.4), and you are live.
- Guided adds one rehearsal: your setup is prepared with help, your data is loaded into a rehearsal company, you walk through your own processes on your own numbers in one review session, sign off, and go live.
- Full CRP (Conference Room Pilot) is the complete method for complex businesses: your requirements are recorded first, the configuration is built to model your business, and there are as many rehearsal rounds as it takes — each ending in sign-offs from your own subject-matter experts, area by area — before the final move.
Three ideas run through all three, and they are worth knowing by name:
- A snapshot is your configuration, frozen. Your chart of accounts, modules, workflow depth, roles and settings are copied into a held company labelled SNAPSHOT. It is read-only — nobody edits a snapshot. When the configuration changes, the change is made where it is exercised (in a rehearsal) and a new snapshot version is frozen from it. Secrets — payment gateway keys, mailbox passwords, AI keys — are never part of a snapshot; they are typed in by hand at go-live.
- A pilot round is a rehearsal company. It is cloned from a snapshot, loaded with your data by the Migration Runner (Chapter 0, §0.12), and used for the review sessions and for training. Rounds are never billed and never counted against your plan. Your people are given sign-ins in the rehearsal company only, with ordinary roles there. When a round ends it is archived read-only — what your experts saw stays exactly as it was — and the next round is a fresh clone, never a wiped one.
- Sign-off is by area, and blockers block. In a review session, each area (sales, procurement, the reports, the data itself) is signed off by name by the expert responsible for it. A change request marked blocking stops its area being signed off — and stops the round completing — until it is resolved or formally waived. Nothing is signed off over an open blocker.
Going live (cutover) is deliberately not "promote the rehearsal". Your production company is created fresh from the approved snapshot, the final migration runs into it, and a named checklist is worked by named people: opening balances verified against the final run's close-out, periods in place, secrets entered, real users invited — and the subscription started. Billing begins at that moment, never during a pilot.
On the Express path you can rehearse too: on the Data Migration page, Trial-run in a rehearsal copy clones your configuration into a rehearsal company (you give it its own administrator sign-in, because it is a separate company). Run the migration there first, check the close-out, and discard the rehearsal when you are done — your live company is never the guinea pig.