Moving from 1C to Business Central

For groups with several entities, the structural decisions are covered in multi-entity and intercompany, and the partner question in working with a nearshore partner.

Since 2022 more and more Ukrainian companies are dropping 1C — software of Russian origin that has lost official support in Ukraine. Microsoft's Business Central is a reliable, global replacement with cloud infrastructure in the EU.

We handle the switch end-to-end: from auditing your 1C to launching Business Central and training the team. The core principle is a parallel period, where the old system runs until the last day and the transfer happens with no business downtime.

If you are the parent company

Most people reading this page in English are not the Ukrainian business itself. They are the group it reports into: a parent company in London or Chicago, a private equity fund that has just acquired a Ukrainian entity, a group CFO who discovered during consolidation that one subsidiary runs software nobody at head office can read.

That situation has its own complications, and they are not technical.

Nobody at head office can audit the system

1C interfaces and documentation are in Russian or Ukrainian. Your auditors cannot open it, your group finance team cannot verify a balance without asking the local accountant, and the local accountant becomes a single point of failure for an entire subsidiary. That is a governance problem long before it is an IT problem.

Consolidation runs on trust rather than data

Numbers arrive as a spreadsheet each month. They may be correct, but nothing in the group can verify them without going through one person. Moving the subsidiary onto Business Central puts it on the same platform the rest of the group can read, with an audit trail in English.

The provenance question will come up

Software of Russian origin in a group's technology stack is a question at due diligence, at audit, and increasingly from banks and insurers. It is rarely a blocker on its own — but it is always a conversation, and it always arrives at an inconvenient moment.

What changes for the group

Business Central runs multiple languages on one database, so the Kyiv team keeps working in Ukrainian while group finance reads exactly the same records in English. This is usually the point at which the project stops looking like a cost and starts looking like control.

Ukrainian statutory accounting still applies

Worth being direct about this, because it is where international projects go wrong. Business Central does not ship with Ukrainian statutory accounting in the base product. VAT, tax invoices and the ЄРПН registry are covered by a partner localisation, and someone has to own it.

The practical consequence: a global implementation partner without a Ukrainian localisation cannot deliver this project alone, no matter how strong they are elsewhere. The usual arrangement is a global partner for group templates and a local partner for statutory compliance — and the two need to agree who owns which layer before configuration starts, not after.

Three risks specific to cross-border projects

What it costs and how long it takes

For a subsidiary of ten to twenty users, a finance-first move typically runs eight to sixteen weeks. Licences are $80–110 per user per month depending on tier; the implementation itself usually lands in the range of $6,000–10,000 for a project of that size. The full breakdown is in what migrating from 1C costs.

The biggest variable is not headcount and not distance. It is the state of the master data in 1C — duplicate counterparties, inconsistent item codes, balances that have never been reconciled. That work can start before any contract is signed, and it is set out in the data preparation checklist.

If you are evaluating whether the move is worth making at all, the comparison with 1C covers what actually differs, and the regulatory position in Ukraine covers what is and is not prohibited.

Why a Ukrainian partner

We are based in Kyiv, we work in English and Ukrainian, and we have done these migrations from the inside. That matters in two specific ways: we can read the 1C configuration your team built over the last decade, and we know which parts of Ukrainian statutory accounting genuinely require a workaround rather than a preference.

For a group, the practical arrangement is usually straightforward: we handle the Ukrainian entity and its statutory layer, your existing partner keeps the group template, and the two are agreed up front.