ERP Implementation Checklist for Indian Manufacturers

Forty checks in six stages, from choosing an executive sponsor to re-measuring your outcomes at 90 days. It includes the India-specific items that are easy to miss: GSTIN and HSN masters, e-invoicing, stock transfers between GST registrations, job work, the accounting audit trail and Tally.

Most ERP projects are decided long before the first screen is configured. They are decided by who owns the decisions, how clean the data is and what was agreed in the contract. A good ERP implementation checklist for an Indian manufacturer therefore starts before you shortlist a vendor and runs well past go-live.


This checklist has 40 items in six stages. It adds the checks that are specific to India: GSTIN and HSN masters, e-invoicing, stock transfers between GST registrations, job work, the accounting audit-trail rule and Tally. Print it and tick items off with your project team.


Before you shortlist

Settle the why and the who first. Software choices get easier when these are written down.


  1. Write three outcomes with numbers, for example inventory days, on-time dispatch and days to close the month. Take the baseline now.
  2. Name an executive sponsor who can settle disputes between departments. Panorama's 2026 ERP Report found organisational issues the most common cause of late projects.
  3. Name a project lead on your side, with hours freed from the day job.
  4. Name one process owner each for stores, purchase, production, quality, sales and accounts.
  5. List every spreadsheet, register and WhatsApp group that holds operational data today.
  6. Write your last real order's journey on a sheet and mark every place someone re-keyed a number. Our guide to how an ERP runs one order shows the steps.
  7. Decide what goes live first: which modules and which site. Panorama found that more than a quarter of organisations used a hybrid rollout rather than going live everywhere at once.


Before you sign

These items protect you from surprises in the quote and the contract.


  1. Ask for the timeline by phase, in writing, with the hours needed from your team each week. Our guide to the ERP implementation timeline has the questions to ask.
  2. Run the demo on your own data: one real BOM, one real order and one real month-end.
  3. Speak to two customers of similar size and industry, without the vendor in the room.
  4. Get every cost in one table: subscription or licence, implementation, migration, training, support and renewal, for the first year and for five years.
  5. Ask who owns your data and your customisations, and how you get everything out if you leave: format, timing and cost.
  6. Agree in writing what go-live means and the acceptance criteria you will sign against.
  7. For cloud products, agree who applies updates and who tests them. Panorama notes that SaaS raises the importance of internal governance: someone must own security roles, reporting standards and change requests.


Before kickoff: data and Indian statutory setup

This is where Indian plants lose the most time. Our guide to ERP data migration covers the data items in detail.


  1. Clean the item master: remove duplicates, fix units, groups and status, and keep one stock unit per item with stored conversions.
  2. Clean the BOMs: every line points to an active item at the right level.
  3. Clean supplier and customer masters. Validate every GSTIN, and merge duplicate suppliers on the PAN inside the GSTIN, not on the name.
  4. Put an HSN or SAC code on every item and service. The tax on each invoice depends on it.
  5. Agree the chart of accounts and who may change it. It is a classic source of design arguments, and Panorama cites one as a cause of repeated rework.
  6. Decide how each GST registration, location and stock transfer is set up. A transfer between two registrations of the same company is treated as a supply under GST (Section 25(4) and Schedule I of the CGST Act), so the system must issue the right tax document. Confirm the details with your tax adviser.
  7. Check whether e-invoicing applies to you. If it does, confirm the system generates the invoice reference number and QR code through the government portal and raises e-way bills from the dispatch record. We have left out turnover thresholds on purpose, because they change; check the current notification.
  8. If you send material to job workers, confirm the system tracks stock at the job worker and the challans that move it.
  9. If the ERP will hold your books, confirm the audit trail. Under the Companies (Accounts) Rules, companies using accounting software must use software that records an audit trail of every transaction, keeps a dated edit log and does not let the trail be switched off, for financial years starting on or after 1 April 2023. The ICAI Journal explains the requirement.
  10. If Tally stays as your books, decide what posts into it and how often. If you still run Tally.ERP 9, note that Tally says renewal of its support subscription (TSS) for Tally.ERP 9 is discontinued from 16 August 2026, and that the product keeps working. Our Tally to ERP page and the Tally vs ERP guide cover your options.


During the build

  1. Run fit-gap workshops with each process owner and log every gap. For each one, decide whether to change the process or change the system.
  2. Keep a list of customisations and who approved each. Every one adds cost now and work at each upgrade.
  3. Keep a scope change log. Agree who may approve a change and what happens to the date and the price when one is approved.
  4. Set roles and permissions: who can approve a purchase order, change a BOM, adjust stock or post a journal, and who cannot.
  5. List the ten reports you run every month and check that each one exists in the new system.
  6. Test awkward cases: a shortage, a partial receipt, a rejected batch, a return, scrap, rework and a credit note.


Before go-live

  1. Do two trial loads and reconcile balances, not record counts. Each data owner signs off their own data.
  2. Train by role and by shift, with your own data. Schedule the second and night shifts explicitly, or they will go live untrained.
  3. Count physical stock for the cutover and load the counted quantities as opening stock.
  4. Write the cutover plan: go or no-go criteria, a runbook with owners and durations, and at least one mock go-live. Microsoft's Success by Design framework describes these as the readiness items of its Prepare phase.
  5. Agree the support and rollback plan: who answers shop-floor questions in week one, and what you do if the go-live test fails. Freeze entries in the old system before the final load.


After go-live

  1. Hold a short daily issues review for the first two weeks. ERP Research puts hypercare at 4 to 12 weeks.
  2. Retire the old spreadsheets. List every Excel still in use and close or justify each one.
  3. Reconcile your first month-end against the old numbers.
  4. Name who owns security roles, reporting standards and change requests from now on.
  5. At 90 days, re-measure the three outcomes from item 1 and decide what to switch on next.


Conclusion

The checklist comes down to three habits: decide who owns each decision, clean your data before you load it, and agree in writing what live means. The Indian items, GST masters, e-invoicing, stock transfers, job work, the audit trail and Tally, are easy to miss and costly to fix after go-live.


If you are coming off Excel, read our spreadsheet to ERP guide. To walk through this list for your own plant, talk to our team about our manufacturing ERP software.