Should we replace or modernise our system?

Keep it and support it. The system does its job. The risks are known and manageable. The money is better spent elsewhere. Support means someone to call and a system made safe to change, and that can be the whole engagement.

Modernise it in stages. The rules and the data are sound; the technology around them isn't. New screens over the same data, an API so it can talk to the tools you've bought since, AI where it pays back, one process at a time, alongside the live system. This is the answer for most of the systems we see.

Replace it. The technology can't be carried forward, or the business has changed so much that the system's model of it is wrong. Even then, replace alongside rather than all at once, with the data moved and reconciled before anything switches.

The most expensive part of any software project is working out what the system needs to do. You did that years ago. Your current system, for all its faults, is a living specification: it shows how your business runs, where the pain is, and what's missing.

You also know what you'd change. Most businesses in this position have a list, written or not, of everything they've wished for since the system went in. That clarity is worth a great deal in saved development time.

And your data comes with you. Years of customer records, job history and reporting move into whatever comes next. Nothing starts from a blank page.

When the technology can't be carried forward. No source code and no way to recover it. A platform that's dead, with no path to a supported version. A hosted product you don't own and can't extend. A data model that's wrong for how the business works now, so that every change fights it.

Even then, the safe way to replace is alongside: the new system grows next to the old one, sharing the same data, taking over one process at a time, with the old route open until you're confident. A big-bang cutover is a choice, and rarely a good one.

When it does its job, the risks can be managed with support, and the money would do more elsewhere. That's a real answer and we give it. If that's what the evidence says, that's what the report says, with a price for supporting the system rather than changing it.

A system doesn't have to be big to be worth modernising. Smaller systems are often the quickest wins: faster to bring under test, cheaper to modernise, and just as much of a change for the people who use them every day. An Access database with six users can be the right first project.

It comes with you whichever option you choose, and it never meets a change until the change has proven itself somewhere else. We build and test against a copy in a test environment, then run the new piece in staging alongside the live system, migrating, checking and reconciling the data there first. Only when the tests have shown it's safe does anything connect to live, and the old system stays available as a fallback until you're confident.

The decision starts with a free one-hour consultation and a legacy system assessment from £395 + VAT, with an exact price before you commit. The report puts a fixed price on each of the three options for your system, so you're choosing between real numbers. Payment terms are on the pricing page.

We'd rather carry your rules forward than rediscover them. Marc Allington leads every assessment and the work that follows. He has built business systems in VB, Access, SQL Server and .NET as well as on the web, in the cloud and with AI, which is most of what the systems we're deciding about are made of. Anything we build runs on open, widely used technology, in your own accounts, with full source code and ownership transferring to you on final payment.