Florentina Sandu has seen a lot of the ERP world.
She has battled with interfaces, workarounds and inefficiencies inside complex legacy systems, and now helps finance teams migrate out of them.
As the Founder of Migrate My Accounts, she has spent the past six years guiding businesses away from costly, bloated ERPs toward streamlined, cloud-first accounting stacks built on Xero.
Her perspective is unique, grounded in a combination of deep ERP experience and a passion for building modern, scalable finance systems.
“I’ve been an accountant working inside ERP systems, and now I spend my time helping others leave them behind!”
This is her story.
Flaws in legacy ERPs
Florentina’s first brush with ERP systems came 15 years ago, working at a company using SAP.
It didn’t take long for her to understand the fundamental problem with monolithic software: they divide people into tiny silos, where no one can see or influence the bigger picture.
"It's impossible to have one person who does everything. You cannot do everything because of the complexity."
Later came JDE, where the interface alone told a story: black and green text, a relic of the DOS era.
“It had that black-and-green interface, like an old DOS screen.”
But the real issue wasn’t the aesthetics; it was the friction. Everyday processes were unnecessarily manual, slow, and unintuitive.
"I started having difficulty in being efficient and understanding how the system works."
This frustration ignited something for her.
“That’s where my love for systems started. I was teaching colleagues how to be more efficient.”
Rather than settling for inefficiency, she became the person others turned to when they wanted to make their work easier.
A shift to cloud accounting... and a revelation
After relocating to the UK, Florentina worked across a range of tools that sat between legacy and modern: Sage 50, Sage 200, VT Transactions, Pegasus Opera. They worked, but they dragged.
Then, she discovered Xero. Instantly, the possibilities widened.
“Using Sage 50, I’d spend two or three days reconciling a bank statement. With Xero: a few hours.”
Automation, simplicity, a logical interface, real-time data... Florentina quickly became, in her own words, a Xero fan, and soon built a career around helping clients adopt it.
Her work shifted from bookkeeping to full system transformation.
Building: Migrate My Accounts
As accounting practices started flocking toward cloud tools, Florentina saw an opportunity: help firms become fully Xero-based.
What began as a push for efficiency soon evolved into something bigger. Today, cost reduction is often the main driver.
“A few years ago, clients moved for efficiency. Now, they move to save costs; efficiency is just the bonus.”
With ERP licensing rising and implementation fee structures ballooning, mid-market businesses are waking up to an alternative model: a Xero-centric stack, powered by best-in-class apps.
“With Xero, you combine apps like Mayday, Joiin, ApprovalMax, Dext, and you get enterprise functionality at a fraction of the cost.”
And Florentina is among the leading experts engineering this shift.
Becoming a go-to migration expert
Florentina’s team now specialises in migrating businesses out of:
- Sage 200
- Access Dimensions
- Exchequer
- Pegasus Opera
- Microsoft Business Central and Dynamics NAV
- SAP Business ByDesign
- And even multi-entity Xero-to-Xero re-architectures
Increasingly, clients are discovering that systems they once believed required an ERP like Exchequer can now be rebuilt on Xero with the right ecosystem around it.
“I don’t live in the systems anymore, I help businesses move out of them.”
Her team develops not just migrations, but exit strategies: how to leave an ERP cleanly, rebuild workflows, redesign reporting, and often improve processes in the transition.
Success story: a 50-entity transformation
Among her most notable recent projects is a UK-based care-home group spanning over 50 entities.
The migration involved:
- Pegasus Opera
- Sage 200
- Multiple Xero-to-Xero restructures
- Full redesign of chart of accounts and workflows
- Best-practice consolidation setup
- Group-level app implementation
Now, with the migration complete, the team is rolling out tools like Mayday and Joiin to build automation and consolidation capabilities that previously required enterprise systems.
“It’s probably the largest migration we’ve done, and now they’re ready to start automating.”
Across other clients, Florentina routinely combines Lightyear, Joiin and Mayday to replicate, and often improve, the functionality once handled by costly legacy ERPs.
A new mindset
Florentina believes finance leaders are undergoing a mindset shift:
Being efficient is no longer aspirational. It’s essential.
“It’s not about wanting to be efficient, you have to be efficient now. Technology pushes you there.”
With cloud adoption accelerating across practices, SMEs and mid-market companies, she sees continued, even growing, demand for cloud-first infrastructure.
Her next chapter? Scaling her migration framework and deepening her specialism in integrated stacks combining Xero, Mayday, Joiin and ApprovalMax.
Because for Florentina, the future is clear:
Lean teams. Automated workflows. Modular systems. Real-time data.
And freedom from the ERP complexity that once held businesses back.
A huge thank you to all of our amazing ERP Survivors for sharing their stories for this series!
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