Answer
This usually shows up gradually rather than as a single breaking point. A controller who once closed the books in three days is now taking eight, not because the team got slower but because the number of manual adjustments, spreadsheet consolidations, and cross-checks needed to trust the numbers has crept up year over year as the business added entities, currencies, or reporting obligations the original ERP configuration was never built to handle. By the time someone raises it as a project, the workarounds have often been normalized as just how closing works here.
Before committing to a platform change, buyers should build a short, specific list: which finance requirements does the current ERP still meet without complaint, which ones require a workaround that everyone tolerates, and which ones create real audit or compliance risk if they are not fixed. That list should come from the people actually doing the close, not just from IT or from a vendor's gap analysis, since the people running the process every month know exactly where it breaks. If most of the list is tolerable workarounds, incremental fixes or better configuration of the existing ERP may be enough. If the list includes real risk items, that is the signal to evaluate a dedicated platform seriously rather than adding another workaround.