UK local government
Modernise finance, procurement, HR and payroll while retaining secure access to the historical records your authority still needs.
Legacy systems stay online because historical information is difficult to retrieve anywhere else. Removing that dependency — properly, with evidence — is the whole objective.
Moving to a modern cloud finance or ERP platform, with the outgoing system left holding the history.
Multiple legacy estates arriving at one new authority, each with its own finance, HR and payroll history.
Finance, procurement, HR or payroll functions combined across authorities, leaving several source systems behind.
Legacy products becoming harder and more expensive to support, with scarcer skills behind them.
On-premise infrastructure being reduced, where lifting an obsolete application into the cloud only relocates the cost.
Old application run costs persisting after the transformation programme has closed and its budget has gone.
Firstcron Services UK Ltd is registered on G-Cloud 15, so an authority can call this work off under the existing framework agreement rather than running a separate procurement exercise.
Inventory, volumes, retention requirements, target architecture and an implementation estimate.
Finance, procurement, HR and payroll data moved into the new platform in reconciled cycles.
Records preserved with retention periods, legal-hold status and lineage attached.
Counts, control totals and categorised exceptions as the evidence a shutdown is signed against.
Staged decommissioning once business, contractual and technical dependencies are removed.
Defined-scope engagements, fixed-price work packages, a programme workstream or outcome-based delivery.
View G-Cloud 15 Services →The final official G-Cloud listing and contract terms govern the scope of procurement. Where anything on this page differs from that listing, the listing governs.
The finance record classes an authority is most often asked for after the new system is live — by external audit, by members, and by its own accountants closing a prior year.
DataLens provides authorised access to this information after the source application is retired: named finance users search, retrieve, report and export against the archive, scoped by role and logged, without the ledger system running behind it.
Procurement history carries transparency and audit obligations that outlast the system which recorded it.
Scope covers the procurement data held in the source ERP. Contract-management records are only in scope where the source system actually holds them; SyntraETL does not provide contract management.
Exact scope depends on what the source system actually holds and on the authority's own retention policy. Both are established during discovery rather than assumed.
A council's legacy estate is rarely limited to one ERP. Historical information often remains across Oracle databases, SQL Server applications, departmental systems and bespoke tools — individually small, collectively expensive, and almost never costed as a group.
Consolidating the long tail is usually where the economics turn: a single archive replacing five applications removes five sets of licence, infrastructure, backup and support cost against one implementation.
Each application still comes down the same way — the four-stage Syntra Legacy Exit model, and the same account of what retirement removes and what it must preserve. What changes at this scale is sequencing: applications are retired in renewal-date order, so each shutdown funds the next.
Reorganisation is the hardest version of this problem: several authorities, several ERP estates, one new organisation, and a legal obligation to keep every predecessor's records retrievable.
Illustrative architecture. This is a description of how the approach applies to reorganisation, not an account of a delivered SyntraETL programme.
Because each predecessor estate is archived on the same retention and access model, the new authority ends up with one place to answer a question about any of them — rather than inheriting four sets of applications it cannot switch off.
SyntraETL can support historical information retrieval and approved records-management processes. It does not provide legal advice, does not set retention periods, and does not by itself make an authority compliant with FOI or data-protection law.
| Validation | Source | Archive | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| AP invoices | 4,821,051 | 4,821,051 | ✓ |
| Suppliers | 81,421 | 81,421 | ✓ |
| Journals | 12,331,087 | 12,331,087 | ✓ |
| Attachments | 442,901 | 442,901 | ✓ |
Illustrative example. The figures show how reconciliation evidence is presented; they are not drawn from a specific engagement.
Source, transformed, rejected and archived counts on every cycle.
Control totals on ledger and payables data, so a matching row count cannot hide a broken value.
An archived invoice still resolves to its supplier, purchase order, approvals and attachments.
Attachments reconciled separately from the transactions they belong to.
Discrepancies categorised and explained rather than netted off.
Finance, HR and information governance accept the evidence before shutdown is authorised.
Illustrative example only. Actual savings depend on vendor contracts, infrastructure, data volumes, support models and retirement scope.
Titles differ between authorities; the interests below do not.
Finance
Legacy-system cost reduction, and continued access to finance history for closedown, audit and members' questions.
Technology
Application rationalisation and technical debt reduction across an estate nothing ever leaves.
Programme
Controlled migration and a legacy retirement that actually closes the programme.
Procurement
Historical supplier, purchase order and approval access for transparency and audit.
People
Employee and payroll history for pensions, verification and employment relations cases.
Governance
Retention, retrieval, audit and evidenced disposal — and a defensible answer to FOI.
SyntraETL has not yet published a UK local-government engagement. The engagements below are the same architecture delivered elsewhere — including a local council in Ireland — and are shown on that basis.
A local council moved PeopleSoft HCM to Oracle Fusion with effective-dated employment history preserved and reconciled.
Read the case study →A government body migrated Oracle EBS financials to Oracle Fusion with a controlled, repeatable and reconciled migration process.
Read the case study →A multi-hospital health system archived 18 data areas of timekeeping history into DataVault with reconciliation evidence, then ran a ten-stage decommissioning.
Read the case study →These are published SyntraETL engagements outside the UK, shown because the architecture is the same one applied here. They are not UK public-sector references and are not presented as such.
Tell us which ERP, finance, HR, payroll and departmental systems remain in your estate. We'll help identify what can be retired and what historical information must remain accessible.
If you would rather start with a single application than the whole estate, the shorter Legacy Exit Assessment returns an indicative scorecard for one system in a couple of minutes.
An estate assessment establishes which applications are being kept alive purely for historical access, what has to be retained and for how long, what they cost today, and what retiring them would return against the next renewal date.