Häufig gestellte Fragen
When does switching from Lexware to a mid-market ERP become worthwhile?
As a rough guideline, the switch becomes relevant for many businesses from around 25 to 30 employees or several million euros in annual revenue, because Lexware Warenwirtschaft is conceptually designed for simple order processing and smaller companies. Lexware Warenwirtschaft Premium typically includes five workstations per licence and can only be extended through paid additional licences; growing requirements such as multi-warehouse operations, batch and serial number tracking, variant manufacturing or multi-site setups exceed its functional scope. Common technical triggers also include noticeable performance losses as document and article volumes grow, as well as the need for multi-channel e-commerce integration. If the company remains stably small without growth momentum, however, Lexware Premium often suffices longer than expected, since every migration entails effort and cost.
What is the most common Lexware successor in the mid-market?
In the DACH mid-market, Sage 100 and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central are the most frequently cited successor systems, while weclapp is growing particularly strongly among e-commerce-driven SMEs with multi-channel sales. Sage 100 scores with deep German compliance, native DATEV integration and a large partner landscape, and classically runs in client/server mode on-premises or as private-cloud hosting via partners; Business Central is cloud-native, available as SaaS, and a particularly good fit in Microsoft 365 environments. weclapp offers a pure SaaS interface, German cloud hosting and good e-commerce connectors, with a smaller partner landscape. Which path is optimal depends on company size, process complexity, the existing IT stack and the cloud strategy; a direct jump to heavyweight systems such as SAP S/4HANA is usually oversized for a smaller SME.
How long does migrating from Lexware to a mid-market ERP take and what does it cost?
For typical SMEs with manageable complexity, a project duration of around four to seven months is realistic, split into an as-is assessment, vendor selection, configuration, data migration, testing and cutover. The total cost of replacing Lexware for smaller setups ranges roughly from five figures to the low six-figure range depending on the target system, with consulting, data transfer, interfaces and internal resources forming the largest blocks and customisations increasing the effort considerably. Industry figures show that implementation and service costs often account for 30 to 50 percent of total costs, while licences usually make up only a smaller share. The replaced Lexware maintenance of a few hundred to a few thousand euros per year, depending on edition, no longer applies, but the ongoing costs of the larger systems are higher; concrete figures should always be validated through a quote from the implementation partner.
Which Lexware data can be transferred and which is hardest to migrate?
Lexware offers export functions in common formats such as CSV and XML as well as DATEV-compliant output based on the standard charts of accounts SKR03 and SKR04, so master data such as customers, suppliers and articles can generally be transferred well. Fields usually have to be mapped in the process, because Lexware's condition and data logic can differ from the structures of the target ERP. As standard, open items of receivables and payables are transferred as of the cutoff date, often supplemented by around two years of posting history, while older data remains archived. Experience shows the most labour-intensive items are older documents with non-standardised condition logic, individually customised master data fields, and custom reports from the Lexware form and reporting tool (List & Label), which have to be rebuilt in the target system.
What happens to legacy data and which retention obligations apply when switching systems?
Tax-relevant records remain subject to retention obligations: the Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act (BEG IV) shortened the retention period for accounting documents from ten to eight years, while commercial books, inventories and annual financial statements remain at ten years. When switching systems, the legacy data must remain readable and machine-analysable for the remaining period; under Section 147 (6) of the German Fiscal Code (AO), after a system change it is sufficient from the fifth calendar year after the changeover to provide access via a data medium (Z3) instead of keeping the old system permanently operational for analysis. In practice, this means continuing to run Lexware as a read-only archive or exporting the data in a GoBD-compliant, machine-analysable form. Also important is the process documentation (Verfahrensdokumentation) of the switch, recording which documents were transferred, which cutoff date marks the transition and how the completeness of the migration is evidenced; close coordination with the tax advisor is advisable here.
Can we run Lexware and the new ERP in parallel?
A temporary parallel operation is common and sensible, for example when Lexware continues to run as a read-only archive for historical documents and reports after the cutover, while the new ERP is used productively. A permanent true dual operation with postings in both systems, however, is not recommended, because it leads to inconsistencies, duplicate maintenance and unclear data states. The usual approach is therefore a clearly defined cutoff date, from which all new transactions are posted exclusively in the target system and Lexware is only available in read-only mode. A short hypercare phase of a few weeks with increased consultant availability after go-live helps to quickly absorb teething problems and open user questions.