Technology Services Group

Everyone is talking about AI. The question is no longer whether it will affect how your business operates. It already is. The more useful question is whether your business is ready to get anything meaningful out of it. Most UK small and medium businesses are somewhere in the middle: aware of AI, interested in it, but uncertain about where to start.

TSG, a leading IT service provider serving mid-market businesses in the UK, has acquired Creative Computing Solutions, an established Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central partner known for its work with the likes of Hat Trick Productions, whose credits include programmes such as Derry Girls, Outnumbered and Have I Got News For You.

A view from the CFO's chair For the last two years, AI sat in the budget as a tidy, predictable line. You bought the licences, you knew the annual number, and the only real decision was how many seats to fund. It behaved like software always had: a fixed cost you set once and reviewed at renewal. That era is ending. With the move to usage-based billing for tools like Microsoft Copilot Cowork, a meaningful slice of your AI spend now behaves like a utility. It bills by consumption.

TSG today announced it has become a member of the Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA), an ecosystem of software development companies and security services partners that have integrated their solutions with Microsoft Security technology to better defend mutual customers against an increasing range of cyber threats.

For many finance teams, the decision to move to a new system comes after months, sometimes years, of working around the limitations of the current one. Reporting takes too long. Data sits in too many places. Month-end is harder than it should be. Sage Intacct is built to change that, but the outcome depends as much on how the implementation is run as it does on the software itself.

Data migration is the part of a Business Central implementation that most senior leaders underestimate and most implementation partners have seen go wrong. It is not a technical task that sits at the end of the project. It is a business decision that needs to start near the beginning, run as a workstream in its own right, and involve the people who understand the data, not just the people who can move it.

Most Finance Directors in distribution and manufacturing know the problem well before they know the solution. The month-end close stretches into days. Reporting relies on spreadsheets that three people have touched and nobody fully trusts. Inventory figures sit in one system, finance in another, and reconciling the two is a manual job that falls to whoever has time. It is not a technology failure. It is a process failure that the wrong technology is propping up.

Reactive support has a clear business model: something breaks, someone raises a ticket, someone fixes it. It is simple to understand and straightforward to price. It is also an expensive way to run a business-critical system. When your ERP goes down mid-close, or a report that the Board needs fails to run correctly, the cost is not just the support call. It is the disruption, the manual workaround, the time spent explaining to stakeholders why the numbers are late.

Ask anyone who has been through a Business Central implementation what they wish they had known beforehand and the answer is usually the same: the timeline is not just about technology. It is about decisions, data, people, and process change, often happening in parallel. Knowing what is coming in each phase helps you resource it properly, manage risk, and avoid the delays that typically push go-live back. Here is what a well-run implementation looks like across the first twelve weeks.

Aylesbury Vale Academy is a Single Academy Trust based in Aylesbury. In September 2025, working in partnership with TSG, the Academy migrated from a legacy Sage 200 desktop system to Sage Intacct — with AP Automation implemented alongside. The result: a finance function that has moved from reactive processing to proactive decision-making, with measurable time savings from day one. The Problem Worth Solving Finance teams in education face a challenge most CFOs will recognise: doing more with less.