Two commercial systems, and a date the seller stops answering.
Bring two commercial books together before the transition services agreement runs out. ClarityArc establishes what has to come across, what the agreements actually entitle you to, and the order the moves can happen in.
The deadline is commercial, not technical.
An acquisition closes with a transition services agreement behind it. For some number of months the seller keeps the acquired business running on their systems, their people answer questions, and the deal looks complete. The work that decides how it ends has usually not started.
What makes it urgent is not the technology. It is that the access, the assistance and the people who know how the acquired business was run all stop on the same date, and the list of what you needed from them is written afterwards.
What we work through with you
Decide whether to consolidate at all
Compare moving onto one system against keeping both and connecting them. The second is sometimes right, particularly where the acquired business trades different commodities, on different routes, under different regulators.
The comparison needs the cost of running two books alongside the cost and disruption of merging them, and an honest view of the capacity your team has while it is also absorbing an acquisition.
Establish what has to come across
Open positions, inventory and exchange balances, contracts and tariffs, counterparty and location master data, credit exposure, and the transaction history you are obliged to keep. Each has a different deadline and a different owner.
Separate what must move into the surviving system from what only has to remain readable. Retained access to a system you no longer operate is a different arrangement from a migration, and it is usually cheaper.
Confirm what the agreements entitle you to
Transition services define the access, the assistance and the end date. Software licences, data rights and third-party agreements decide what can be copied, converted or kept at all, and they do not always transfer with the business.
A migration plan cannot create rights the agreements do not give. Where a right is missing or unclear, that becomes a commercial question before it becomes a technical one.
Sequence it against the trade month and the close
A commercial system cannot cut over mid-month. The sequence has to respect nomination deadlines, the trade month, the accounting close and the periods that will still be restated after the transition ends.
Agree what runs in parallel, what is reconciled against what, and the point at which the acquired system becomes read-only.
Two books disagree in specific ways.
Commercial systems rarely disagree in the abstract. They disagree about which location a delivery point refers to, how a counterparty is identified, whether a quantity is scheduled or measured, which charges are in a tariff, and how a prior-period adjustment is applied.
Those are reconciliations with owners, not a data-mapping exercise. We work through them with the schedulers and accountants who will have to live with the answer, because a decision made in a mapping document and not understood by the people using the system comes back during the first close.
Not everything has to move.
The instinct after an acquisition is to bring everything into one place. Some of it genuinely must: open positions, balances, anything a settlement or an invoice still depends on. Much of it only has to be findable — closed periods, superseded contracts, history retained for audit or regulatory reasons.
Separating the two is usually where the cost comes out of the plan. It also decides what the final weeks of the transition agreement are spent on, which is the scarcest thing in the whole exercise.
What you receive
- A decision on consolidation with the comparison behind it, including the option of connecting rather than merging.
- An inventory of what moves, what stays readable and what is deliberately left behind, with an owner against each.
- An assessment of the rights the agreements give you, and the gaps that need a commercial answer.
- A sequenced transition plan built around the trade month, the close and the agreement’s end date.
- Reconciliation criteria agreed before cutover, and a definition of the point at which the acquired system goes read-only.
Where we stop.
We do not negotiate the transition services agreement or advise on its terms, and we do not resell or implement ETRM software. Configuration inside the product stays with your vendor or implementation partner. Where the work is the interfaces themselves, that is commodity systems integration, and the two are usually bought together.
Bring the transition agreement and its end date.
We will help identify what has to move, what only needs to stay readable, and the first decision that cannot wait.