Killing the Frankenstack: Why Your Back Office Architecture Is Holding You Back!

From Frankenstack to Flow: Rethinking Your Back Office Architecture

Most organizations don’t set out to build a messy tech stack. It just sort of… happens.

You add a financial package here, a payroll system there, an integration tool to glue them together, and a handful of Excel workarounds “just for now.” Fast forward a few years and your middle-to-back office is stitched together like a Frankenstein’s monster of systems and spreadsheets.

That’s your Frankenstack - and it’s quietly holding your business back.

In this blog, we’ll look at what a Frankenstack really is, why it’s so damaging to your financial operations, and how an integrated solution like 1Staff on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central replaces chaos with clarity.

What is a Frankenstack, really?

If you look at the typical middle-to-back office architecture, it often includes a core financials package (P&L, balance sheet, AP), a separate pay-bill engine, a standalone payroll system, one or more middleware tools, and a sprawl of “helper” spreadsheets. Individually, each tool might be fine. Together, they create a complex web of handoffs and transformations just to get a single transaction from “time worked” to “cash collected.”

Whole teams end up orbiting this Frankenstack - people living in Excel for billing, specialists watching integrations and reconciliations, and analysts trying to stitch together incomplete or conflicting data. There’s a lot of activity, but not nearly enough clarity.

Why Excel and middleware can’t save you

Excel is powerful and familiar, and it absolutely has its place. But it should not be your system of record.

When key parts of your billing, pay, and financial processes live in spreadsheets and side systems, you introduce error, audit risk, and delay. You’re often waiting for end-of-day or even end-of-week processes before you know your real financial position, and the concept of a customer or assignment is scattered across multiple tools.

Middleware helps move data between systems, but at best it’s shuttling transactions between pieces of a process that should never have been split apart. You end up paying for technology and people whose main job is to compensate for a fragmented architecture, not to move the business forward.

That’s not modernization. That’s coping.

Real-time profitability and risk, without the detective work

When everything sits inside one integrated platform, your visibility changes dramatically. Instead of working at a rough “percentage margin” level, you can see real-time net profit by customer, assignment, or worker and identify problem work sites or worker classes driving up costs.

Because all related entries are connected, you can:

• Analyze patterns affecting workers’ comp, local tax, and compliance.

• Understand the cumulative profitability of an assignment or client without exporting to separate BI tools.

• Trust that the data has fiscal integrity and a clean audit trail.

You’re no longer paying BI teams and IT specialists to reconstruct the truth from several systems. You’re working from high-quality, consistent, auditable data right in your primary transaction system.

The integrated alternative: one engine, one audit record

Now imagine a different model.

Instead of spreading the lifecycle of a timesheet across multiple tools, you have one system where a timesheet ledger sits at the heart of pay-bill and financials. Time is captured once and then drives billing, pay, work in progress (WIP), and ultimately revenue and cost recognition—all inside a single double-entry accounting system.

That’s the design of 1Staff on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central:

• 1Staff is embedded directly into Business Central, not bolted on via middleware.

• Time interpretation, billing, pay, WIP, and revenue recognition all share one data model.

• You can drill freely between timesheet, invoice, payroll, and balance sheet entries.

Whether you’re paying a supplier, a contractor (1099), or an employee, the transaction is recorded once, tracked through its lifecycle (unbilled, billed, paid), and linked so you can see the full financial story on demand. No mocked-up invoices, no summary postings with no visibility behind them, and no second system required just to understand profitability.

Faster answers, fewer disputes, smaller teams

Everyday questions become simple queries instead of mini-projects:

• “What invoice was this payroll run related to?”

• “Can you show me the timesheet behind this charge?”

• “Has this assignment actually been billed and paid yet?”

In a Frankenstack, those questions can trigger an investigation across multiple systems and spreadsheets. In an integrated 1Staff + Business Central environment, an AR clerk or accountant can run a single inquiry, pull all related entries, and drill into the timesheet, invoice, payroll transaction, and work site details.

That means faster dispute resolution, stronger collections (and better DSO), and teams that spend more time managing the business and less time reconciling the tech stack. And if something does go wrong—whether it’s a data issue or a software bug—you make one support call, not three.

Built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Because 1Staff is built inside Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, you get staffing-aware back office capabilities on top of a world-class cloud financial platform.

You benefit from:

• Modern, SaaS-based financials backed by Microsoft.
• Support for in-house payroll, plus APIs for external payroll providers if you prefer.
• The ability to run high volumes of payrolls and complex billing regimes.

Embedded support for industry nuances like pay-when-paid, PO tracking, and VMS transactions.

Instead of bending a generic ERP to fit your reality and propping it up with spreadsheets and middleware, you’re working with a platform designed to handle these nuances from day one.

Time to retire the old manual

Many organizations live with their Frankenstack because they think “this is just how it’s done.” They’re working to an old manual—a mental model from a time when this level of integration simply wasn’t possible.

So they accept that Excel will always be the real system of record, keep adding people or outsourcing to cheaper labor markets to cope with complexity, and invest in more middleware and BI to patch gaps instead of fixing the root cause.

But that’s no longer necessary.

With valid, high-integrity financial data in a single, integrated system, auditors can verify quickly, leaders can make decisions faster, and your teams can support growth instead of just surviving it.

Kill the Frankenstack before it kills your growth

If your middle-to-back office feels more like a science experiment than a system, it might be time to take a hard look at your architecture.

Are you relying heavily on spreadsheets to close the gaps between systems? Do you have people whose full-time job is reconciliation or monitoring integrations? Do simple financial questions require complex investigations?

If the answer is yes, you probably have a Frankenstack.

1Staff on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central gives you an integrated alternative: one platform, one audit record, and one support team for your pay-bill and financials.

It’s time to retire the old manual, simplify the architecture, and move from Frankenstack to flow.

Talk to Us About Simplifying Your Back Office.

Let’s talk - or book a demo of 1Staff in action.