Free practical guide · Coriable Ghana
Business Software and ERP Requirements Checklist
A good software requirements document describes the process, data and decisions the system must support, not just the screens it should contain.
Reviewed 29 October 2026 · For business owners, marketing teams and project managers
1. Describe your current workflow
Identify who starts each process, who reviews it and what marks it complete. Document exceptions such as partial payment, stock returns, cancellations, missing inventory and offline operation.
- Current process map and pain points
- Approval steps and exception cases
- Branches, teams and required reports
- Business owner for each workflow
2. Define roles and access
List each role and what it can read, create, edit, approve, export or delete. Consider branch, department and client isolation. High-impact actions should be recorded with actor, time and reason.
- Role-by-module permission matrix
- Tenant and branch isolation rules
- MFA and account recovery requirements
- Audit trails and sensitive exports
3. Inventory data and integrations
List essential records, identifiers, validation and retention rules. For each integration, document the provider, data exchange, credentials owner, retry handling and how duplicate webhooks are prevented.
- Source systems and import formats
- Payment, SMS and email integration rules
- Data migration and deduplication approach
- Backup and recovery requirements
4. Decide what success looks like
Write acceptance tests from real user journeys. Examples: a branch cannot see another branch’s confidential sales; a stock return updates the purchase order amount; a duplicate payment callback does not create two receipts.
- Happy-path and failure-path tests
- Performance and accessibility expectations
- UAT sign-off owners
- Maintenance and rollback process
5. Plan rollout and ownership
Start with the most important workflow, prove it works in staging, train staff, then migrate in controlled phases. Agree on source-code and data ownership, deployment credentials, third-party costs and support response times.
- Phased delivery roadmap
- Environment separation
- Training and handover plan
- Security review and operating budget
