Here we are talking about switching from one ERP or accounting system to another or implementing new Enterprise Resource Planning application from scratches. Before reading the rest we recommend you to talk to your consulting partner if there is migration tool available from your new ERP vendor.
You may expect migration tool to mid-market Corporate ERP applications such as Microsoft Dynamics GP from popular small business accounting packages such as QuickBooks. If you are thinking to start over with data conversion from the very old version of the same ERP then you should question if instead of data export and import you could do upgrade in several intermediate steps. If these options are not available in your case then let’s go ahead and take a look at data migration:
1. ‘Let’s convert everything!’ Let’s think about this decision. Historical documents such as Sales Invoices might be numbered in hundred thousand and even millions. The process of data migration includes several steps such as data export from the old system, cleaning and reordering document columns in predefined format, import them as work documents ready for review and finally processing documents in your new Accounting application. The first step is probably straight forward but the steps three through five might be repeated several or in some cases many times to provide reasonably migration quality. Repeating these four steps with million rows of documents might physically take several days just computer processor time. Here you have to think about feasibility of such large scale project. Are you ready to pay hundreds of hours of consulting time for something that could be potentially stored in the old accounting?
2. Possible recommendations. The first one would be the suggestion to keep old accounting running on low profile server or user computer just for data inquiry if some of you long term customers request the information about past invoice. The number of customers is typically lower and in B2B scenarios might be less than ten thousand in 90 percent of the cases. Customer is often categorized as so-called master record in Corporate ERP terminology. So consider just master records to be converted including customers, vendors, employees, addresses and GL accounts. Then for GL accounts you create one large transaction to bring over beginning balances and you can start using new system assuming that the legacy accounting is available for inquiries. First couple of months the number of historical inquiries might be high. Maybe several per day but as time goes it should decrease exponentially as new system is shifting focus on what is going on right now and not in the past. If you believe that you have to go ahead and do historical documents migration and you have millions of documents stretched over ten or more years then consider bringing over only one or couple of historical years
3. What to do if your legacy accounting is based on subscription licensing. This typically means that when you stop paying for the subscription you lose the possibility to login into old application. Ask you provider if you own your data and if it is possible to export your old records into popular DB formats such as Microsoft SQL Server, MS Access or even CSV text file. Check with your IT department if they are comfortable to query this exported database in order to answer common customer support questions. If this recommendation doesn’t work then data migration might be inevitable
4. ‘Why is that you do not recommend full scale data migration?’ Through our consulting practice we noticed that data conversion was often underestimated. Consulting firm has the right to be optimistic and promise something that they never done so far but ready to come through the learning curve as the project progresses. This position might be respected but at the same time it introduces the risk which could be deemphasized in the sales cycle
5. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representative pick up the phone in St. Joseph, MI call center). help@efaru.com. We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan and Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico and Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese. We feature our expertise is in International Business
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