Data conversion is important part of new accounting software implementation. It is good idea to limit the scope of migration project.
Reasonable expectations are chart of accounts, master records such as customers, vendors, inventory items and plus GL beginning balances. There are situations when you have to do limited import of historical documents in sales and purchasing. In this small paper we will give you an idea on exporting records from outdated Great Plains Accounting for DOS, Windows or Macintosh:
1. GPA database overview, location and tables. First of all it is in Btrieve and it could be also deployed on Pervasive SQL 2000 32 bit. Pervasive Software in late 1990th acquired Btrieve Technologies and rebranded the product. Location of your company database is by default in GPS folder on the server where default company (if you have only one) is in GPDATA subfolder. This folder in its turn has subfolders where AR for example stays for Accounts Receivable and if you open this one then Cusmas.dat is apparently Customer Master table file
2. Exporting records from GPA. In our opinion one of the best options is Pervasive SQL Control Center. However before you can connect it is necessary to produce DDF files (File, Field and Index.ddf). The procedure to produce these files is described in ODBC manual located on installation CD (if you are on versions 9.5 or 9.2) or on floppies for earlier releases. You can do either select * from the table or if you have millions of historical documents then compile the query with limited number of fields and use Export logic
3. Comments on historical sales documents extraction. There is nuance as file ORDHST.dat hosts several tables including Sales Order Header, Lines, Taxes and few others. This is why you cannot pump it out with wizard and have to use ‘where’ clause
4. SAP B1 Data Transfer Workbench is the tool for importing. Normally when data is exported your SB1 consultant does the job. He or she has to reformat data and save them in the form of CSV templates. This job is usually done in Excel. Please expect several attempts until the quality is reasonably good
Let’s now answer popular questions from customers and prospects:
Q. We have old Great Plains 9.2. Now we have budget to acquire something more modern. It sounds like Business One is good option but it requires data export, cleansing and import steps. Is it possible to avoid it?A. Yes, but in this case you have to update to Microsoft Dynamics GP as MS has migration tools. The steps at this time are the following: GPA 9.2 upgrade to 9.5 (here you need conversion diskette). Then you migrate to Dynamics GP 8.0. The next one is to GP 10 and finally to 2010
Q. In our case records migration is very modest as we need only customers and vendors. We do not like the idea to experiment with ODBC connection. Do we have alternative way?A. Yes and in your situation we recommend to print reports directly to text file and then cleanse them either in Excel or import into SQL Server custom table and delete blank lines, page numbers and headers there
Q. We would like to stick to GPA DOS for another few years. But we would like to retire our old Novel server. What would you recommend?A. There was recommendation from Microsoft to deploy Great Plains Accounting on Pervasive SQL Server 2000 32 bit. You can either do client-server environment with Windows 2003 or 2008 32 bit or have Pervasive single user workstation
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