We spent years trying to convince clients not to try to migrate transactional data when they move to Sage Intacct. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze, we said. Imports, exports, data mappings, data cleansing, oversight, verifications — all of it added to the cost and the timing of an ERP conversion. That was before we discovered Platform Transition, a Sage Intacct Marketplace Partner (MMP) specializing in elegant data conversions for new Sage Intacct customers. Their methodology changes the equation, making a data migration nearly effortless for our clients to transfer detailed general ledger transactional data from QuickBooks (or other accounting/ERP applications) to Sage Intacct. How does Platform Transition do it?
“We start by asking how we can make the customer’s life easier and more joyful,” says Hugh O. Stewart, President of Platform Transition. “That’s our underlying goal. Data conversions don’t need to be stressful, they don’t have to be time consuming, and they don’t need to involve extensive compromise. If a client wants their historical data, we can get it for them.”
Data Conversions Speed ROI
Part of laying the groundwork for a smooth conversion to Sage Intacct is determining what to do with your company’s data sitting in QuickBooks or another ERP. As we confessed, we used to urge clients to resign themselves to just beginning balances, as anything more required too much effort and expense on their part. However, starting off with general ledger transactional data, master file data, and even subledger detail speeds our clients’ return on investment and allows them to be productive right from the start.
With a full data migration, most of our clients find they don’t need to keep the legacy application around to run reports or check activity — it’s all in Sage Intacct. Sage Intacct provides robust financial reporting capabilities, and when the application comes stocked with historical data, not just balances, reports are strategic and meaningful from day one. Plus, having a professional team performing the conversion ensures its accuracy. This means clients don’t just save the time they would spend performing the conversion in house, they eliminate the errors that inevitably arise when manual data entry is involved.
Going It Alone is Expensive
In our experience, it takes a customer between 20 and 30 hours per entity to enter opening balances in a new accounting application. Organizations that want to perform a complete data migration internally (including transactional data), may expend around 125 hours per entity. For an organization with three or four active entities, that adds up to weeks (dare we say months?) of data entry, exports and imports, and validation. Who are you paying to do that? Who’s doing their job while they’re doing it? How are you verifying that it was entered accurately?
The benefit of outsourcing data migration to Platform Transition is that conversions are all they do. They are specialists. As one their happy clients put it, “With outsourcing in general, the benefit is an organization’s specialization. Having that specialized knowledge enables you to get things done a lot better, more efficiently, and more cost-effectively.”
Turning Data Conversion Into an Art Form
The computing term ETL is often used when a legacy system is being replaced with a new system. It refers to Extracting data from one system, Transforming it to the needs of the system it will be loaded into, and then Loading the data into the target system. It’s a mechanical process designed to move large volumes of data.
While Platform Transition’s workflow definitely involves those three steps, they handle the workflow with surgical precision, not bulk actions. “We don’t rely on data dumps, we confirm we are extracting the right data,” explains Hugh. “When we look at how to transform the data, we are considering the organization’s reporting needs. When we load the data, we load it so that it’s easy for the client to validate that we’ve done it correctly. Where ETL is oversimplified and focused on the vendor performing the steps, our process is highly specialized and focused on the client.”
Some say the company has taken data conversions to an art form. They actually received feedback from a happy customer who described the process as an “Accounting Monet.” Another customer said they’d “run out of superlatives” to describe how Platform Transition handled their project.
A Simple, Four-Step Process
We can distill Platform Transition’s artful conversion process down to four steps:
- Data extraction, either by providing a backup or login credentials to Platform Transition
- Platform Transition provides a detailed analysis of the data to the customer
- Customer reviews and confirms the proposed maps
- Platform Transition performs conversion and client verifies
The company has confidence in their methodology and so do the clients of their more than 900 successful migrations. “We get it right the first time and give our customers confidence every step of the way,” says Hugh.
Partnership Is What We Do
At BT Partners, we rely on partners like Platform Transition to provide specialized products and services we know add value for our clients. They’ve earned our trust and the trust of our clients. If you have questions about moving QuickBooks data to Sage Intacct, let’s talk and see if the juice is worth the squeeze.
