Migration is a decision, not a copy

Every record you carry across has to be cleaned, mapped and checked by a person. Ten years of transactions costs roughly ten times one year, and the tenth year is consulted roughly never.

  • Master data moves: customers, suppliers, items, the chart of accounts, employees.
  • Open items move: unpaid invoices, open purchase orders, stock on hand, loan and instalment balances.
  • Closed history usually does not. Reading it is what the old system is for.

Want to know how this works out for your company? Send us the question as you would ask it.

Opening balances beat transaction history

The cheapest workable migration is a balance sheet at a cut-over date, plus the open items behind it. The old system stays readable for anything asked about a closed period.

The data is dirtier than anyone thinks

A migration does not clean data; it moves it into a stricter system, which then gets blamed.

  • Deduplicate customers and suppliers before anything is mapped.
  • Agree one item code scheme and one unit of measure per item. This causes the most migration delay.
  • Reconcile bank and cash to a real statement before you take the closing balance across.

What actually breaks at cut-over

The transactions half-finished on the day you switch:

  • Purchase orders raised in the old system, received in the new one.
  • Invoices part-paid before cut-over and part-paid after.
  • Stock physically in transit between branches, counted in neither place.
  • Cheques written but not cleared before the switch.

Pick a cut-over date that suits the ledger

The start of a financial period is usually right. Mid-period costs more, because every balance is constructed rather than taken from a close.

What to insist on before you sign

  • Which record types are in scope, and how many of each.
  • Who cleans the data, and what happens to the price if it arrives dirty.
  • How many trial loads are included. One is not enough.
  • Who signs off that opening balances are correct, and against which document.
  • How long the old system stays accessible, and who pays for it.

Where we come in

We scope a cut-over as its own piece of work: a count against each record type, trial loads until the counts reconcile, and a signed opening balance before the old system goes read-only.

Where you are keeping the old system, the work is an integration instead — the two run side by side and one of them owns each field. We build both onto Zoho and ERPNext.