Microsoft Great Plains: data conversion & migration scenarios – overview for
consultant
By Andrew Karasev
1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918
Alba Spectrum Technologies
Microsoft Business
Solutions Great Plains serves multiple industries in the US, plus it has strong
presence in Latin America, U.K., Australia, Canada, Middle East, South Africa.
Great Plains is natural solution for growing company, when small business
accounting application, such as QuickBooks, M.Y.O.B, Peachtree, Quicken or
others should be replaced with ERP, better positioned to serve mid-size
business. With the switch to Microsoft Great Plains you need to decide on data
migration and conversion. Let us give you highlights on your options:
- Beginning Balances
approach. This is the simplest
way. What you do is – enter beginning balances in Great Plains General Ledger
(GL) and begin using your new system. When you need to enter invoice for
existing customer – you create customer record in Great Plains and go ahead
with Invoice in Accounts Receivables or Sales Order Processing (SOP). The
same symmetric procedure is for vendor invoices in Purchase Order Processing
(POP)
- Master Records
migration. If you have large
number of customers and vendors, plus multiple addresses for customers,
numerous inventory items, sophisticated chart of accounts with several
thousand accounts in GL – you need to migrate these master records from your
old accounting to Great Plains. The best way is – purchase Great Plains
Integration manager and do it in-house or with minimal help from external
consultant. If Integration Manager license seems to be expensive and you have
SQL expertise in your IT group – you could your programmer populate master
tables: GL00100, RM00101, RM00102, PM00200
- Open & Work Data
Migration. In Great Plains
Accounts Receivables and Accounts Payables invoices have open status if
payments are not yet applied to these documents. We recommend you to use
integration manager to bring customer and vendor invoices and payments and
post them in Great Plains. This way will allow you to save on consulting
services and keep good relationship with you Microsoft Business Solutions
Partner. We do not recommend using SQL scripts for bringing open data into
Great Plains – you will
have posting issues, related to incorrect distributions. In other words do
not populate such tables as SOP10100, SOP10200 via direct SQL stored procs.
- Historical Data
Migration. We recommend stay
away from this migration unless it is absolutely necessary – you may have
order takers needing immediate access to customer historical records to place
new order. In this case having two system: legacy accounting for data lookup
and Great Plains for new documents – may not be efficient. Then you do direct
historical tables population: SOP30200, SOP30300, etc.
- Data Conversion.
Conversion means the process of extracting data from your legacy application
and massaging it to be ready to be fed to Great Plains. In case of each
specific system you should use specific approach. In case of QuickBooks you
simply print reports, save them in text file and massage there – usually in
Excel or Lotus 1-2-3. The specific of small accounting applications is
proprietary database platform, which makes traditional tools, such as ODBC
connection complicated.
Good luck with conversion and migration and if you have issues or
concerns – we are here to help! If you want us to do the job - give us a call
1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com
Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer in Alba
Spectrum Technologies – USA nationwide Microsoft RMS, Great Plains, Microsoft CRM customization
company, serving clients in Chicago, California, Texas, Florida, New York,
Georgia, Arizona, Minnesota, UK, Australia and having locations in multiple
states and internationally (
http://www.albaspectrum.com ),
he is CMA, Great Plains Certified Master, Dexterity, SQL, C#.Net, Crystal
Reports and Microsoft CRM SDK developer. You can contact Andrew:
andrewk@albaspectrum.com