Migrating into and out of an accounting software

Changing from one accounting software to another is like moving a house from one place to another. It is never a fun thing, but if you have to do it , means you have to do it.

The keyword is …it must be fast and easy.

Business grow and you find that your current system is not serving you as well as it used to be and moving forward, you will need more state of the art features or robust system, when you want to move out of your current system that almost breakdown regularly or files get corrupted if you are still using the desktop versions.

But before you jump into another new system, (even though we are seeing new users migrating to our system rapidly) we always tell our potential users, that even if you finally decided not to choose us, please make sure that you can easily exit from the system when the time is near , as easy as you move in. Bear in mind you can only print reports out from any cloud system but you do not own the database structures.

Why we say that? Sorry to say that the motivation to design it to let you migrate in is greater than to design something to let you migrate out easily, for obvious reasons.

Then why do we say this? For we spent equally much effort to let you move out, as how you easily moved into our system. We were users ourselves and we do not like this feeling at all, so we accept the fact that you had decided to go, and we want to make it a gracious exit.

We provide you steps to extract your chart of accounts, strata roll, and vendor listings  into excel and let the next vendor to pull into their systems.

Your aging (b/f) of your SP and vendors  and your trial balances at your cut-off date can be sent to excel, in nice proper cells and columns.

So the question you have to ask the next vendor is…can you show us how easy is to export our strata roll out of the system into excel? It is a good practice anyway to keep a copy outside the system as a backup.

Get them to demo for you, make sure that the exported cells are independent and in neat columns and rows and not merged, so much so that you need to massage the fields again.

A lot of users are concern about moving in but not the moving out (a few years later). But you, as a business owner, you will have to ask,  don’t leave it to your staff to ask this question for they may not be involve in the moving out, by then, for obvious reasons.

So whether you have 10,000 SP listings or 2000 vendor listings, all must be at a click of a button.

It is not unheard of that company changed software or project come and go in the next three months, you must make sure that you are able to move the system in and out quite quickly.

Writer : Choo Hong Peng,
Chartered Accountant, Singapore
Email : sales@realtimme.net

As at 18/08/2020