Data migration

Forza

To All Navision Expert,


Our company is in the process of implementing Navision 4.0. We are currently using an accounting system plus off the system sales order and purchase order.

The NSC told us that only opening balance and open invoices can be migrated to Navision. All the posted G/L entry have to remain in the current account system.

As an accounting idiot, I not so savvy when it comes to this kind of issue. (I only recently "discovered" the difference between balance sheet account and profit/loss account)

I need some guidance to know if this the normal practice during implementation of Navision.


Any help will be greatly appreciated.

themave

I wouldn't bring in detail, but when we first implemented Navision, we made a journal entry for each months balance for the prior 5 years, so we could produce comparative financial statements. we used a dataport to enter the info in general journals, then posted the journals.

ecclectic

comes down to one thing. Did they charge you to migrate only balances and open items or every individual entry? there's quite some effort required to migrate individual entries and "closed" items and is seldom done

Forza wrote:

To All Navision Expert,


Our company is in the process of implementing Navision 4.0. We are currently using an accounting system plus off the system sales order and purchase order.

The NSC told us that only opening balance and open invoices can be migrated to Navision. All the posted G/L entry have to remain in the current account system.

As an accounting idiot, I not so savvy when it comes to this kind of issue. (I only recently "discovered" the difference between balance sheet account and profit/loss account)

I need some guidance to know if this the normal practice during implementation of Navision.


Any help will be greatly appreciated.

muksha

If you are ready to pay for migration extra, then your NSC should not hasitate in migration. But be carefull in providing the history data.

Forza

There is no explicit mentioning of migration all all those historical data in the agreement. By historical data, we are meaning posted G/L entry and invoices. They indicate that there will be a lot of man days involved in carrying this out and will cost us more. Furthermore, the validation process might cost us more too.

But I suspect that they hesitate to perform this because of lack of experience and don't want to be held liable for any problems that arise from it. I've looked at the database of the current system and found that there are close to 300,000 line of posted G/L entry.

Anybody had any experience migrating financial history to Navision?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks a million.

Forza

Sorry I missed this post.

themave:

I wouldn't bring in detail, but when we first implemented Navision, we made a journal entry for each months balance for the prior 5 years, so we could produce comparative financial statements. we used a dataport to enter the info in general journals, then posted the journals.

I begged you for the detail, themave.
Or else I'll ](*,)

Just kidding

Your insight got me to think. Perhaps instead of bringing the opening balance forward to Navision during Go-live, perhaps I should do a summary net change of all the G/L accounts for every month of the past 5 years together with the opening balance of 5 years ago. If done such a way, will Navision be able to calculate the year to date balance based on that?

Mind again that I'm really not good in accounting and is just brainstorming about this solution logically. Don't laugh at me if you find this proposed solution to be silly. :-s

Nikk

Hi,
Our approach is to import audited balances into the new system,we do not bring in ledgers from any accounting system just because it is one.The data in a new implementation must start off as clean as possible.

themave

Forza wrote:

Sorry I missed this post.

themave:

I wouldn't bring in detail, but when we first implemented Navision, we made a journal entry for each months balance for the prior 5 years, so we could produce comparative financial statements. we used a dataport to enter the info in general journals, then posted the journals.

I begged you for the detail, themave.
Or else I'll ](*,)

Just kidding

Your insight got me to think. Perhaps instead of bringing the opening balance forward to Navision during Go-live, perhaps I should do a summary net change of all the G/L accounts for every month of the past 5 years together with the opening balance of 5 years ago. If done such a way, will Navision be able to calculate the year to date balance based on that?

Mind again that I'm really not good in accounting and is just brainstorming about this solution logically. Don't laugh at me if you find this proposed solution to be silly. :-s

Yes this is exactly what we did. I did this on my own, without the solution center, using dataports.

what you can do will depend on what you can get out of your old system, and how much effort (or money) you want to put into it.

Our lagacy system, had the ability to output a flat file of the g/l table. it had all the entries in it. I took that and imported it in to microsoft access, and used access to produce a new table that had the month end summary for each account, by department code. I then used a dataport to import this file into a Navision general journal. Then I posted the general journal, letting Navision do all the validation.

To make the dataport, I first made some sample entries in the general journal batch, and then made a dataport that would export the general Journal line table. I exported it, and looked at all the different fields that were filled in by Navision, this told me the fields that I need to have in my microsoft access file.

This is the same technic I used for the beginning inventory balances, I just used the item journal instead of the general journal. Same for customer ledger entries, vendor ledger entries, ect.

This all depends on how much time you have to learn Navision, I worked with a test company for many months, learning all I could about Navision, this was so we could do the work ourselfs, as much as possible. If you don't have the time to learn it, then you should pay the solution center to do. it is not hard, and if they seem to not know how to do it, you may give extra thought about using them.

Forza

themave:

I'll send you a ticket and fly you in here to do it for us. It's just a 20 hours flight. Hahaha.

God I missed California. You work in Livermore? That like 10 min from SF, right?

themave

Forza wrote:

themave:

I'll send you a ticket and fly you in here to do it for us. It's just a 20 hours flight. Hahaha.

God I missed California. You work in Livermore? That like 10 min from SF, right?

Pretty close, about 45 minutes with traffic, which there is a lot of.

Forza

I'm a SJSU alumni. Never occur to me that Livermore is closer to SJ than SF. But then again. We do bump into Lawrence Livermore on 101 quite early on our way to SF.

Forza

I am trying out myself on migrating all the sales invoice from the old system to Navision and dataport it into Posted Sales Invoice table.

Anyone care to chip in some idea of what to look out for?

I am assuming that the posted sales invoice table is sort of dormant where I can import those historical data into.

Forza

Let's come back to the G/L balances and let's forget about my last post about the Posted Sales Invoice.

I have the ability to extract the monthly net change of all the G/L account for the past 3 years (date back to the opening balance of the current system) from the current system that we are replacing. I am thinking perhaps I post the opening balance for let say June 2003 (the first month of the current system), and post the net change for every month after that, then I close the year one by one until I reached to the current month. That, in theory, will give me the monthly financial statistic of all those 3 years, correct?

We are making a decision next week to run Live and posted the opening balance. Your advise will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

gdkve9

Forza wrote:

I only recently "discovered" the difference between balance sheet account and profit/loss account

My dear friend, could you share what is that you have discovered regarding the difference between the balance sheet account and Profit/Loss account?? [-( [-(