And now, no doubt, you'll receive one of those Sage Surveys that says "How did we do?" I'm always so torn on those, and I've found it better politically to ignore those surveys and not answer. (Ignoring them should be an answer in itself!) But it is SO tempting to answer them truthfully and let them know exactly how they did (or did not) do. As my father used to say "You're just breeding a scab on your nose." Oh...but so tempting still!
And thank you for letting us know what you did to fix it!
Sue Bennett | President
P. 503 620 3484 | F. 503 620 2765
12559 SW 69th Ave | Portland, OR 97223
sue@benpor.com www.benpor.com
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------Original Message------
In case anyone else may benefit from my experience:
I just completed an upgrade for a client moving from v2017 to 2019/PR2.19.4. They have 60 company codes. After the installation and initial migration, which took place late in July, the client added 2 new companies in both versions, and have been in production in v2017 during the long testing phase.
Last weekend, I performed the final migration. When I selected companies to migrate (no system files) and selected all companies, I got this message: "Company code and/or company keys already exist when re-migrating data". I removed the 2 newly added companies from 2019 and re-migrated them (along with the other 58 companies in this installation). No error messages, no conversion errors. No problem, right? Wrong. During my onsite visit yesterday, they reported that in the 2 companies, there is no Payroll data. I decide to re-migrate those 2 companies. Get the message again.
Sage KB 66732 addresses the message and offers 2 options:
1. DFDM and remove the records for the 2 companies from SY_MigratedCompanies.M4T, then re-migrate them. Tried that, but there are no records for those companies in the file.
2. Copy the MAS_XXX folders from the source system to the target system (I did not try this option because I believe I have heard multiple times from Sage and 90Minders that you can't just copy company data into the new version and re-convert, so I didn't even try).
I opened a case with Sage. Without expressing my opinion about my Sage experience (which would be a rant), Sage informed me that I needed to re-migrate all the data WITH system files for all companies again. In fact, the "payroll expert" that I was not able to talk with directly, as she was in the background with the analyst I was speaking with insisted that I must always re-migrate system files. Did I mention that there are 60 companies in this installation?
Thankfully, what I did instead was reach out to Jim Woodhead, who recommended removing the companies in question in 2019, re-creating them, and copying the MAS_XXX folders from 2017 to 2019 and convert. Voila! Big shout out to Jim for saving the client from, to put it mildly, a negative experience that would potentially have them be fearful of future upgrades.
What is still a mystery to me is that the file referenced in the KB, SY_MIGRATEDCOMPANY.M4T, has a modification date from the original migration, not the most recent one, and therefore did not contain the records for the 2 companies that were not originally migrated. I did not pursue this question very far because I needed to get the client up and running and the analyst I was working with clearly had no idea.
In any case, the big lesson for me was that I could copy folders from the old version and convert without re-migrating.
Thanks to anyone who read this message in entirety for doing so. I felt the need to post this to the community so that I can let my experience with Sage go and move on.
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Barbara Goldstein
Sr. Consultant
DSD Business Systems
San Jose CA
800.627.9032 x221
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