Sage 100

We have a client that moving to Sage 100 v2015 off QuickBooks and they want all the history migrated (of course). We're currently working with Greytrix on the data conversion and it's taking forever, 4 weeks so far. Of course they have had numerous problems with the QuickBooks data and there is a bunch of corruption I'm sure. Does anyone else have options available for the migration? I know we can do exports, imports, all that fun stuff and we have done that before. Sage used to have the Data Migrator, but I think that is dead as far as I know. Just looking for some input and other possible options.

Converting history has never proved to be cost effective for our customers. That doesn't mean that every customer doesn't ask for it in the beginning. Since we do all our work on a fixed fee basis, we tell the how much it will cost, before we get started. The less we know up front, the higher the quote to address the risk. This allows them to make a better ROI decision. As an alternative, we typically set up a VM and move a copy of their current accounting system to the VM to preserve the OS, app, and data for research and lookup.

We do the same, but these guys are on subscription with QuickBooks and as soon as it's up, poof goes the data access. I thought we would give the Greytrix route a try, but it's just dragging out.

This one of the dirty aspects of an SaaS service. You have to come up with a way to preserve your data. Some like Acumatica will give you a copy of you database but even that has limited value. You have to build an application or set of queries to make the data usable and meaningful. We had a client who moved from NetSuite to Sage 100. NetSuite essentially held their data for ransom to get another 50k out of them while they pulled all the data out via CSV files and built a SQL repository to hold it. I smell a business opportunity if you can just figure out how to leverage it.

https://community.intuit.com/articles/1145829-exporting-from-online-to-desktop

I just had a meeting with a prospect who was (is) pushing hard for migrating all of their prior year history to Sage 100. I tell them the same as @ShawnSlavin -- that a full history export is expensive, probably full of errors which won't be caught for a year and will leave you not trusting the full history and wondering why you paid so much to migrate it. In some cases there's another reason that the user wants full history and if you can get at that then you may be able to export only certain files. in my case the prospect wanted pricing info from the past few years.

@WayneSchulz, thanks for the reference to the Online to desktop export. That will come in handy. I agree completely with isolating the underlying need for the data so you can get to a manageable dataset to work with.

What @ShawnSlavin said. SaaS hostage potential is exactly the reason I've resisted Cloud-based computing over the years.

@LouWagner just because there are sharks doesn't mean you shouldn't stay out of the water. The better prepared you are, the better chance you have to have a great time and not get eaten. No risk no reward. Just take the risks with you eyes open and take reasonable precautions. In the case of a SaaS solution, know how your going to get your marbles back when you decide to pack up and head home. (How's that for mixed metaphors?)

Love the metaphors, @ShawnSlavin ! I agree with you, wholeheartedly and while I've resisted, I've come to the same conclusions you have. Getting the data back is one thing, getting it back in a usable form is something else entirely. The question of who owns the data has been the biggest sticking point to date. Obviously, the owner of the data is the company who subscribes to the software, but I'd hate to be held hostage for it.

the owner of the data is the company who subscribes to the software"" - not necessarily. Software publishers continue to get away with completely unconscionable license agreements.

...and who reads those?

This past summer, I was able to migrate a year's worth of history from QB as journal entries. I used a VI job and once we got the formats down it wasn't too bad. I think it took me 2 hours per month of data to clean up the output spreadsheet and run the import. That might have included posting in a test company, so the client could review the numbers to make sure that the financials and trial balance tied out.

What did they pay for that @KerrieGuarino and did you use a value-pricing model?? Option 1: I/We will export, cleanse and bring in a year's worth of history. Option 2: You can export and cleanse the data and I/we will bring it in afterwards. Option 3: YOU can print out, manage your history on your own.

@ThereseLogeais you value pricing master. Boy. you've learned how to ride pretty damn quick.

I have used Transaction Pro before. Easy to setup. Not sure it will get all the data you want but it does grab transaction detail. http://www.baystateconsulting.com/products/01TxnExport.htm I've also used MS Access and QODBC. However you end up having to build your own data mapping and VI from there. This tool looks interesting and Charlie Russell is a well respected QB guru. http://www.sleeter.com/blog/2015/04/extract-quickbooks-data-with-qb2excel/ Good luck!

@ThereseLogeais, they paid hourly for it. We told them before we started that we hadn't done this before so we wouldn't know how long it would take. They really wanted this history, so we charged them by the hour which they paid for. Now that I have done it once, I think I could establish some sort of upper limit on the cost, based on two hours per month of history. The client did a little cleanup in that they populated the Sage GL account numbers in the file. I also think we had to use a custom GL export out of QB to get the data to export in a format that was relatively easy to import.

Thanks @AndrewHagenbach , that's the type of information I was looking to receive. Appreciate the feedback.

@AndrewHagenbach thank you for sharing. Both of your references look very promising.

@KevinWesley - how did this turn out? I have a QB prospect that wants history also. Did Greytrix deliver? Did you end up using one of the other options?