Best Practices for ERP Data Migration: Transitioning from Microsoft GP to Dynamics Business Central

If you have decided to leverage the cloud by migrating your business from Microsoft Great Plains (GP) to Dynamics 365 Business Central (BC), now it is time to discuss the best practices for it.

Dynamics Business Central (BC) is a simple yet robust solution that increases the efficiency of your business. Dynamics BC is a cloud-based business application platform that combines customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP), productivity applications, and artificial intelligence tools.

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A crucial aspect of this change is understanding and mastering data migration. In this blog, we shall discuss some of the healthy practices to follow during the data migration from on-premise-based Microsoft GP to cloud-based Microsoft BC.

Charts of Accounts (CoA)

Charts of Accounts (CoA) is a financial, organizational tool that provides a complete listing of every account in a company’s general ledger broken down into subcategories.

CoA is used to organize finances and give interested parties, such as investors and shareholders, a clear insight into a company’s financial health.

Each CoA typically contains the client business’ name, a brief description, and an identification code to make it easier for readers to locate specific accounts.

During your data migration process, CoA is usually the first thing to be migrated. Business Central has an intelligent mapping built-in utility that helps with the segments and dimensions of the data.

Businesses store data in segments. Each segment stores specific information such as region, department, project, cost center, salesperson, etc. This makes the CoA complex and multi-segmented, though easy to slice and dice while running financials.

But over time, CoA becomes enormous and unwieldy. Every time you add a new segment, you need to update the same everywhere, such as over expense accounts, revenue accounts, general admin accounts, etc.

Unlike dimensions, segments are unable to provide proper depth for financial analysis.

Business Central has opted for an approach where a regular account number has 20 characters. Segments can be added within the system and can help define unlimited dimensions. Therefore, it is advisable to not migrate CoA and instead leverage the dimensions feature from day one.

Migrating Customers, Vendors, and Other Items

Businesses thrive on data: the more the data, the merrier. According to Hubspot, the average company manages 162.9TB of data; the average enterprise has 347.56TB of data, seven times as much data as the average SMB with 47.81TB.

Data migration entails the migration of open receivables and open payables as well. Upon migration, often only details like invoice number, due date, and the balance dollar amount are visible. The same is true for purchase and sales orders data as well. The orders whose invoices are settled will not be migrated.

Bringing redundant data into your new cloud environment will not only make your cloud messier but also hamper the speed and efficiency of the system, thereby killing the objective of the cloud.

A healthy practice is to settle the invoices before migration and avoid bringing fragmented data to the cloud.

Transactional History

Businesses have years’ worth of data. As discussed previously, it is not healthy to bring over such a vast amount of data to the cloud. Along with cluttering, it also requires you to invest in additional storage space. You also need more resources to ensure that the data is not truncated, duplicated, or simply blank-spaced.

If the data is keyed and coded correctly, it will be easier to search and handle the information, regardless of its magnitude. On the contrary, if the data is not keyed correctly, the query for searching primary entries according to their previously allocated code will become an arduous task. Hence, it is healthy to leverage a warehouse rather than bring the entire data into the cloud.

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Reports

Businesses run on data, numbers, and facts. A good way of representing data is via reports. A company makes hundreds of reports on various metrics over a fiscal year. These are then repeated every year with the addition of more reports as the business grows. If your business is migrating from Microsoft GP to Dynamics BC, the data present over both platforms will slow down the process of report generation and data analysis.

Jet Reports is an excellent migrational tool for Business Central. So, if your business uses Great Plains (GP) and has shifted to Business Central (BC), Jet Reports can help you to pull data from both ends. If you have to make reports where half the FY data is in GP and another half in BC, it will help smoothly pull the required data from both ends and put it on a series of charts or performance indicator reports. Jet Reports is just one option for Power BI, and many other such tools are also available.