System migration

We can offer a transfer service from most accounting systems to Freeagent, Xero and QuickBooks.

Why should you migrate?

Migration from legacy systems to a cloud-based service can improve your performance and competitiveness, while cutting out unnecessary and often time consuming routines that you probably didn’t realise existed within your business.

Many legacy systems come with additional costs that make the overall return on investment harder to achieve compared with what will often be a very small monthly subscription for cloud-based services.

Think about it for a second, you probably have an annual fee for your accounting software, monthly fees for IT support in case it needs upgrading, and even a server you replace every decade or so to run the whole thing on.

Cloud-based accounting systems could allow you to ditch most of these costs and replace them with a small monthly subscription. They even allow for remote working on a device of your choosing like a laptop, tablet or phone.

Even the cost of these cloud-based services can be reduced if you pair them with a complimentary service. For example, if you have or open a Natwest Group bank account account (Natwest, Mettle, Ulster and Royal Bank of Scotland) then you can get Freeagent for free.

New methods of working

Other things to consider is compatibility with new technologies. Using legacy systems most likely mean a lot of manual data entry, or some sort of rudimentary data import function.

Cloud-based systems often cut most of this out and tend to connect directly to the source data, meaning manual data entry tends to be a thing of the past. Even in the worst case scenario, importing data tends to be a few button clicks rather than needing a PhD in computer science.

As mentioned elsewhere on this site, there are new features available to you with cloud-based systems.

• Bank feeds – connect your software to your bank to remove the need to type the date, narrative and amount into your accounting software.
• Bank rules – teach your software to categorise your transaction for you
• Receipt snapping – take a photo of a receipt or invoice and have your software extract the information from it itself
• Pay suppliers – pay suppliers directly from your software rather than logging into your bank separately and typing out the bank payment manually.

Migration considerations

You could set up a cloud-based system from scratch and populate it with data as you go along. This means you don’t have any history from earlier years to compare current data with.

This means there are no migration costs to consider, but it does mean that each time you need to add an invoice to a customer or supplier, you will need to create them at the same time. If you deal with hundreds or thousands of customers and suppliers then this might be a hidden cost in time and potential errors.

Transferring customers and suppliers at the beginning without any history could be a nice balance of saving time and drawing a line in the sand between current and old data.

Other things to consider is how much historical data you want to bring over. Going back too far might create more work in re-reconciling troublesome transactions. Another way of achieving this is to import monthly totals for the last few years rather than individual transactions. This allows you some comparative data to see how you are operating now against how you used to operate, but without the headache of the handful of transactions not importing correctly.

Steps for data migration

1. Identify data you wish to migrate
2. Establish resources needed to migrate
3. Backup existing data prior to migration
4. Perform migrations
5. Test the new system for migration errors
6. Reconcile data where possible to ensure a smooth starting point