Changing Systems? Don’t leave your historic data behind

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Changing systems is never easy and one of the biggest challenges to overcome is how much historic data to bring across or perhaps reluctantly, leave behind.

The standard approach to financial data is that open items – the line detail on outstanding debtors and creditors, are migrated together with balances for most of the rest of the general ledger.

Excel downloads or paid-for-access to the old system for a year – a cost not always considered in investment proposals - allows users to retain views of the historic transaction detail. 

Where there is job, project or other data types, such as outstanding purchase orders (PO’s) and time, the ideal is to bring over the detail which applies to current live projects, although on occasion and depending on the complexity of mapping old system data, sometimes it is only possible to bring in line summaries of these projects into the new, viz totals for billings on account, revenue recognised, job costs and time.  

Not anymore.

 
 

Agency DNA now has a solution[1] to extract and hold as much historic date as you want, in a usable Excel-like format which allows it to be stored alongside new system data, thereby creating a seamless trail from the beginning of time (pun) to your eternity.

This is immensely powerful, for several reasons:

  • There are no gaps in your data - your audit trail is complete and historic data secured.
  • You can report with data straddling inputs from old and new systems – especially important if you are phasing your implementation and have to run two or more systems for a period of time.
  • You can build data profiles, the trends derived from merging old data sets with new actuals and forecasts – critical if you are overseeing long term revenue contracts, but essential if you are looking to create business plans, eg for a sale, where having your historical data sitting alongside actuals and forecasts and immediately to hand, will be of real value for you.

These are example of how our solution helps you after you’ve made your new system decision.

Our solution can also be used to help you test the data structures you want to implement in a new system before you decide and hard-code them in – potentially saving you loads of time and money if you get the setup wrong – or realise your proposed solution can’t produce the outputs you need.

For a discussion on how Agency DNA’s remarkably cost effective solution can be relevant and of value to you, call us on telephone: +44 (0) 20 3394 0046 or to request a demonstration (Click here).

[1] Built using BizView™ (see https://www.agencydna.com/cpm) By mimicking Excel in BizView, users can create everything from simple to highly advanced web-based forms and reports based on many different data sources and the BizView Data store.