When is the best time to migrate from Sage Financials?
Time is ticking away to the 31st Dec 2020 when Sage Financials reaches it’s end-of-life. This is the first time a major SAAS based accounting system has been turned off so for most of us, this is uncharted territory. This is a short post covering when is the best time to migrate, and highlighting the negative impact on your regulatory obligations if you don’t act in time.
When to migrate
Discussing this with clients, it is often felt that the end of the financial year is the best time to migrate to a new accounting system. The main benefit being you only need to migrate the Balance Sheet accounts as the PnL Account will be zero. The down side is the end-of-year tends to be a very busy time, so my not be ideal for grappling with a new system, and discovering the inevitable gremlins. And the benefit assumes that your accounts are completely done-and-dusted BEFORE the migration – maybe not very realistic?
Migrating at the end of a VAT period is certainly a good idea. This means you can pick a cut-off date for the migration of the accounts, transfer the Balance Sheet and PnL balances (along with open invoices) with the aim to generate the VAT submission exclusively from your OLD system, with future VAT submissions only using the NEW system. You can continue to process late payments posting to both systems.
If you migrate mid-VAT period, you can either sort out the submission taking data from both systems, or you can migrate to the previous VAT period end and re-key all the invoices & payments. Most of you will be working with a partner to manage the migration, and remember the more complex the migration, the higher the cost.
SAAS and historical data
SAAS – Software as a Service (or Cloud Computing to you and me) introduces some additional challenges. With systems such as Sage 50, after migration you would still have access to your old data. This is really important to enable you to run your audit, and in case of a VAT inspection. With Sage Financials end-of-life this is NOT AN OPTION!
After 31st Dec 2020 you will have NO access to your data!
So if you were planning to migrate on the 31st Dec end-of-year think again! Even migrating at 30th Nov is only for the brave, or foolhardy, you really do need to give yourself more time than that.
Archive Data
Sage recommends you print out your Balance Sheet, PnL, Aged reports and VAT submissions for regulatory purposes:
See: Exporting Data for Migration – Financials
You also have the option of exporting ALL your Salesforce data, including all the Sage Financials data to CSV. That means one csv file for each object, which is 330 csv files at the last count!
If you are concerned by this, please get in touch and we can discuss some options: