By Hugh O. Stewart

Picture this: You’re two weeks away from your Sage Intacct go-live (cutover) date, and your implementation manager hands you a template for Transaction Account Balances. “Close your books in the legacy system and bring over the ending balances only,” they tell you. You ask, “What about all of my historical data?” That’s the moment you realize your implementation doesn’t include the migration of any of your historical transactional data. If you’re in the middle of an audit, or if you’re trying to get acquired, raise money, or go public, you need your historical data.

Some implementation teams advise their clients to minimize historical data migration during implementations due to its complexity, cost, and high risk of corrupting critical accounting data. Instead, they recommend only transferring summary balances. However, this approach robs businesses of tremendous strategic value.

When you work with a team that has a proven data migration process, you can move your full historical records into Sage Intacct efficiently and with confidence. The benefits extend far beyond a smooth cutover. Migrating your detailed transactional data unlocks powerful capabilities that can transform how you analyze your business and serve your stakeholders.

Here are eight reasons why I believe migrating historical accounting data should be the default approach for any ERP transition.

1. Gain Strategic Insight

If you only migrate summary balances from your legacy system, you lose the ability to do detailed year-over-year analysis on specific vendors, products, or business units inside of Sage Intacct.

Without the full transaction history in your new system, you may have to continue manually consolidating data from multiple sources in Excel, or else maintain a separate data warehouse for conducting year-over-year analyses.

Migrating your full general ledger (GL) with all of its detail allows you to leverage Sage Intacct’s powerful reporting and analytics from day one. You can seamlessly compare your current and historical financial data to produce detailed financial insights that would have been impossible to produce in your legacy system. This empowers you to make more informed, data-driven decisions that drive your business forward.

2. Get More Value from Sage Intacct’s Best Features

Sage Intacct’s robust dashboarding features are designed to provide real-time visibility into your business performance. However, these dashboards will be limited in their usefulness if they only contain data from your go-live date forward. Building sufficient historical data for comprehensive multi-year trend analyses can take considerable time if you go live with summary balances only.

By migrating your full historical data, you can immediately begin unlocking the full potential of Sage Intacct’s purpose-built reporting and analytics tools.

3. Get a Higher Multiple at Exit

A rigorous historical accounting data migration de-risks the due diligence process during an acquisition and can lift the multiple buyers are willing to pay. Clean, systemized history makes revenue recognition, margins, and working-capital trends auditable, reducing uncertainty, holdbacks, and the “haircut” buyers apply. It also enables credible quality-of-earnings work, clearer recurring vs. one-time revenue splits, cohort and churn analysis, and defensible EBITDA add-backs — making an acquisition more attractive to PE and strategic buyers who prize reliable KPIs.

With standardized, drill-down detail, buyers can underwrite growth and cash conversion with confidence, often re-rating the business toward peers with higher comps. In short: better data lowers perceived risk, sharpens the value story, and supports a higher exit multiple. We have had customers share that they have experienced a higher multiple upon exit because of the rigor of the historical data migration in the environment being sold.

4. Plan a More Functional Go-Forward Architecture

When you migrate your full historical data, it empowers you to configure your Sage Intacct architecture in a way that better serves your actual business needs. If you were to design your go-forward architecture without first mapping your legacy data, you’d have a hard time anticipating all of the necessary workflows and configurations to make sure your team can efficiently reproduce all the reports they’re used to producing.

In fact, our client Coppermine Capital told us that if they hadn’t taken the time to carefully map out their historical data, their entire go-forward architecture wouldn’t have been workable. Migrating your detailed transactional records allows you to uncover any false assumptions that could impact your implementation plan. You’ll be able to realize much earlier in the process exactly what your Sage Intacct implementation scope needs to be. You’ll also empower your implementation specialist to build an architecture designed to support your business in the future as it scales, thus mitigating the risk of a reimplementation down the road.

5. Pass Audits with Ease

Audits are stressful enough under the best of circumstances. If you can help it, you don’t want your team to have to jump between your new system and your legacy system to produce all the reports they need to satisfy auditors.

When you migrate your historical data, you can leverage Sage Intacct’s powerful auditing features from day one, using its robust reporting capabilities to quickly generate financial statements in whatever format auditors request.

This not only enhances the integrity of your accounting records, but it also makes future audits more efficient and less disruptive to your business operations.

6. Improve the Quality of Your Accounting Data

A historical migration process often requires you to clean up your master data.

Let’s say you have 5,000 vendor records and you know there are dozens, maybe even hundreds, of duplicates within that data set. If you bring over the duplicates, you’ll end up with errors in Sage Intacct. During the data conversion step of a historical migration, you can identify and eliminate the duplicates before moving to the next step of the migration. The conversion process is also a great opportunity to establish consistent naming conventions and categorization for vendors and customers and to address coding errors, missing information, or other data integrity issues.

This cleanup effort can streamline your accounting workflows and give your team more confidence in the accuracy of your reports and your financial projections.

7. Speed Up User Adoption of Sage Intacct

Research on the success factors for ERP transitions consistently shows that when users trust the quality of information in their system, they’re far more likely to find it useful — and that perception of usefulness leads to higher satisfaction and adoption rates. Because historical migration efforts usually start with data cleanup, the data that gets migrated tends to be of higher quality than the summary balances that would otherwise get moved.

Additionally, the familiarity of your historical data can also boost your team’s trust in the reports they generate in the new system. That early trust helps them learn faster, rely on the system sooner, and realize the return on investment more quickly.

For example, a construction accounting team could run a Job Cost Report in Sage Intacct on a project they’re familiar with and compare individual line items — like the labor cost on a bathroom build-out — to the same line items on the equivalent report in their legacy system. When the numbers match, they gain confidence in their ability to navigate Sage Intacct, and the magic of the new system clicks for them faster.

8. Get Rid of Your Legacy System Immediately

Migrating your historical data gives you the freedom to retire your legacy system for good soon after your cutover. You can stop jumping between two systems and performing consolidations in Excel, gain back hours of time, and reduce the risk of manual data entry errors. And if you were paying an annual subscription for the legacy system, you can also cut out its expense — often a significant one.

Unlock Sage Intacct’s Full Potential with Your Historical Data

Migrating your historical data sets the stage for a seamless transition to Sage Intacct, allowing you to maximize the platform’s capabilities from the start. This comprehensive process streamlines user adoption, boosts data confidence, simplifies audits, and enables the immediate retirement of legacy systems. By taking the time to thoughtfully migrate your data, you can unlock the full transformative potential of Sage Intacct, positioning your organization for enhanced financial visibility, operational efficiency, and long-term success.

At Platform Transition, our mission is to revolutionize data migration and free businesses from the constraints of outdated systems. We offer flat-fee services that minimize the risk to our customers and incentivize us to achieve a perfect migration on the first try.

Schedule a meeting or request a quote today to get started.