By Hugh O. Stewart   

During a Sage Intacct implementation, most VARs only offer some form of Trial Balance Migration, which may load a single Trial Balance or may involve migrating net monthly summary balances from your legacy accounting system into Sage Intacct’s general ledger (GL) to provide basic reporting capabilities, but loses all of the detailed financial activity that contributed to those balances.  

If your team needs to run granular multi-year analyses, support an audit, explain historical variances, or investigate prior-period activity, a trial balance migration will leave you frustrated after go-live. Summary balances simply don’t tell the full story. For that, you need transaction-level historical data.  

Platform Transition provides two historical financial data migration options to meet different levels of financial and operational reporting complexity:  

• GL Detail Migration through our process called The Multi-Dimensional Data Conversion Solution^™
• Subledger Rebuild through our process called The Simplified Subledger Conversion Solution^™

(We also perform Trial Balance Migrations, but we’re best known for the two solutions above.) 

Let’s dive into the differences between these two solutions to illustrate when each one makes the most sense.  

A Quick Primer on How Sage Intacct Organizes Data 

Let’s start by reviewing some basic Sage Intacct terminology. If you’re migrating to Sage Intacct from a legacy system like QuickBooks, Xero, or Abila, you may be unfamiliar with the way Sage Intacct structures financial and operational data.  

These differences are of great significance when you’re deciding what historical data to bring into Sage Intacct.  

The Role of the General Ledger (GL) in Sage Intacct 

The GL in Sage Intacct is the authoritative record of your financial data. About 95% of the reporting engines in Sage Intacct pull data from the GL.  

The GL resolves every contributing transaction from every source to a single transaction type: a journal entry. You can’t enter operational transactions like vendor bills, adjustments, and payments into the GL. They flow in from subledger modules.  

The GL stores: 

• Your chart of accounts 
• Posted journal entries 
• Dimensional tags on financial activity 

Think of the GL as the financial layer — the place where all accounting activity ultimately lands, regardless of which module created it. 

Subledger Modules in Sage Intacct (AP, AR, Order Entry, etc.) 

In Sage Intacct, operational transactions like bills, invoices, and bank activities live in subledger modules.  

For example: 

• Accounts Payable (AP) transactions include AP bills, AP adjustments, and AP payments 
• Accounts Receivable (AR) transactions include AR invoices, credits, and cash receipts 
• Order Entry and Purchasing modules support objects like sales and purchase orders and other procurement documents 

These modules maintain all the business logic, workflows, and line-item detail that sit behind your financial activity. 

In legacy systems like QuickBooks or Xero, subledgers are less formal or barely exist. In Sage Intacct, they are foundational. 

Our GL Detail Migration Solution Brings Over Your Financial History for Maximum Reporting Capabilities 

The Multi-Dimensional Data Conversion Solution^™ is a transaction-level historical data migration process that brings your entire GL journal entry history into Sage Intacct. We can go back as many years as you want — up to the full history in your legacy system — and we bring over every line item with all of the dates, descriptions, and context that tell you what that transaction represented, whether it was a bill, a credit to a customer, or a bank reconciliation, etc. And we can enrich those transactions with Sage Intacct’s dimensions (like Department, Location, Item, Class, etc) so that you can take full advantage of Sage Intacct’s advanced reporting features.  

This solution includes:  

• Every journal entry going back as far as you want 
• Original dates, descriptions, and source references where available 
• Dimensions applied, when possible, to support multi-year analytical reporting 
• Journal entry detail that users can drill into from GL reports 

We can also add on the migration of your attachments. This includes both master data attachments (like vendor contracts, W-9s, photos, addresses, etc.) and transaction attachments that are associated with your journal entries and in specific cases, originally attached to the subledger records that created the journal entry in the legacy system.   

Attachment migrations are incredibly valuable for companies that are completely paperless and need to migrate supporting documentation that only lives in their legacy accounting system.  

The Multi-Dimensional Conversion Solution^™ is our most popular accounting data migration solution because it gives you full historical reporting capabilities without paying to rebuild operational data you no longer use. It lets you analyze multi-year trends in Sage Intacct, so you’re getting maximum value from Sage Intacct’s amazing reporting tools from the get go.  

What to Expect from a GL Detail Migration 

Migrating and converting legacy general ledger transactions into Sage Intacct typically takes anywhere from two weeks to 60 days, depending on the amount of history you want to bring over and how much data cleanup needs to happen before the migration.  

A GL Detail Migration also comes with several side benefits that you miss out on if you only migrate trial balances, especially for multi-entity organizations. When you bring over your historical financial transactions, you get a chance to merge and de-duplicate all your master lists (Vendors, Customers, and Projects) from all of your individual entities. The transactional data mapping exercise guides you through the process of cleaning up reporting inconsistencies that would otherwise transfer into Sage Intacct, so you end up with more reliable reports. And you learn a lot about the capabilities, automations, and safeguards built into Sage Intacct along the way, which can dramatically speed up your adoption after go-live.   

A Subledger Rebuild Recreates Your Operational History in Sage Intacct

In The Simplified Subledger Conversion Process^™ (our Subledger Rebuild migration unique process), we rebuild the AP, AR, or other subledgers inside Sage Intacct so that they behave as if you had originally entered the data into Sage Intacct. We take bills and recreate them as bills and pay them with their historical dates. And we make sure the AP subledger reconciles with your AP historical ledger and aging balances. 

This solution includes:  

• Paid and unpaid AP bills 
• Historical customer invoices and payments 
• Credits, adjustments, voids, write-offs 
• Payment application history (payments applied to their respective invoices) 
• Accurate AP and AR aging as of any historical date 
• Fully reconciled control accounts 

What it achieves: 

• Subledger detail matches GL history 
• Operational teams gain continuity of information 
• Auditors see clean, traceable activity across years 

And we don’t just bring over your open items either. We can rebuild your purchase orders, sales orders, with their converting sales and vendor invoices, and we can make it all post to the general ledger, giving you a near-perfect replication of your old system with your new mapping, as if you had always been operating in Sage Intacct.  

A Subledger Rebuild gives you operational continuity — the ability to answer vendor, customer, and auditor questions with full history, not partial or incomplete data. If you need to be able to see which bills were paid by which checks a year and a half ago, you need a Subledger Rebuild. 

Just like with the GL Detail Migration, we can also bring over attachments that live in your legacy subledgers.  

What to Expect from a Subledger Rebuild 

The Simplified Subledger Conversion Process^™ involves significantly more time and effort than a GL Detail Migration, and for that reason, it costs about three times more, and it can take anywhere from 120 days to a year, depending on the challenges encountered with the legacy data.  

But for some companies, the ability to maintain operational continuity is well worth it.  

Which Migration Scope is Right For You?  

Here’s a helpful comparison of the three main approaches to accounting data migration that we see: Trial Balance, GL Detail, and Subledger Rebuild:   

Solution / Outcome	Trial Balance Migration	The Multi-Dimensional Data Conversion Solution™  (GL Detail Conversion)	The Simplified Subledger Conversion Process™  (Subledger Rebuild)
What’s imported?	Monthly summary balances	All historical journal entries	All historical journal entries + all historical operational transactions (AP, AR, Order Entry, Purchasing)
Level of detail	Very low	High (transaction-level)	Very high (operational lifecycle)
Operational drilldown available?	No	No	Yes — full drilldown into bills, invoices, payments, credits
Recreates vendor/customer history?	No	Yes (limited – reportable only on the GL)	Yes
Supports year-over-year financial reporting?	Yes	Yes — with true historical activity	Yes — strongest alignment
Supports year-over-year operational reporting?	No	Yes	Yes
Supports audits?	Minimally	Strongly (JE-level audit trail)	Strongly (JE-level + operational sourcing)
Overall value	Low	High financial clarity	Maximum financial + operational clarity

For more than 80 percent of our customers, the GL Detail Migration provides all the reporting functionality they need. However, if it’s critically important for you to be able to tell which bills were paid by what payments, or to find out what payments paid which invoices, a Subledger Rebuild will give you that ability in Sage Intacct. Alternatively, you could keep operating your legacy system, but this is inefficient and, in some cases, costly.   

If a Subledger Rebuild doesn’t make sense for you, but keeping your legacy system operational isn’t a good solution either, we have another solution that provides stable, long-term access to your historical operational data, called The Affordable Subledger Archive Process^™ (ASAP). This unique process extracts your subledger transactions from your legacy system and stores them in a searchable database outside of Sage Intacct.  

Accelerate User Adoption With Platform Transition’s Historical Data Migration Solutions 

Regardless of which solution you choose, any of them will increase your accounting team’s trust in Sage Intacct, which in turn will accelerate their adoption of it.  

Platform Transition is the only firm that can migrate both your financial history and your operational history into Sage Intacct in a way that keeps the GL and subledgers perfectly aligned. That means no workarounds, no mismatched balances, and no “we’ll fix that later” promises — just a clean, reconciled system that feels like you’ve been operating and reporting in Sage Intacct for years. 

Schedule a meeting or request a quote today to see if we’re the right partner for your historical accounting data migration project.