Green Machine^® is a privately owned, American manufacturer of innovative recycling and solid waste processing equipment and systems. From 2006 to 2025, the company used QuickBooks Desktop with a significant number of customizations to manage their finances. When maintaining a remote server was no longer a viable solution for providing remote access to their team, they looked for a cloud-based solution. They chose Sage Intacct, a cloud-native modern ERP that offers much more sophisticated reporting capabilities than QuickBooks. 

Migration of 19 Years of Historical Data Needed for Business Continuity 

Ruth Northrup, systems analyst for Green Machine, joined the company in the middle of their Sage Intacct implementation, and quickly realized the implementation would only be successful if it included a migration of their detailed historical transaction data going back to 2006.  

“We sell custom conveyor systems with warranties, and we need to know when that system was installed, what was charged, what the line items on that system were,” Northrup says. “We need to have that data at our fingertips.” 

Strategic Guidance and Transparency Made Complex Sub-Subledger Migration Seamless 

Green Machine hired Platform Transition to complete a historical subledger migration with sub-subledgers and attachments — the most complex scope Platform Transition currently offers for non-construction clients. Green Machine needed their entire accounting system history, going back 19 years. The migration included more than 3,000 vendor records, about 900 customer records, and more than 200,000 line items.  

Northrup says experience has taught her the value of partnering with a data migration expert. “I have been working in systems and transferring data between systems for over 20 years. It’s always worth having an expert come in and do it for you. There is no reason to try to kill yourself to get your data out and into the new system.” 

Northrup says the Platform Transition team provided insight into Sage Intacct’s capabilities and architecture that helped her make better configuration decisions. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know, but Hugh and Tanya were fantastic at making sure that we knew everything we needed to know in order to make it a seamless experience.” 

She also says that Platform Transition’s data validation processes gave her added confidence during the migration. “I could transparently see all of my data at any given time, and when it came over, it came over the way that we expected it to,” Northrup says.  

Green Machine Sales Maximized ROI of Sage Intacct with Historical Migration  

Because of the level of attention to detail Platform Transition brought to the data migration process, the result was a Sage Intacct implementation populated with complete data from 2006 with full functionality, as if the company had never used QuickBooks. 

Their Sage Intacct subledgers now contain blue numbers for all their historical transactions, meaning finance team members can click on a bill transaction from as far back as 2006 and see which check number paid that bill. They can even open the attachment, if there is one associated with the transaction. They don’t have to use any workarounds to access any of the customer records that were previously stored in QuickBooks. Additionally, they gained the ability to run year-over-year reports immediately and use all of Sage Intacct’s enhanced reporting features that weren’t available in QuickBooks.  

Northrup notes that the Platform Transition team also helped her set up some critical reports in Sage Intacct after the migration because they had run out of support hours from their implementation team.  

“Our experience with the Platform Transition team was really amazing,” Northrup says. “From the beginning, they were really supportive, understood the data we were trying to get out, understood the QuickBooks system we had, they understood Sage Intacct, and were able to make great recommendations for us.”