Platform Transition (formerly The Financial CoPilot) provided a bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO solution package called the Contract Finance Department™. One of our clients reached thirteen QuickBooks® Online (QBO) databases and needed a more functional solution. After four months of research, we found Intacct® and were excited about the software’s ability to provide user-specific dashboards, rights management, and many other features necessary for scalability and growth. We were particularly excited that one of the software’s biggest strengths was that it was optimized for a multi-entity environment. A big reason why we made the leap from QuickBooks® to Intacct® was for this very reason. In June 2014, we became an Intacct® Accountant Partner and were shown a QuickBooks® migration tool that Intacct® offered. From that demo and our practice with the tool, we anticipated being able to easily migrate our client to Intacct® with all of their detailed historical data. We know how frustrating it can be when moving from a legacy system to a new one. And sometimes that move means either still keeping the legacy system around for historical data or having to migrate that data. We looked forward to not having that problem when using the tool.

But a good story isn’t a good one without the “details.” And it is those details that turned our story into a solution not just for that client but for others. What happened? After seeing the demo of the QuickBooks® migration tool we promised the CEO of the client company that we would be able to migrate all of their multi-entity data and put the legacy system to rest in just 8 days. We made that promise at 1PM EST on Thursday. Later that very day our hopes were dashed when we were told that the existing data migration tool would only work with migrations in a single-entity environment. We were told that a full migration may conservatively take three months and cost in the several tens of thousands of dollars. There was no way we could go back to our client and break that kind of news to them. What resulted from that roadblock was an opportunity to overcome it. We overcame it with version 1.0 of The Multi-Dimensional Data Conversion Solution™ (MDCS).

At that time our then The Financial CoPilot team possessed nine years of experience creating software that migrated data between financial systems. Those nine years prepped us for the undertaking of developing an internally developed utility to do what we’d promised. We created the tool in record time and by the next day, we had migrated four years worth of data from one entity into Intacct® and within a few days, had fully migrated all the data for all thirteen entities. By the thirty-fourth iteration of our utility, we went from an 80% first-pass error detection ratio to one error for every 300,000 transactions, while reducing overall workflow time! We continue to modify the software in order to improve efficiency and accommodate configuration complexity. Our mission in designing this solution is in eradicating the amount of time a user spends migrating from their legacy software to Intacct®. By removing this barrier to entry, individuals and companies can be more empowered in making the migration to Intacct®.