By Hugh O. Stewart  

If you’re a CFO preparing for a Sage Intacct implementation, you might be wondering how quickly you can get up and running in your new system. Sage claims that Sage Intacct can be deployed with minimal business disruption in as little as 60 days. Is that realistic?  

The truth is: it depends. In theory, a team with perfect alignment on workflows, reporting requirements, and internal processes could be up and running in a few weeks. But gaining that clarity takes time because Sage Intacct introduces concepts, workflows, and architectural structures that simply don’t exist in most legacy systems. 

Take dimensions, for example. You may have used tagging or classes in tools like QuickBooks or Xero or worked with segments in NetSuite. But Sage Intacct’s dimensions are not the same. They behave differently, create different types of conceptual relationships, and power very different reporting capabilities. Even the savviest CFOs face a learning curve when they begin configuring their dimensional accounting architecture in Sage Intacct. 

In most implementations, the limiting factor isn’t how fast your Value Added Reseller (VAR) can move. It’s how long it takes your team to fully understand what your workflows should look like in Sage Intacct, make the decisions required to design them well, and then determine to what extent you would like your historical data to conform to the new configuration. 

The more you know before you get into the thick of it, the smoother your implementation will be. 

Here are six factors that consistently lead to stronger, more successful Sage Intacct deployments.

1. Understand What Is and Isn’t in Your VAR’s Scope

Your Sage Intacct VAR is responsible for the forward-looking design of your new system. Their job is to help you structure Sage Intacct in a way that supports your business. This often includes:  

• Defining your chart of accounts 
• Configuring dimensions and workflows 
• Establishing roles and permissions 
• Standing up your entities 
• Importing master data lists 
• Configuring modules like GL, AP, AR, Cash Management, and (when applicable) Order Entry or Purchasing 

Anything related to future-state architecture belongs squarely in the VAR’s scope. 

What’s not normally in scope — and this is where many CFOs get caught off guard — is a satisfactory scope for your historical transaction data. Almost all VAR contracts state explicitly that historical data extraction, cleanup, mapping, and transformation are the client’s responsibility, where the VAR will be responsible for loading the data and helping with some client-supported error resolution. 

That doesn’t mean historical data migration has to be a bottleneck. If you start early enough, or work with a specialized partner like Platform Transition, your historical data can move on whatever timeline your project requires. We’ve completed complex, multi-entity migrations in days when needed, and we routinely meet aggressive go-live deadlines. 

The key is simply recognizing that historical data migration normally sits outside the VAR’s responsibilities (if not their capabilities). Once you understand that division of labor, you can plan your team’s workload around it and avoid surprises mid-project.

2. Start Your Transactional Data Mapping as Early as Possible

No matter how much historical data you plan to bring into Sage Intacct, beginning your transactional data mapping early in the process delivers enormous benefits. Transactional data mapping is the bridge between the data formats, hierarchical structures, and workflows of your legacy system and the architecture you’re building in Sage Intacct. 

Transactional data mapping involves identifying every master data element referenced in your historical transactions, then determining the correct home in Sage Intacct for each element. This process reveals your actual usage patterns — which vendors, customers, employees, items, locations, projects, or departments you’ve actually used in the past — and what structures you’ll need to set up in Sage Intacct to support your existing workflows going forward.  

Without going through a transactional data mapping exercise, it’s hard to see these usage patterns, especially if you have a multi-entity setup. You may think you know which GL accounts or dimensions matter, but without looking directly at the raw transaction data, it’s easy to make assumptions that don’t hold up in practice. 

Transactional data mapping gives you: 

• A clear picture of which charts of accounts you actually used over the past several years 
• A complete inventory of dimensions and attributes that still matter 
• Evidence-based guidance you can take to your VAR when designing your Sage Intacct architecture 

This is especially valuable if you’re a newer finance leader with limited institutional memory. Instead of relying on anecdotal knowledge or incomplete documentation, you can walk into design meetings with a factual map of your organization’s data usage. 

When we handle transactional data mapping at Platform Transition, we extract the historical transactions first and harvest master data directly from them, building the maps that will govern the migration from this data. That approach removes all guesswork and eliminates the risk of configuring Sage Intacct around outdated assumptions. You can bring your implementation specialist a clean, validated map that shows the exact set of data elements you’ve used throughout the historical period that matters to you. With that data, they can help you design an architecture that supports your future workflows without leaving behind anything important. 

Mapping your data early in the implementation process gives your entire implementation a stronger foundation. It prevents rework, eliminates hidden dependencies, and ensures the system you’re building reflects your actual business — not just your memory of it. 

3. Clean Up Your Legacy Data During the Migration Process

If you’re migrating from a multi-entity environment — or even a single, long-lived accounting file — you almost certainly have duplicate or inconsistent master data hiding in your legacy system. Let’s say you use AT&T for your sales team’s cell phones. You might find five different spellings of AT&T (ATT, AT and T, A.T.&T., etc.) across your records.  

Sage Intacct allows shared master data across entities, which is one of its strengths. But that strength becomes a weakness if you import duplicates. Suddenly you have multiple versions of the same vendor, and no one knows which record to tag. Reporting becomes unreliable, and your new system becomes messy before you’ve even had a chance to use it. 

Some VARs point to this cleanup effort as a reason to avoid migrating historical data altogether. They may tell you to “start fresh” in Sage Intacct. But that argument falls apart quickly, because you can’t start fresh with master data. Even if you only bring over your trial balances, you still need to unify your vendor, customer, employee, item, and project lists. And if you haven’t gone through a rigorous cleanup exercise, you’ll still import duplicates — you just won’t notice the inconsistencies until they cause problems. 

This is why cleanup needs to happen before you import anything into Sage Intacct, regardless of how much history you plan to bring over. 

At Platform Transition, we build data cleanup into our accounting data migration process by default. We rarely require you to fix or correct any data in the legacy system. When we extract historical transactions, we use them to generate a unified master data list — every vendor, customer, item, and dimension reference that has ever appeared during the period you’re migrating. From there, we de-duplicate, standardize naming, and resolve inconsistencies across all legacy instances. Our unique process, The Duplicate Suppression System^™, handles historical master data cleanup at scale, even for clients with hundreds of entities or years of accumulated records. 

A clean, consolidated master data list does more than prevent reporting issues. It makes your implementation faster, because you aren’t stopping to untangle inconsistencies during testing. And it makes your go-forward operations simpler, because your team starts with a clean, well-organized foundation instead of inheriting a patchwork of legacy errors.

4. Make Sure Your VAR Knows About All the Modules You Need Configured

One of the most common implementation pitfalls we see happens when companies assume that Sage Intacct’s modules map neatly to the features of the legacy system, and essential modules may be unintentionally left out from the proposed configuration. 

A classic example is the Order Entry module. Many companies tell their VAR they don’t need it because they didn’t use anything similar in their legacy system. But once we map their historical data, we frequently find “Items,” which are product or service descriptions tied to quantities and rates on their historical invoices. In Sage Intacct, Items can only be included on AR invoices through Order Entry. 

If you use Items with quantities and unit prices on your invoices today, you need the Order Entry module to recreate that functionality in Sage Intacct. Without it, the system can’t support those workflows, and you’ll either lose visibility or face a painful redesign after your go-live. 

This is another reason early transactional data mapping is so powerful. When you bring your implementation specialist a complete, validated picture of how your organization actually uses things like Items or attachments, the missing pieces in your go-forward architecture become obvious. Instead of discovering gaps during user testing — or worse, in production — you can identify the necessary modules before configuration begins. 

At Platform Transition, we surface these patterns early. Our mapping process makes your historical data usage unmistakably clear, giving your VAR everything they need to design a system that accounts for all required modules from the start.

5. Determine a Validation Standard for Every Object You Plan to Migrate

Before you migrate any data into Sage Intacct, you get to establish clear validation standards that define what a “successful” migration will look like. Without those standards defined upfront, you’ll be left spot checking everything from AP balances to Vendor IDs, and it’ll be much harder to achieve complete confidence in the accuracy and completeness of your migrated data.  

For numerical data, validation is relatively straightforward. Reports like AP Aging, AR Aging, and GL trial balances can give you clean, side-by-side comparisons between the legacy system and Sage Intacct. If the numbers match for the same cutoff date, we know the migration was successful. We use these balance-based checks at multiple stages through our migration process because they provide immediate confidence in the integrity of your financial data. 

Non-numerical data requires a different approach. Vendor IDs, customer IDs, items, projects, and other identifiers don’t sum to a total, so you need alternative ways to confirm their accuracy. Some validation methods for non-numerical data include: 

• Record counts

Tally up how many vendors, customers, items, or other objects existed in the legacy system (after mapping and deduplication) and compare that to how many appear in Sage Intacct. This quickly surfaces missing records or unintended duplicates. 

• Referential integrity checks

Every migrated transaction should reference a valid master record. You can run targeted exception reports to surface transactions that are missing master data elements, like bills with no vendor, invoices tied to a placeholder customer, or invoices with a blank item line. If you find any unexpected exceptions, there may have been a problem with the mappings. 

• Spot checks of high-importance records

Some records carry more operational and reporting impact — projects, items, departments, or key vendors and customers. When combined with other more rigorous validations, spot checks of your most important records will also help you gain confidence in your data. 

Clear validation criteria remove ambiguity, shorten testing cycles, and help you catch issues before they reach production, where they are much more expensive and time-consuming to fix. 

6. Evaluate Workflows — Not Just Data — Before You Sign Off on the Implementation

When you’re reviewing your implementation environment, it’s natural to focus on whether the data looks right. But correct data is only half the equation. You also need to confirm that Sage Intacct is configured to use that data the way your team expects. The only way to do that is to test your core workflows before you sign off on the implementation. 

A workflow test reveals problems that aren’t visible in lists or reports. For example: 

• A vendor might appear correctly in the master data list, but if the default AP account wasn’t configured properly, the system won’t post bills the way you expect. 
• An Item may have migrated cleanly, but if it isn’t associated with the correct revenue or expense accounts in the relevant transaction definition, your entries won’t hit the GL correctly. 
• A dimension might exist, but if the required relationships weren’t configured, users may not be able to select it in pertinent operational screens. 

These issues only surface when you run the process end-to-end. 

Before your final import into production, walk through a representative set of workflows — entering a bill, creating an invoice, posting a journal entry, or running an approval process. Each test validates the interplay between configuration and data. If something doesn’t behave as expected, you want to discover that during implementation, not during your first monthly close. 

Once your final data is loaded into production, many configuration settings become locked in relative to that data. Adjusting them afterward may require remapping, reloading, or manual cleanup. Testing workflows upfront helps ensure that your users step into a system that’s fully functional from day one. 

Streamline Your Sage Intacct Implementation With a Data Migration Partner 

A smooth Sage Intacct implementation depends on more than good configuration — it requires having clean, validated historical data ready to support that configuration. When your team understands how your legacy data actually behaves, and when your VAR has access to accurate maps and consolidated master data early in the project, every step of the implementation becomes faster and more predictable. 

That’s where a dedicated data migration partner makes the difference. At Platform Transition, we work alongside both the customer and the VAR to clarify data usage, expose hidden dependencies, and eliminate the guesswork that often slows projects down. Because our work begins with the raw historical transactions, we don’t need a configured Sage Intacct environment to get started. Many of our strongest projects begin before a single architecture decision has been made, giving the implementation team clean master data, validated mappings, and clear evidence of how the organization actually uses its accounting structures. 

The result is a more efficient implementation with fewer surprises, less rework, and a system that reflects the realities of your business from day one. If you want to streamline your Sage Intacct deployment with the support of a team that specializes exclusively in historical data migration, schedule a meeting or request a quote to get started.