We all believe that what we are doing currently is the best method. We have used a particular system or have done something a particular way and have become very comfortable and perhaps intimidated by anything that might shake this up.

When it comes to business software in particular, while we think we have it all down pat and have mastered the latest and best, this is often not the case. Some software we use for managing accounts can be outdated and cumbersome but you don’t always know that at the time.

A change to a new system may have upfront costs but in the long run, a move to an up-to-date and effective accounting system can save you time and money.

The shift

There are a couple of ways you can change over to a new system. One is using a third party to manage the conversion. The other is to have your accounting team perform the conversion manually.

Option 1: through a third party

When you use an outside system you can lose the ability to customize your new accounting system. You may face difficulty in being able to customize your chart of accounts, invoice layout or even how the invoices with part payments are brought across.  If any part of this transition process goes wrong, you have no recourse in which to get it corrected with the third party provider.

If you use a third party, they may supply you with a checklist of items to use in bringing the relevant data across. This list can be quite extensive and unless you have extremely good knowledge of accounting principles you may find some of these items to be quite daunting.

Option 2: manual transition

When the transition of data from one software to another is done manually, you can be sure that all of the data is captured correctly and imported to your specifications.  This process does take time but the quality of the data in the new software is accurate and reliable.

To ensure you achieve the best outcome when moving over to a new system, we recommend that all of your data in your existing file is accurate, up to date and has no errors. This will assist with the effectiveness of the conversion as your data can be brought across to your new software precisely. If you have large numbers of manual journals you will find it very difficult to have these brought across using a third party. These will need to be checked by your accountant and brought across manually.