Advice on migrating to "modern" software

[Nancy Palmquist]

Bill,

My advice is to start using the new system as of a certain date, like 
the start of a fiscal period.  Overlap both systems for a month or so in 
that you will put payments against items billed in the old system to 
close off the old invoices.  You will do all new business in the new 
system.  Continue for a time until the remaining open invoicing in the 
old system is manageable, then create balance forward invoices for those 
items in the new system and drop the old system from then on.

It may be possible to load basic data if the new system allows it, but 
in all my moves from one system to another, loading the data fresh in 
the new system always seemed to get a better set of data.

The new system may ask for information not available before so even if 
you load it someone has to update each and every record to supply the 
missing data or modify where necessary.  I think adding is always 
cleaner than updating.

This is not an overnight process and in all cases may take months before 
you can use the new system exclusively.

I have seen many customer move from my Medical Office System to other 
kinds of billing and that is always my advice.  To write custom routines 
to try to load data effectively may just not be cost effective.  If you 
are leaving filePro, it is not hard to write export routines to dump 
filePro files to csv or txt files. What is not clear when you do this is 
the relationships between files, but it might be a good starting place 
if you want some files loaded for reference.

IMHO - "Modern" is a lousy way to say WINDOWS, likely instead of Unix or 
just for the GUI stuff.  I still do not see out of the box software in 
the WINDOWS world that can and does work better than filepro especially 
if your company needs custom work often. But I may be a bit prejudiced.

Nancy



On 2/22/2018 4:52 PM, William J. McEachran via Filepro-list wrote:
> I recently got asked to give some advice on 'how to' go about migrating
> from and old legacy system to a new custom software solution.
>
> I have my thoughts ... but I know many of you have done this or in the
> process of doing it and thought I'd pass on the question to the group
>
> What advice would you offer a small business that want to  migrate off
> their 'obsolete' old system to the new 'modern' system of their dreams.?
>
> Thanks
> --
> Bill McEachran
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-- 
Nancy Palmquist         MOS & filePro Training Available
Virtual Software Systems    Web Based Training and Consulting
PHONE: (412) 835-9417           Web site:  http://www.vss3.com

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