December 1^st is quickly approaching and the angst of knowing that a new accounting system is needed looms before you.  While the business of doing business has been all consuming during the last 11 months, the notion of sending one more year on an inadequate accounting system seems unfathomable. If you plan on taking any time off for the holidays, is moving to a new system by January 1^st even possible?  Well, relax. You actually have more than 28 days because some of your “Go Live” tasks are actually done after you cut-over to your new accounting system.  Here is a realistic timeline on how you can accomplish this with myGPCloud.

Overview:

Week 1 – define chart of accounts and financial reporting needs – predefined in myGPcloud

Week 2 – extract from your existing system/clean/modify – vendors, customers, and inventory master lists

Week 3 – import vendors, customers, inventory items

Week 4 – bring in open balances such as month end trial balance numbers, open accounts payable, accounts receivable, inventory items costs and balances, purchase orders and sales orders.

End of Week 4 – GO LIVE

Post Go Live:

Week 1 – Develop your financial reports – predefined in myGPcloud

Week 2 – Open Bank transactions – enter outstanding checks and deposits in transit

Looking at the details

Week 1 – First let’s look at some of the time consuming tasks that have already been taken care of for you with myGPcloud.  The key to every good ERP/accounting system is the chart of accounts.  After all, it is the basis of all your financial reporting.  If you get this wrong you will be cursing yourself for years to come. It is no wonder why CFO’s, controller and business owners spend countless hours trying to come up with a COA that allows for growth, best practices in reporting and significant enough visibility to manager and bankers without going overboard on the number of accounts. And those are just the posting accounts. You also have to think about departments, location or product segmentation reporting.  Whether you are a simple start up business or a sophisticated distribution or manufacturing company or a complex professional services company, myGPcloud has a chart of accounts thought out for you already.  We have predefined four very unique charts to handle general business, supply chain, manufacturing and professional services businesses.

Week 2 – If you are moving from another accounting system like Quickbooks, Peachtree or many of the Sage products, extracting your master data files can be done quickly and easily into Excel.  From there you will want to clean out any old vendors, customers and inventory items you no longer use and you might also want to re think their ID’s.  myGPcloud allows for 16 characters in each ID field and you can use alpha-numeric as well, if you like.

Week 3 – Now that your data is nicely organized and current, you can use our simple integration manager tool, which comes standard with the product to import into Dynamics GP these items.  If you need help or have a lot of items, we have a fixed price list for help on importing these items.

Week 4 – This week usually falls during the last week of December between the holidays. So depending upon your business, this can either be a quiet week or a busy one; so make sure you plan accordingly.  Many customers try  to print checks out of their old system and hold on to them while they transition over to their new system to avoid having to enter too much open AP. Open AP can be easily manually entered as well as open purchase orders if you have less than 20 – 40 of each.  More than that and we recommend doing an import, again using Integration Manager in Dynamics GP.  Open AR however is usually something out of your control, so you will have to enter, or import in these transactions so that your AP and AR agings match your old system.  Open Sales Orders are also recommended to be manually entered if possible, as many of these will affect inventory balances as well, so make sure you enter your inventory balances first.  Remember once you move these over, no more transactions should be entered into your old system.

GO LIVE – Well you are about to start entering into your new myGPcloud system.  Make sure you have check stock on hand that will work with your new system – myGPcloud uses most existing check stocks but some manual changes may need to be made.  This might also be a good time to take a copy of your database and move it into a test company.  Reach out to the support team at myGPcloud and they will do this for you.  Then go into your test company and run some transactions; purchase orders, sales orders, accounts payable invoice entry, journal entries, etc., and print out all the items to make sure that everything looks the way you want it to.  Make sure you view our videos and blogs on the 10 steps to going live with myGPcloud.  These are helpful videos and blog posts to get you through the common questions.  Or reach out to the support team as all new customers have 5 technical support calls at no charge.

Post Go Live – Week 1 – Well now that you have gone live and are entering transactions into your new system, getting financials or reporting is your next important task. If you are using the predefined charts that came with the system initially, you are ready to print financials.   If you added accounts, you will just need to go into the report writer and add them there.  With myGPcloud we have pre-written the following reports for so all you need to do is print them as needed.

• Summary Balance Sheet
• Detailed Balance Sheet
• Summary Income Statement
• Detailed Income Statement
• Detailed 12 month Income Statement
• Trial balance

Post Go Live Week 2 –  By now you have probably received your bank statement or you can go on line to print one out.  But in order to use the Bank Reconciliation module you will need to enter in (from your last bank reconciliation) your deposits in transit and un-cleared checks.

Hopefully this quick recap will give you the confidence that you can move to a new accounting system with just 30 days left to January 1^st. It will take some dedication on your part, but well worth the effort when you realize all the great features that you will get with your new myGPcloud system.