Migration to SAP Business One from Great Plains Accounting Notes
There are still customers, who are on Great Plains Accounting for DOS, Windows or Macintosh, typically versions 9.5, 9.2, and earlier. When Great Plains Software encouraged its GPA customers to convert to Great Plains Dynamics at the end of 20th Century (as there was a concern of GPA not being year 2000 compliant, plus support for GP Accounting was about to expire those old good days), large number of GPA customers followed the advise and migrated.
Then,
there was the period, when Great Plains Software successor, Microsoft Business Solutions offered migration path to Microsoft Small Business Financials (this small business corporate ERP application fits better from the price standpoint, however this Corporate ERP business line was terminated and the last SBF version available was 9.0). Well let's now look at competition to Microsoft Business Solutions or Microsoft Dynamics - SAP Business One. SB1 is often cheaper in comparison to Microsoft Dynamics GP, and SAP B1 functionality might be comparable or even exceeding (especially comparing Dynamics GP Business Ready Business Essential and SAP Business One Professional all-in-one license modules set). Please, note that SAP BO doesn't have Payroll module (directly from SAP, however there are third party add-ons). SAP Business One is especially strong in small business manufacturing and light assembly, warehouse management, picking and packing, service warranty contracts, plus it has integrated Opportunity management module (often referred as CRM or Customer Relation Management). Let's now consider migration steps and options:
1. Exporting Data from Great Plains Accounting. Typically customers just print reports (CSV, but do not expect all reports to be available in CSV, some of them are good for human reading, but require preprocessing and data massage in MS Excel or in custom MS SQL Tables). Earlier versions of Great Plains Accounting had also such features as Data Export. Later versions of GPA, such as 9.2 and 9.5 allow you to do direct ODBC connection (via Microsoft Access for example, but you will need to find your original GPA 9.5 or 9.2 floppy diskettes to generate DDF files).
2. GPA to SAP Business One data conversion recommendations. Try to do migration to SBO at the end of your financial year. Try to migrate GL accounts, customers, vendors and beginning balances only. Try to convince your management do not take approach like this "we need to convert everything!" - this is probably possible in theory, but it doesn't look realistic, especially considering budget restrictions
3. Data Import to SAP Business One. We assume that the size of the company, converting from Great Plains Accounting is small and budget is low, which makes it non feasible to purchase advanced SB1 data migration tools (IBOLT, etc.). Likely that you will be utilizing SAP Business One Data Transfer Workbench with its CSV (often referred as Excel) worksheets. DTW might be very powerful in initial data conversion as well as in ongoing integration to SB1. We will review new features of DTW in SAP Business One 8.0 (older versions were SAP Business One 2007A and 2005A for USA)
4. Converting from GPA to QuickBooks. There are options to convert, customers, vendors, inventory items via Excel files with mapping. However, if you are planning to convert such features as Payroll Employees, Paycodes, Deductions, State, Federal and Local Taxes, Contributions - you may be dissatisfied, as you will need to deploy third party tools with complex mapping
