Sage Line 500 V5.5 upgrade to NAV

Dynamics 365 Business Central/NAV User Forum
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I’m currently working in a team that is upgrading a Sage Line 500 v5.5 to NAV 2009 sp1. My focus is developing Data Migrations (I have 15 years experience as a Sage developer and have done many Sage upgrades also). I am also involved in working with the NAV developers to replace the Sage electronic order imports with NAV equivalent functionality.

Please can anyone tell me about their experiences of performing such an upgrade? I’m especially interested in any issues and problems with data migration. I would also be keen to know about performance tuning after the migration of data.

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Hi Kelvin,

Welcome to the Dynamics User Group!

I have done a number of Sage to Nav conversions and the data migration is hughly dependant on the customer’s requirement. Apart form the obvious master data and balances - what do you intend to migrate? I would guess that you are required to migrate the sales/order history - what volume of data is involved?

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Hi Dave,

Thanks for the welcome.

Nice to hear you have done many conversions. I hope you will share your tips and tricks. Below is what I’m migrating (TableID in brackets).

Customers (18) Fairly straight forward here. I have 1.7M postcodes & town so am using this for assigning City. I have someone working on a lookup between the postcode district i.e. LE (Leicester) and the County. Would be nice to start off with valid postcodes and addresses.

Gen. Journal Line (81) SALES Sage AR Open INV,CSH,CRN,JRN. Unallocated amount for partials. Having trouble with this with mapping. I can migrate in but posting complains about Document No. I have mapped slitemm.reference to this but NAV wants GJSAL000001. I’ve splt INV,CSV,CRN & JRN into different Line No sequences. Any help here would be great. Also we can’t import closed items so credit control may have an issue here (no history). Have you a work around?

Item (27) Starting this next week.

Stockkeeping Unit (5700) Starting this next week. I don’t know how to book opening balances in yet for each Location/Item/Bin combination. The data is easy to extract from stquem but I don’t know the table to import it to. Help here would be well received.

Sales Price (7002) Have made a stab at this. My company has thousands of Sage price lists. Some with zero prices! I’m going to use 100% discount in a discount group to handle this.

They are changing the chart of accounts and as such I have to map the old GL account to the new NAV General Ledger Code which has been assigned its dimensions. I have to extract the balances from Sage and then let the accountants break these down as the new opening balances for the NAV General Ledger Code. Not being an accountant I can only try to understand what they want to achieve. I can at least extract the balances from Sage.

Vendor (23) Not started yet.

Gen. Journal Line (81) PURCHASE. Not started yet.

No SOP history. We are starting with just open orders which will be migrated using an order import Codeunit via buffer tables.

We have manufacturing but this may be keyed manually.

One last thing. We have many Customer & Item codes with leading zeroes. What is the best way to stop these being stripped when exporting to Excel. We can change these in the migration so we are going to have to live with them.

Hope we can exchange ideas etc.

Kelvin

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Hi Kelvin,

Comments below:

This is a common problem especially in the UK (Ireland doesn’t really have postcodes), we would normally to to fix this in Sage or extract to Excel and get the customer to fix it there.

I suspect that you are using a Journal Batch with a no. series associated with it - use a batch without a no. series. The history is a bigger issue as you have to post allocations - it can be done but a bigger task and needs to be questioned as to the merit as the line detail is not migrated by this method.

Don’t foget sub - table e.g. Item Unit of Measure

You need to discuss with your Nav partner if you are going to implement stockkeeping units and if so are you going to migrate or generate them in Nav. To bring in your opening stock balance you can use Item Journals (table 83)

Hmmm - you need to sit the customer down are determine the “live” prices and migrate these.

In Excel, have the code Column as text and it will leave the leading zeros.

In a word the best help I can give you is “Validate” - what I mean is that migrating the data is only half the battle, you will need to run field validates to populate other fields and sub-tables e.g. dimensions. You Nav consultant/developers should be able to assist you here.

Hope this helps

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Hi Kevin… leading zeros for customers & item codes… in the past, when I’ve migrated things like this, I usually export the codes as a text field to force the inclusion of the zeros.

Good luck with your implementation - I remember spending two weeks migrating GL History from a large Sage database into Nav and I still have the scars [;)]

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Tim,

Many thanks.

The leading zero issues is not a migration one. I have customers and products which begin with leading zeros. So when you export from NAV to Excel the leading zero is removed by excel. This will make ad hoc reporting a problem.

Luckily for me I’m only migrating in the opening balances for COA (phew!).

Cheers

Kelvin