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Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains serves multiple industries in the US, plusit has strong presence in Latin America, U.K., Australia, Canada, Middle East, SouthAfrica. Great Plains is natural solution for growing company, when small businessaccounting application, such as QuickBooks, M.Y.O.B, Peachtree, Quicken or othersshould be replaced with ERP, better positioned to serve mid-size business. With theswitch to Microsoft Great Plains you need to decide on data migration andconversion. Let us give you highlights on your options:
 Beginning Balances approach. This is the simplest way. What you do is  enterbeginning balances in Great Plains General Ledger (GL) and begin using your newsystem. When you need to enter invoice for existing customer  you create customerrecord in Great Plains and go ahead with Invoice in Accounts Receivables or SalesOrder Processing (SOP). The same symmetric procedure is for vendor invoices inPurchase Order Processing (POP)  Master Records migration. If you have large number of customers and vendors, plusmultiple addresses for customers, numerous inventory items, sophisticated chart ofaccounts with several thousand accounts in GL  you need to migrate these masterrecords from your old accounting to Great Plains. The best way is  purchase GreatPlains Integration manager and do it in-house or with minimal help from externalconsultant. If Integration Manager license seems to be expensive and you have SQLexpertise in your IT group  you could your programmer populate master tables:GL00100, RM00101, RM00102, PM00200  Open & Work Data Migration. In Great Plains Accounts Receivables and AccountsPayables invoices have open status if payments are not yet applied to thesedocuments. We recommend you to use integration manager to bring customer and vendorinvoices and payments and post them in Great Plains. This way will allow you tosave on consulting services and keep good relationship with you Microsoft BusinessSolutions Partner. We do not recommend using SQL scripts for bringing open datainto Great Plains  you will have posting issues, related to incorrectdistributions. In other words do not populate such tables as SOP10100, SOP10200 viadirect SQL stored procs.  Historical Data Migration. We recommend stay away from this migration unless itis absolutely necessary  you may have order takers needing immediate access tocustomer historical records to place new order. In this case having two system:legacy accounting for data lookup and Great Plains for new documents  may not beefficient. Then you do direct historical tables population: SOP30200, SOP30300,etc.  Data Conversion. Conversion means the process of extracting data from your legacyapplication and massaging it to be ready to be fed to Great Plains. In case of eachspecific system you should use specific approach. In case of QuickBooks you simplyprint reports, save them in text file and massage there  usually in Excel or Lotus1-2-3. The specific of small accounting applications is proprietary databaseplatform, which makes traditional tools, such as ODBC connection complicated.
About Alba Spectrum Technologies. Alba Spectrum Technologies is joint venture ofseveral IT and business consulting companies, now operating as single businessentity. We have local presence in the Houston, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, SanDiego, Dallas, Miami, Atlanta, Denver, Phoenix, New Orleans, Minneapolis, SanFrancisco, LATAM & Brazil, Germany, Russia, South East Asia and Oceania. We believein the coexistence of Java (J2EE, EJB, Linux, Unix), Oracle and Microsoft (.Net, C#,VB) platforms and systems and specialize in several product lines and cross platformintegration, customization, heterogeneous report design, plus we provide ERP/CRMsystems comparison and reviews, not being committed to just on MRP platform. We alsostake on XML cross-platform data interchange to be advanced in the coming decade.
Alba Spectrum Technologies websites: http://www.albaspectrum.com http://www.greatplains.com.mx http://www.enterlogix.com.br http://www.ronix-systems.de
