You will need to provide us with your Customers, Vendors (Suppliers) and Bank Accounts.

As soon as you’re signed up you’ll be provided the data templates to complete. These are Excel spreadsheets with some cool “smarts” behind them that allows them to be imported into Business Central. A helpful walkthrough is provided alongside to make this process as easy as possible. If you can extract your Customers and Vendors out of your current system, it’s more of a column reshuffling than anything else and should take a couple of hours. 

You can view an example Chart of Accounts here.

In order to get you up and running so quickly a “fixed” Chart of Accounts is required. You can add as many additional G/L account codes as you like once you’re live (you may have some extra Expense accounts you wish to add), but G/L accounts that are linked to other ledgers in the system are fixed. If you need to maintain an existing account structure, no problem. Check out our Packs and Pots Implementations.

• General Ledger: Opening Balances for each G/L Account (you can post this by previous months if you wish to provide a little extra for reporting)
• Sales Ledger: Any open items for the Customer (including original dates/document no’s/due dates)
• Purchase Ledger: Same as above
• Bank Accounts: An opening balance plus any unreconciled entries

The data and system is yours. Once Business Central has been setup/configured you can add extra data as necessary, whenever you like.

Data needs to be with us a week before your KickStart week. Generally we’d say to give yourselves at least a week for data, so if you signed up on a Monday and data was done for that Friday, your KickStart week could be as soon as just 2 weeks away! Ultimately though it’s flexible and the KickStart week should be booked at a time where you can give it your full attention.

If you know you’re going to be busy, make sure you book your KickStart week to give you ample time to cleanse your data. We generally book out teams in a couple of weeks in advance. This makes sure everything happens on time, so if the deadline is missed it’s likely your KickStart week will have to be moved. Depending on availability this may be multiple weeks. Moral of the story – don’t miss the data deadline!

After your KickStart week you can use Business Central straight away. However, most people will wait and complete month-end on their old system – transfer the opening balances/items – and then start using Business Central in production from the start of a new month.