Owners often say “we have the sheets, just import them.” Open them: three spellings of a customer, item codes mixed with catalog numbers, stock is last week’s count plus WeChat screenshots. Dump that in and day one chokes on dirty data. Migration is a project. Walk a timeline, not a file name.
Move living master data only: customers, suppliers, items, warehouses, price rules, open orders, current stock. Retired customers from five years ago, voided documents, personal note columns are not treasure. Why Excel fails is in Excel inventory breaks once volume grows.
Whose customer sheet wins, whose item codes win, which count is stock. No owner and clean-up becomes a department fight. Sales and finance must accept one customer file first. See Sales and finance looking at the same customers and contracts.
Merge same names spelled differently. An item with several units needs a conversion rule. Tax-in or tax-out is written down. Finish that in the sheet, then import. Dirty data in the system will not match the books no matter how tight permission is.
Import twenty customers, fifty items, one warehouse of stock, and walk a real order. If it misses, stop. Do not “import everything and look later.” Stock rules are in How a system makes inventory match the books.
In-transit POs, unshipped sales, open work orders move by state — not as one history dump. History needed for statements is a read-only archive, not mixed into the live table.
Agree how many parallel days: the old sheet only ships out, new orders only enter the system. Count on cutover day, list gaps, warehouse and finance sign. An unclear cutover day leaves two books for a month.
Extend vs. rebuild changes the migration plan. Keep codes and customer numbers you can, so the floor does not “lose the goods.” The call is in Should you extend the old system or rebuild it. Whether finance connects in phase one also shapes cutover: walk inventory first, then push vouchers — safer than cutting two systems at once. See Do you have to connect finance and the ERP you already run.
DaXi asks for a migration list before build: which files, who cleans, how many parallel days, who signs cutover. Without that list, launch day stops on “the sheets are not ready.” To plan migration together, go to Business systems service page and bring sample sheets. Migration often takes longer than writing screens. See cost and cycle. The overall sequence is in from brief to launch.
Photos, contract scans, and QC reports are data too — not only numbers. File names must map to a customer or order, or the attachment opens empty. Open permission by role. Do not share the admin account in a group file. In the first week after cutover, match stock and unshipped orders every day. Problems cluster then. Wait until month-end and you cannot tell migration from operations. Collect the “real sheet” on someone’s PC before the official file on the shared drive. That is the floor truth.
Bring the customer sheet, item sheet, and a current stock sample. We will mark columns to move, clean, or drop so two books do not go wrong on launch day.