text: BC comprises financials, sales, services and operations, project accounting and HR, it streamlines processes and provides AI insights for smarter decision making. On top of this– it is integrated with Office 365 – now your data from BC can travel to Office apps and back with no boundaries – this is a fantastic experience.
  Business Central is a real treasure chest for every business with immense options for customization and personalization, but if you have Dynamics GP deployed and haven’t decided on Business Central yet, you can still give BC a whirl by synchronizing your on-prem Dynamics GP with Dynamics 365 Business Central. This will allow you to stay on-prem, but at the same time enjoy insights from cloud AI for better planning and decision making.
  If you have found that cloud is your perfect match and you are ready to make the move – both literally and figuratively, keep reading – this time we will discuss how to migrate your data from on-prem Dynamics GP to Business Central in a few easy-to-follow steps and make this SaaS your primary solution.
  Only a supported version of Dynamics GP (released in: 2015, 2016, 2018) with the latest build deployed can be migrated (Pic.1). The reason for this is that only the above-mentioned versions have additional code units that allow to export data from GP into a separate zip file compatible with migration tool. To create this file, go under File menu in your GP, choose Maintenance and then Export data (Pic.2).
  Once you save your zip folder, containing .txt files with data and settings (Pic.3), you can start migration – as simple as that.
  Migration is a one-time data move, once you migrated, BC SaaS will become your primary solution and your existing Dynamics GP system will only be used to search across your historical GP data or for reporting purposes (if you use a connector to a reporting tool). As moving from on-prem finance solutions becomes more commonplace, Microsoft is developing extensions, that make migration process literary a walk in the park. Dynamics GP Data Migration Extension is available for free at Appsource . Thanks to this extension you can migrate the following modules:
  Now you may ask an obvious question – why can’t we migrate all our GP data? The reason is that Dynamics 365 BC is a totally different product, and some modules in it, like Fixed Assets or No. series work differently (comparing to on-prem GP) or don’t exist at all, like e.g. Payroll.
  At the moment only the above-mentioned data can be migrated with the help of GP extension, but Microsoft is planning to add the ability to migrate historical data for Sales, Purchasing and Inventory too. There is also a Rapid Start Services – toolkit to migrate more data and we will come back to it a little bit later.
  Now when everything is ready for migration you can start the process. Under Setup and Extensions you will see Assisted setup and click on Migrate business data. On the “Data Migrators” page, you can select among a number of options: to import from GP, QuickBooks, QuickBooks Online and Excel. At this point you will be asked to choose the export (zip) file and the extension will group the information it contains in a table for you to check if everything was exported correctly before migration process starts (Pic.4). As you continue, the migration tool picks up your data, pushes it up into BC tenant and maps it to the tables within the BC application.
  If an error occurs there may be two scenarios – if a not required field contains an error (like absent @-symbol in email address), the record will still be migrated, and you will be able to correct the error after migration. If error is in the required field, the record won’t migrate. Overview of migration will help you to keep track of that (Pic.5).
  When GP extension was first released it offered only the option of bringing over your existing Chart of accounts and the Balance sheet at the time of migration, so only a Summary value was brought across to BC. The reason is that the GL chart of accounts in Dynamics GP and Business Central distinguish by their structure. There is only one Account number in BC tenant, therefore GP account main segment will become the account number in BC once you migrate. The other segments will come as dimensions. Transaction amounts are not distributed across those dimensions, but all the amounts are summed in the main segment of that particular account (Pic.6).
  Since 2018 fall release you have a new option of bringing a brand-new chart of accounts with new account numbers. To do this choose “Create a New Chart of Accounts” option during setup process (Pic.7).
  Then you will be offered to download Excel file (Pic.8) where you should map each of your current accounts with a new unique account number. If you leave some lines on the “New Account Number” column (Pic.9) blanc or enter duplicates, the migration will fail.
  After your Excel table is ready, you can import it back to wizard (Pic.8) and all your accounts will change its numbers according to the Excel table lines. Not only the numbers, but also new accounts’ summary information will change – it will be available for fiscal period of a current year and the year before (Pic.10) (fiscal periods are determined according to GP settings).
  Another new option available since fall 2018 is the ability to post transactions automatically or leave them unposted, meaning you can post them manually once migration process is over. You can automatically update the General Journal or, if you want to make sure everything migrated correctly, you can leave it unposted which would give you the ability to look at all the transactions and their batches and then post them manually in case you want to make any changes before that process completes.
  Now detailed open transactions are brought across too. For example, if you have 10 invoices, credit memo and three open payments, all of those documents will come across as individual transactions. Instead of bringing the original transaction amount, the amount remaining on the transactions is brought across. For example, if Adam Park Resort has invoices for $40 000 with an amount remaining $20 800.09, balance in the customer leger entry will be for $20 800.09 (Pic.13). The same applies to Vendors – only outstanding amount on the transactions will migrate.
  Your inventory items will be imported according to the cost valuation chosen, when you set up a company in BC. First-in first-out evaluation method is automatically applied to service items. As for now the quantities on hand are migrated into the blanc site; after migration you can transfer those to the corresponding locations manually (Pic.15). It is also one of the enhancements around the migration tool that Microsoft is planning to make in future releases.
  Apart from this data, certain setup information is migrated. Posting groups are brought across based on Posting Setup in GP, as well as Payment method ID, Shipping Method ID and Salesperson ID (the details in regard of those particular entities are not brought across, only the IDs are transferred).