Switching softwareIntroduction

The most common order is also the riskiest one: import all the old data first, then start working. That costs you an evening before you learn anything at all about whether the new system helps. And it answers none of the questions you actually have today.

Reverse it. Have something calculated first that your spreadsheet cannot do: how much revenue do you actually need for a given take-home figure? How large is your tax reserve right now? That takes minutes and needs no imported documents at all. Only once the answer was worth something to you does the effort of moving data make sense.

The best moment is a cut-off date, not an accident

Switching mid-quarter produces two half datasets. Sensible cut-off points are the turn of the year, the start of a quarter, or the month after a completed monthly close. Choose a point where the old system is cleanly finished, and begin in the new one with a clear opening balance.

Deliberately run the first month twice. It sounds like extra work and it is in fact the cheapest insurance you can buy. At the end of the month you compare both results.

If the figures agree, you have bought confidence. If they differ, you have found something far more valuable: a place where one of the two systems calculates incorrectly, and it almost certainly did so before as well. Those discrepancies are the real prize of the parallel month.

What you actually need to bring across

You rarely need to migrate everything. For day-to-day operation you need open items, your recurring expenses, your customer records and the current state of your reserves. Completed prior years stay where they are. They need to be retrievable, not editable.

Many people hesitate to switch because they fear a conflict with their practice. The opposite is true if you set it up properly. A tax practice has no interest in which program you use. It has an interest in clean, structured data it can import without retyping.

The standard for that is called DATEV, and it is used by more than 40,000 tax practices in Germany. If your system produces a DATEV-compliant export, your practice's work becomes cheaper and faster: no manual transfer, fewer typing errors, shorter closings. A feared conflict turns into an argument in favour of switching.

Tell the practice before you move, not after

Let your tax practice know before the cut-off date rather than afterwards. They can tell you which format they prefer, whether they want direct access to your data, and what they need for the annual accounts. A short conversation beforehand saves you rework in the spring.

This list is surprisingly short, and a change of software does not alter it:

• the complete bookkeeping data for the year, ideally as a DATEV export
• all statements for the business account
• the fixed-asset register, if you depreciate larger purchases
• payroll records, if you have employees or part-time staff
• the previous annual accounts or tax assessment as a basis for comparison

If your new system can produce these five things cleanly, the switch is uncritical from the practice's point of view. Check that before you move rather than in March.

If you file your income tax return yourself, you have until 31 July of the following year. With a tax practice that deadline extends to 30 April of the year after that. Those are nine additional months.

This difference is not a detail. It means that working with a practice does not only take work off your hands, it also buys you room to breathe. Anyone considering dropping their practice to save money on the switch should price those nine months in.

Only once three things hold: the parallel month agreed or its discrepancies were explained, the practice successfully imported an export from the new system, and one complete monthly close ran through in the new system.

Until then the old system stays readable but unedited. After that you only need it as an archive for the statutory retention periods. A switch is finished only when you no longer have to open the old system to answer a question.