Overcome Historical Data Loss Objections to Win New Acumatica Business

All right, well, hello everyone, My name is Romano Muszierski, I'm director of Partner sales here at Acumatica. I work with a team of partner account managers and we manage many partners across us and outside. I'm very excited to welcome everyone in. Today's webinar focused on historical data migration challenges. So we often run into a schematic evaluations where customers will request or require migration of historical data from their legacy solution into the next erp, hopefully which will be Acumatica. Of course, the ASV partner presenting today is Data Self and they will walk us through a couple of options and scenarios on how that requirement could be addressed. With that, please allow me to introduce Gianni Girardi, the founder and CEO of Dataself and Tom Fitzpatrick, the solutions engineer. So guys, the floor is yours.

Thank you Roman. I'm very excited as well. I was a software engineer in my early career, became a business person and then for the past 20 years I've been helping mid sized companies that use systems like Acumatica to help their managers make more informed decisions. This particular webinar overcome historical data loss objections to win new Ecomedica business. It's a long topic but we've been having more and more clients that have been knocking our door with such a challenge and there are different options on how to tackle this problem. Hopefully this webinar will be informative, show you some additional options to tackle their needs. Tom, do you want to introduce yourself quickly?

Yep. Tom Fitzpatrick, BI Solution Engineer with Data Self Today I'll be primarily showing you a couple different demo scenarios here of how you can really Data Self. You can leverage Data Self for better historical analysis. But also I'm typically the individual that you will deal with if you have a client, either a prospect or current client who is interested in more advanced or is just more data driven and looking for something a little bit more than what Acumatica has out of the box for reporting. So I look forward to the demonstration today. We have a great webinar and look forward to hopefully talking with some of you after this call today.

Thanks Tom. And by the way, this webinar is for Ecumatica resellers, so the focus is on ecumenical resellers topics around historical data blending. So let me go to the next slide here. So typically when an Acumatica var is working with a prospect considering a new modern erp, at some point of the discussion you guys go over something like this, the Akumatica data migration plan and usually you discuss the options, you know, to move the we call the matter matter lists the chart of accounts, the vendor method files, the customers open, documents open, AP open, AR open so some some financials for the last couple of years or so. So this is a very common scenario that what I've seen and I've been in this business for over 20 years that's pretty much the context that a VAR will present to a a prospect. Many times prospects don't know exactly what's happening so they'll check the boxes just thinking that what they need is within the available options. So many times they just say sure, check this back, check this box and you're good. Is that it? Yeah. Is that it? Well, the question is that sometimes is not addressed. It's not even showed in a lot of these checkboxes as what about historical transactions? What about the history of your AP ar, your GL transactions, your project accounting? What about those transactions? The main rationale is well, companies should be forward looking so why should you care looking at the past transactions if actually we're putting your business in a much better, more modern ERP and let's help you get the most out of this ERP to move forward. There's no point in looking in the past of all those low transactions. For many businesses that's true. You know, many businesses they don't need to look at the past to decide something better for the future. At the same time, what we're seeing the market pretty much is this whole new data driven culture. A lot of businesses, they're investing in a modern ERP like a comedica because well, they are more data driven. The old legacy system kind of sucked in many regards and they want something modern, something that they can connect their multiple systems and part of the investment is to have better visibility out of the business operations. And this is sometimes even driven by a younger new generation of managers that are looking for being easily access to their trends, to their data, make money from decisions, make better decisions moving forward. So this is very common to have this new data driven culture. Now I'm going to mention some examples where the legacy historical transaction retention being able to look at the past history along with Ecumedica was critical. And I'm going to make this case that many times this problem is a lot more common that many of ours think in a way and why you should take the angle about this problem in a different direction. So this webinar will be around that we have done historical data blending bringing the legacy data and blended with the modern ERP for data. Dozens of customers with Akumatica, we have about a dozen customers. We have done this historical data blending. I'm going to mention just one of them like Technicore, which is one of the most fascinating stories. Technicore is a construction company and many, many years ago when they decided to move to Ecumatica and I talked to the president, Peter, and he said that he would only be able to move to Ecumatica if he was able to see. You know, they work with projects in many projects they cross multiple years and they work with many customers that they have multiple projects across multiple years. So it's a lot of customers with a lot of projects across multiple years. Many projects closed, many projects open. And he said that, you know, when he's negotiating with his customers, quite often he has to see the history of the projects, not only the open project that he's working on, but projects in the past to analyze profitability of the customer, challenges they have with the customer in the past around certain areas of the project so he could make better decisions moving forward to make the best out of each project with each customer. So he said it was critical that when he moves to Akumaticon to be able to see project history for all projects closed and open as well as financials across all the years from the old legacy system with Acumedica seamlessly you should be able to see P and L balance sheet project accounting reports like he never changed the accounting system. We helped implement that Solution back in 2019 and he's been an active and amazing solution and he continues to use today this idea of being able to look at the past, the current, in helping make better decisions for the future. Some of these other vendors, they are more like kind of in distribution business. And these customers, they have clients where you know when you're selling to a new client. Quite often you don't need to look at your past sales because you're negotiating a new deal. But many times when you are negotiating with the existing customers, even, you know, retail clients or clients that are just buying from you frequently, sometimes there's seasonality, sometimes there's factors that you need to see what happened in the last 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, sometimes before the pandemic, sometime long time ago, what happened with this client. So when you're negotiating new deals, you are contextual. You understand the challenge of the customer, how they operate and how can you make a better deal to retain the customer or increase the profitability of your business. So there are many situations where you can only make a more informed decision looking forward when you actually look at the past to see what happened. And sometimes it's looking at ap, you know, costs. What happened with the vendors when you're buying certain items sometimes can be, like I mentioned, projects to see what happens project wise. Sometimes it's actually looking at sales orders that you lost or that you kept. There's a lot of, you know, things that you can learn from the past to decide better for the future. So back to this topic. You know why VARs, as a rule, don't have a checkbox on this list for historical transactions? Well, primarily there's not a checkbox because if you open this discussion quite often it becomes a more. If the client says, oh, oh, what do you mean, I'm not going to have my history. Well, now you open potentially a can of worms, right? Sometimes solving this problem is not simple. Sometimes it's a lot of work and sometimes it can be a lot of cost. So there's a concern of opening this question and going into a can of worms. So why not? Let's just, you know, as I mentioned, when it comes to historical transaction data migration, option one is leave it out, don't talk about it, because the client might not need it. And if they need it, they're going to ask about this down the road when we're already deep into the project. At that point they're not going to pull the plug. They'll continue with you, become a change order and then things will continue, no problem. So why open the discussion now when you don't want to rattle the cage, right? You don't want to risk the business. Well, in my perspective, it really goes down to you being or setting up to be a trusted technology advisor. As a trusted technology advisor, your role is to ask the hard questions. And this can be a very hard question, right? And if you bring it up in this problem of historical data transaction, data migration is the same across all modern ERPs. We work with a lot of the Acumatica, your competitors, you know, the Netsuites, the Intex and whatnot, and they all have the same limitation. You know, when it comes to historical data blending, it's limited. So the point is, most likely you and your competitors from other ERP systems are not. That checkbox doesn't exist in any of these vars. By default, unless the client asks the question, you don't bring it up. Now again, as a technology trust advisor that you're trying to get this, get this, this status, if you bring up this question, the client's going to say, what do you mean you're not going to be bringing transactional history. Well, by default we bring and you explain the why you bring the customer list, the chart of accounts, open the open documents and most clients don't need to look at the past. Do you need to look at the past to make more informed decisions for the future? If the client says yes now you did your job, you raise a question that is a big problem and now you have to show the options that you have to tackle this problem in Acumatica has some ways to tackle this problem. And with data Self, when you cannot handle the problem in an inexpensive way, or if it's a complicated data self brings all the layers that you can really cover amazingly. And now if the prospect knows that this problem is they have to ask this question for the other VARs that are competitors and the other competitors don't have a BI solution in the plate and their needs are more complicated. Boy, you have an advantage now. You showed that you ask questions that are important for their future. And guess what? In your portfolio of options you have components to address the problem. No matter what it is, you have great solution for that problem. In part of this webinar it will show you options beyond what Acumatica offers. So I'm hoping at the end of the webinar when we revisit the slides, we're going to tell that you should stop leaving it out. You should actually go to your template, add a new checkbox with historical transaction and be confident to talk about it because it will make you show that you are really asking all the hard questions in addressing the problem from the beginning from the right angle. So let's see what options are available for you to address historical transaction data migration. And first I'm going to tell the first problem. So what is the main pain that you're trying to solve by bringing the historical data into the future? Well, first of all primarily is if you don't do that, the client is going to be unable to easily analyze historical transactions. That can be sales transactions, GL details, GEO transaction details, project accounting, AP are, you name it. So that's the first maintain in Akumatica. One of the most common solutions to do this in Acumatica is primarily looking at what transaction history they want from the legacy system and just import as a table or tables in the Akumatica database, connect some GIS and say hey client, now that's it. Your recircle data is in Akumatica. Here's how GIS works. We solve the problem. This is the most common Way to handle this problem is just bring the data into Akumatica. We have seen sometimes that people try to also blend the data along with the actual tables like the AR Tran, the GL training that can become very expensive, but that's one of the options. Option two, and this is a Data Self solution. So we're adding a new option that you don't have today unless you're using a data warehouse solution like Data Self and we call historical data blending with the tables together. What does that mean? Right here we're showing you have your Acumatica system that's going to have the live data, you have the legacy system that will be having frozen data. Then there's a separate database. This is a SQL Server data warehouse hosted somewhere where the Acumatica live tables are going to be replicated in SQL and the legacy system tables are going to be imported and frozen in SQL Data Warehouse. Now all the tables for reporting purposes from the legacy system are stored in a data warehouse. You can decommission the old system and now if or when you need to report out of those legacy systems tables, you just quiver the SQL data warehouse and you can easily see the data side by side. What Tom is going to show next is in Data Self once you do this data blending and keeping the tables together, the data warehouse. How easy it is with Data Self to query the live data from Acumatica in the legacy data in the same framework, in a very straightforward framework. So Tom, And you're muted by the way.

There we go. All right, so here we are within our historical sales analysis template and it's important to note that this is a template so this could be leveraged in a variety of other business areas, could be purchasing inventory, just to name a few. But as Johnny just showed in that visualization option one is you're taking your Acumatica data, you're taking your legacy ERP data, you're placing that inside of a data warehouse, but they are still separate of each other. But the nice thing here is with Data Self you're going to give your customers, your clients a very easy and dynamic view of this historical sales analysis. So it's going to allow them to consume, it's going to allow them to analyze, ultimately allow them to make more informed, data driven decisions. Now in looking at this template here on the left hand side we have our Acumatica data, we have our legacy ERP data. On the right, I'm going to be able to slice and dice this in a variety of different ways. So right now I'm looking at sales broken down by customer and item, but maybe I don't want to see an entire customer list. There's just one particular customer that I'd like to do some sales analysis on on the left hand side. I have some filters here, so I could filter this by branch salesperson, customer name, item, what have you. We'll select customer name here and we'll choose Agri Link foods just as an example and here now we're seeing just a subset, just my historical sales analysis for this particular customer. Maybe I want to view not back to 2027, but I want to just go 2030. What I can do, and these are invoice sales here is I can update this filter here and you can see that that legacy ERP data has dropped off. And it's dropped off because my Acumatica in this use case they went live with Acumatica effective 1:1, 2030. So there is no legacy data that's needed to consume. But within here I could slice and dice this further so if I wanted to I could expand this out where now I have access to that invoice number. And just like in Acumatica, anything that's blue is a hyperlink that you could drill down into the source document within Acumatica or within Dataself. I'm sorry, because it can be embedded inside of Acumatica, I could drill into this document and it's going to take me to that invoice and memo page. Maybe I want to see. You know what, let's look at this back to 2022. Simply type that in and instantly and accurately it's going to populate and render that historical data for me because this data has already been pre crunched, pre digested within the SQL Server data warehouse. Again ultimately at the end of the day, what data self solves here is giving your end users, your clients easy visibility into consuming and analyzing historical sales analysis to make more informed, data driven decisions. That gets them out of having to leave an instance of their legacy ERP open running stuff so that they have to extract that data, export that data to Excel, export data from Acumatica, place them into an Excel table, do a lot of manual manipulations, time and effort to really get the analysis they need. With Dataself you have this all in a one stop shop view within your Acumatica instance. Jonny, anything else that you'd like to add?

Yeah, just a quick note. A few of the clients that knock on our door to help with this problem, they were already live with ACUMATICA and just like Tom said, they were primarily using Excel as the way to combine the legacy data with the Acumatica. And Excel is an amazing tool until it isn't. And when things start to become slow and then the first ones make a decision, now we have to call the business analyst to export the report to Excel. Sometimes Excel crashes, sometimes the data is incorrect. So it can become what we call an Excel hell in this framework here. Even though the data behind the scenes is still separate tables, you know the structure of the erp, the old one is still separate from Akumatica, but because it itself has a BI solution, when you look at the report looks like the data is together. Visually, if you can look at those reports, you can see the same customer, you can see what happened in those two periods and mentally you can make a decision, oh, this customer is buying these items now they're no longer buying and making from decisions. So this eliminates exports, eliminates Excel, eliminates decision makers waiting for people to do manipulation outside of Akumatica to make more informed decisions.

I have a question for you guys. So in some instances you have a way to import the data directly into Acumatica from, from a legacy solution. So can you talk a little bit about differences between that option and an option of using datasoft?

Yep, Roman, that's a very good, very good question. Interestingly enough, the few times that when people came to knock on our door was because you were doing things in Excel, like I mentioned, they were exporting to Excel and going through the manipulation Excel and in Akumatica if you bring the data to the Acumatica and you put gis, theoretically you could also build something like this dashboard in Acumatica. Yes you can. So why don't people use more this functionality in Acumatica? So my first answer is I don't know, I think they could do some of it right, it's there. However, some of the things that we do better than Acumatica even from the standpoint is first of all in data self, the filters and the interactivity between the dashboards or the widgets can be controlled centrally. So when Tom changed the invoice date, it affect the reports on both sides. When he changed the customer name, it affects the reports, both reports together. My understanding is in Acumatica you have limited ways to work across different widgets. Each widget is controlled separately. So this is one difference. The BI provides more ways to interact across multiple widgets within the dashboard. Second, and sometimes is also important, many times when people care about their Historical data, they have lots of data. Coincidence or not, people that are very data driven, they usually do a lot of analysis in data. And when you do a lot of analysis, we did with a lot of data, if you're hitting a Kinetica live system, you're going to have performance issues. This is the same issue with all the ERP systems. ERP systems are not designed to handle query in real time of large or complex data rules. And that's why companies in the BI world, and it's a huge industry that datasoft is part of, that's how we make our money. It's taking data out of the source systems, running reports much faster, pretty much in seconds, without affecting the performance of the source system in providing ways to more easily slice and dice the data.

Thank you, that was a great answer. And again, this is for large sets of data is when it will affect performance, right?

Yeah. All right, I'll take the control again to continue the presentation. All right. So that was the solution number one to this problem. Now we have a second solution that quite often is what clients decide to go and we call also historical data blending. But now the data is blended. And what is the difference between this and the other one? Well, primarily, as I'm showing here, not only we brought the legacy data to the data warehouse, but then tables or business areas that the client cares to do historical data analysis. What they want to do is to do seamless historical data analysis. Because at the end of the day, even though you changed your erp, you still have usually the same customers, the same vendors, the same salespeople, the same territory, the same items. Maybe you are changing the IDs, but the entities behind those IDs are still the same. And you want to let your salespeople, your project managers, let them analyze the business behind the numbers. Like you never change the accounting system. Like in this example I'm taking, for instance, if you take note, the AR trend table, the GL trend table, the PM trend table, those are very technical terms. But behind the scenes those tables have the details of sales, of GL transactions, of PM transactions. And then the table in the data warehouse will have the the equivalent data from the legacy system blended and glued together. There's a single table for AR trend where the live starts on a certain day and behind that is legacy data blended and transformed to match with the acumatic equivalent AR trend, AR invoice, AR register, GL trend, all of these tables, we can blend them. And once you do this blending, then when business people are analyzing their Transactions, it looks like they never change the accounting system. It looks like they're working with Acumatica forever. To show this in real life, Tom is going to show again how this works on the user interface. Great.

So here, now we are within our slicer template and again these are just templates. So I could use this not just from a sales perspective, inventory, purchasing, projects perspective. Right now we're just looking at sales broken down by a customer in 2030. Okay, but let's say I want to look at that legacy or that historical analysis. On our right hand side we have our filters. Here I could just select all and apply. And here you can see now we have going back to 2026, in this use case I'm able to consume my legacy and current Acumatica data in one view. Okay. This is blended together, seamless integration. If you recall from our previous, from the previous demonstration our legacy ERP data was in green. We did that on purpose primarily just so you could differentiate between the legacy and your Acumatica data. But now your clients, your customers, they're going to be able to consume that legacy data again blended together. But this is where then they can do, you know, ad hoc analysis through this slicer. So being able to easily slice and dice their data into smaller bite sized pieces. So maybe they don't want to see sales broken down by customer, maybe they want to see it broken down by salesperson. Simply select our option here up at the top salesperson and in a second or two now I'm seeing sales broken down by salesperson. Okay. Across all of our sales data going back to 2026. Maybe I want to build upon this. I want to see not my customer data, but I want to see my item data. Select the dropdown item. And now we have that item data rendering for us. Maybe now I want to see that customer data. Okay, again, expand, drop down again it's just simple point click functionality allowing easy answers to ad hoc questions. The nice thing being that they have access to data going back to, in this use case, sales data going back into their legacy system. So again only helping them or empowering them to make more informed decisions. In this use case option or in this option this data is blended together so it's, it's much easier to consume.

Johnny. Thank you Tom. Thank you, Tom. Yep. Now let me when we show prospects the two options, no option one and option two, guess what? Everyone says I want option two because I don't have to think about it, I don't have to mentally join it. It's just all because at the end of the day, again, even though the ERP has changed, but the same customer, same products and some salespeople, the project monot. So people want this. The question is why people would go for option one and not always option two. There is a cost, right? There's more effort to to more professional services from a license standpoint. There's usually no change as both systems work the same from a license standpoint, from a data warehouse standpoint. But there's more effort to actually blend the data seamlessly. Sometimes the effort is not that big and then people go with this option too. But sometimes to align all the dots to be able to do this kind of analysis completely seamlessly can be quite a bit of effort. So I always tell people you have more options when you go with Data Self, you have more options to show the client. And again, if the VAR competitor VAR doesn't have a solution like Data Self in their portfolio and the client needs historical data analysis and you show these options, I guarantee the client's going to be very excited with what you're bringing to the table while the competitors are going to be suffering or struggling to come up with something similar.

Well, Johnny, are there any other popular use cases that separate option one and option two?

You know the devil is in the details, right? There's always a lot of. I can answer this question multiple ways, but one way that to me really tells apart option one from option two is when you blend them together. Like in option two, you can really do trend analysis. And many times when you're trying to make better decisions for the future, you have to see trend analysis in the past. Thank you, Tom. Tom is showing here one example that shows just visually the concept of the historical data blending because we have the data together in this chart is showing the top two customers and just showing sales trends. And we have two lines, one for one customer and one for the other customer. The green is the legacy data, the black is the live data. Again, we're just showing two colors for you guys because you are VAR and you care to mentally understand the concept. In production, there's only one color for the customer. It doesn't matter where the data comes from. What I care is it going up, is it going down, and why. And here with the BI solution being able to see trend analysis across multiple years, you can slice and dice it. Tom, can you just change the branches to show how easy it is? Right now we're just applying a filter that once you apply the filter, choose a product retail, you See that automatically as you're analyzing for every branch, what's happening with my top customers, you can quickly see the result. You don't have to export Excel, you don't have to ask anyone to do anything. As a business person, you are focused on the problem again. Is it going up, is it going down? Why? And being able to change things. So Roman, in a way, to me, one of the main reasons why clients would go through the extra effort to blend the data is when they are really data driven and past trends can help them make better decisions in the future and then it's worth the additional investment. So, you know, trend analysis is usually a main reason why people would go for the extra investment.

Awesome. Thank you.

All right, all right, let's move on. I'm going to take control again. All right, thank you, Tom. The next topic that sometimes can be an issue is if the historical, if the legacy system has lots of transactions, usually it's not a very good idea to move that data into a new ERP system because you're going to start the new ERP system with lots of data and you already start to tax the source system with data that is not useful for the new system except for reporting. So instead of putting old data, lots of data in a new system, don't do it. Put in the data warehouse in data self in a BI solution. That way you're not going to slow down. Akumatica is going to continue to run amazingly fast. And when you run reports on the legacy system, you're not hitting Akumatica, you're hitting your BI system and therefore the performance will be amazing. So performance issues usually tell people if you have lots of data, legacy data or not, and you might have performance issues no matter what your new ERP is, call us because from a reporting standpoint we usually can address that. As a rule in data self we tell if a report is taking longer than 10 seconds to render the data, call us, call us because we have ways usually to keep reports running in seconds. No matter how much need, how much data you have, how many companies, how much you know, it doesn't matter the data volume. We can handle things and make things run really fast. Now the second pain point that is also associated to not bringing legacy data to the new system. You know, Acumatica slash Data self. If you don't do that, if you don't offer a solution for them to bring the data and they need to do historical data analysis, what's going to happen is the cost of keeping the legacy system alive because People cannot kill the legacy system because they need to see data back, sometimes for auditing purposes, you know, they need to keep it for five years, sometimes even more. And sometimes just the cost of the licenses to keep the legacy system can be a burden. We have a recent client that when they came to us they were already using another modern ERP system and their yearly subscription was very expensive, was close to six figures just to keep their license current. They were moving to Akumatic. They were pretty much at the end of the transition, but the new ERP would have a renewal coming up quickly and they had to put another almost six figures investment. And then what they did is they called it a self. We got all the data from the legacy from this other modern system. We brought all the data into the data warehouse so they could decommission the other system right away. And then all the reporting needed and all the data for transaction moving into Acumatica was in the data warehouse. So no worries about keeping the legacy system alive because the data that needs for reporting is in a data warehouse and now you have full access to the data regardless of the legacy system being available. So just the cost of the license can be big in the long run if you have to keep the legacy system. The second is also the human cost of keeping a legacy system around. Just, you know, in case you need to do reports in the legacy system. Credentials to the legacy system. Sometimes they change things, they no longer work, just knowing where to go. Maybe you change the people that are involved in the process. And now you need to run a new report out of the legacy system, but nobody knows how to do it and it becomes a nightmare. So there's an important reason why moving the data, the legacy data over the new platform is to really detach clients from the past and move them to the future. And sometimes data warehousing data self will be part of their solution. We're showing here some of the common systems or the competitors or other ERP systems that we have moved data from their legacy into a new ERP like Acumatica. Now good news is data self as being an enterprise BI solution. We can bring data from any source system. Doesn't matter if the client is using an AS 400 from 40 years ago or if they're using some proprietary system that they built. We really have resources and technology to bring data from any data source and blend it with data from Acumetic and other systems as needed. So this is pretty much how we do it. Addressing these kind of problems. We called our data warehouse framework Primarily, no matter where the data source you have, we bring this data into a SQL Server data warehouse we call the data self. Data warehouse can be in the cloud, our cloud, the client's cloud, your cloud, if you're hosting your client's data can be on premises, doesn't matter where it is. But this is a SQL Server data warehouse and a lot of the data warehouse effort is no code. Many of people that maintain the data sub data warehouse, they know nothing of coding because the most of the data warehousing, deployment and maintenance requires zero coding. However, just like Acumatica, you also have the low code and full code capabilities. You know, some reporting problems can be very complicated. And then we provide full SQL Server capabilities to massage the data as needed. Once the data has been kept in the data warehouse, maintained, automatically refreshed, massaged to do better reporting, then we support multiple ways that people can analyze their data. We're showing here some options that are very popular when people are looking at better reporting tools. Of course Excel, very popular, but Power bi, Tableau, Domo and whatnot. If the legacy system has a SQL compatible reporting tool like Crystal Reporting Services Excel, quite often we can move all their data from the legacy system into the SQL Server data self. They can take their legacy report point to the data warehouse database, and right off the bat the legacy reports they had before will continue to work out of the data warehouse exactly as it was working before. Maybe this is a little bit too technical for some of you, but on the reporting side we can bring a lot of value to help clients detach from their legacy system and move into a modern reporting platform. And with Acumatica as the ERP system, the second solution we also bring to these problems is we have an extensive library of reports and dashboards with more than 8,000 KPIs connected to Acumatica. You know, AP, AR, GL, inventory purchasing, sales, sales order, CRM, opportunity, payroll and you name it. And depending what ERPs they are coming from, like you know, Sage Dynamics, Monot, the same reports will work with their data. So when you, when we're looking at, let's say the, the slicer that Tom was showing, if the client has some of these legacy system that we already have connectors to, quite often the ability to blend the data seamlessly, you know, the option two as we're Tom was showing, will be easy. And then there will be a lot of reports ready to go on day one so they don't have to be starting new reports from scratch or custom reports in the new archimedica system, the Data Self library will accelerate time to get reports to management's hands. And with the solutions one and two, primarily what we're doing is we're helping companies to decommission the legacy system sooner than later. So at the end of the day, the main reason why many companies need to know about legacy data, legacy transactions, is because they're becoming data driven. And the idea is if you don't tell them about if you don't ask them this question and they're going to realize only later that actually oops, we need this data, they're not going to be happy. You're going to be telling no. Why the heck you didn't tell me before the sale that this data was not coming in. You know I didn't have the technical knowledge. It was your job to tell me and you're telling me only now that we have to go live in month to month. It's a very hard conversation so you should be bringing the conversation earlier. Especially because with Data Self if you bring the conversation before during the pre sales you have an amazing portfolio of options to tackle that need in case they have it. While the competitor of yours that doesn't have a BI solution like Beta Self, they'll be in hot waters because it's not easy to solve the problem if you don't have an enterprise solution like DataSelf and that's pretty much what I would tell people. Always add the checkbox to your to your data migration form, have the discussion if you need to call us to be in the discussion to show these options and explain to the client how Acumatica and Data Self together they offer more options to solve. If you want to call us, Tom will be happy to be in calls. I'll also be happy to educate you and the clients and see when we're a good fit as the next steps. If you have questions or comments about how your clients can avoid the historical data objections, the phone and the email is here. Also the Acumatica Marketplace has a lot of our materials. We have close relationships with your PAMs, your CSMs, with Roman and Monat. So feel free to reach out to Acumatica to get the conversation session going and we'll be here to educate you and your clients that will open Q and A.

Johnny, I don't know if you saw there's a question. There's one question in the panel.

Nope.

What if the client is changing IDs so a customer or vendor ID goes to auto generated number?

Ah yeah, IDs is when we start to have what the devil is the details. Usually when you are moving data from a legacy system to a Qematica, it's your job as a VAR to create conversion tables IDs that are what is the old ID and where is going to land in the Akumatic ID. And that applies to chart of accounts, customer IDs, vendor IDs, item IDs. So usually as part of your job converting data, you have to create this ID conversion tables. Data self usually will take these tables and plug them as to link the legacy data IDs with the live data IDs. So in the data warehouse we use those code conversion to make the magic. Now what usually you don't have to worry is you will only build the conversion IDs for the things of the recent past. And many times clients they have been changing their IDs over the years. And chart of Accounts is a good example that sometimes clients have in the course of 5, 10, 20 years, sometimes they change chart of accounts multiple times. So you only convert the last chart of accounts to the new one. And when the client wants to run a financial 10 years ago, three chart of accounts ago using your conversion, we cannot do with only one ID conversion. So in data self, usually converting IDs is a bigger conversation because we go back to the whole company history, not only to the most recent one. I'm going through this long discussion to tell there is not a single simple answer to this question. Typically we have to see what the problem is, why you cannot handle this problem, let's say with the acumatica per se, or if you can, how you're doing it. And then when we're bringing legacy data, what are the implications of this conversion idea and how we can use data warehousing techniques to pretty much tackle any case. We have many cases where we teach the client how to adjust ideas as they move forward. Because quite often there's initial heavy lifting where all the IDs are converted on day one, but quite often on day five, 10 they realize oops, I forgot something. And then Oops, I forgot something. Then instead of calling us or you guys all the time to fix those IDs, we give a framework where the client can easily download the IDs, update what they forgot reload is like a table that has more conversion IDs as they figured that some were missing. And then they can maintain the ideas without calling us or you guys to keep up to that maintenance. Good question.

Yeah, I don't see any other questions.

Johnny, Real Quick, just to build upon that answer, let's say that the name is the same. Can you pull by the name and not the ID in this scenario that was built out from a legacy to Acumatica?

Yes, you can. The problem is most of the times the names are not kept well. People put commas, no commas, they misspell things. Even though using descriptions is an option. How we can link tables in the data warehouse? Yes we can. But one of the things that I have seen more frequently is actually having the conversion IDs in an Excel file where users know how to open Excel, they know how to maintain manually and then we provide them with a simple process that they can download the conversion ID that is currently applied to the system, they make changes to whatever they need to change and then publish it back up to the system. But yes, by the way, one common problem with client names is actually client names change over time. Not unusual for clients being acquired. Addresses have changed, they moved to a different location, it's still the same company and now they're moving to a different location. So how can you handle all of those scenarios where you want to analyze a customer but now they are different territory, but it's the same customer to who they belong to. There's a lot of reporting problems that with a BI solution like Data Self on top of Acumatica, tackling those problems become, I mean you have more options to tackle them. All right, Well I want to thank you all for joining the call. Like Roman mentioned, we are here to assist you guys. Our first main goal is education. We are very partner driven. We want to be sure that you guys understand the options we bring to the table, how we can help you and your clients be more successful. We're very respectful of the way you want to approach your clients. If you want to just present yourself without Data Self as we being part of your team or as an isd, it's up to you. Some of the good things is we are fulfilled by Acumatica. So when you, when if you place an order for Data Self, the order actually comes from Acumatica and you get your margin as part of the whole deal so you don't have to buy the license from us. I want to thank Tom for participating in the call today and for Roman to do the introduction and for the good questions. Thank you, thank you and happy hump day guys.

Have a good one.

Take care everyone.