Clean Install of GP2018 vs upgrade

Clean Install of GP2018 vs upgradeFollow
Thomas Hill
Thomas HillMar 30, 2022 04:01 PM
We are looking to move to GP2018, currently on GP2015R2. We use three companies. We are considering …
1. Clean Install of GP2018 vs upgrade

TOP CONTRIBUTOR
Thomas Hill
Posted Mar 30, 2022 04:01 PM
We are looking to move to GP2018, currently on GP2015R2. We use three companies. We are considering a move back top two companies, combining two that did start as one. There are a lot of “things” (to use a technical term) that utilities have not cleaned out. Our customer and vendor masters are massive with companies that no longer exists or that we no longer do business with. Our inventory is bloated with obsolete items. We have purchase orders that were never completed (fulfilled).

Is doing a “clean” installation a thing?

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Thomas Hill
Staff Accountant
M&A Technology, Inc.
Carrollton TX
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2. RE: Clean Install of GP2018 vs upgrade

Dave Magalen
Posted Mar 31, 2022 08:13 AM
Hi Thomas,

The answer is yes and yes and well, maybe.

“Clean Install” in the IT world (my world) is always a good thing. Upgrades sometimes bring weirdness with it and this give you an opportunity to remove any junk that would be carried over. Especially when you are upgrading to a newer major release.

“Clean Install” as in cleaning up the company data, that is defiantly a thing as well, but there are many things to consider here before just making that decision, including the amount of time and resources needed.
– You would need to figure out what your policies are for retention. How much data do you need to keep for records (GL, JE’s, other transactions, etc) as well as what you consider stale (customer that has not bought from you in X years).
– You could technically install a new system and then use smart lists, SQL scripts or other tools like Smart Connect or eConnect to bring data over from the old systems. Export what you need, clean if you need to, import into place. You will need to also make sure all the settings are in the new system (taxes, periods, accounts, templates for reports, etc).
– Obviously testing is key here to make sure that the new system will function exactly as the old (or exactly as you need it to with new rules)

If you are just looking to clean out old records (taking the combining companies out of the equation for a minute) you can look at something like CDA (data archiver) or some other GP Tools, maybe even just some SQL scripts to clean up and out some old data. If this is the case, it may be easier to take a copy of the database, do your clean up and then upgrade. All your settings would carry over, and the upgrade should do some database checks to make sure of data integrity. Check Links and other routines might be a good idea to run just in case.

I hope this gives you some information, from the IT perspective. Others will hopefully chime in from other perspectives like Finance or some consultants that do the upgrades and clean ups. They might be able to give you more in depth ideas on the best ways.

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Dave Magalen
dmagalen@auroraplastics.com
IT Manager – Aurora Plastics
Streetsboro OH
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3. RE: Clean Install of GP2018 vs upgrade

TOP CONTRIBUTOR
Thaddeus Suter
Posted Mar 31, 2022 09:23 AM
A few years back I worked on a nice GPV9 to GPV2016R2 direct update for a massive single database company. Once all the steps and scripts were done and the update tested a couple times the job took about 45minutes when done for real in production. Then some more time to run the necessary check links and reconciles.

It could not have been done otherwise as the number of GP update steps would be 3-4 as I recall and the company’s down time window was 12hours maximum.

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Thaddeus Suter
Retus, Inc
HELOTES TX
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4. RE: Clean Install of GP2018 vs upgrade

TOP CONTRIBUTOR
Thomas Hill
Posted Mar 31, 2022 09:41 AM
@Dave Magalen and Thaddeus
Thank you for the information. It was a question I had not seen on here, nor could I see that it had been asked.

In another company, I installed new accounting software (GL/Financial and Payables) that we changed the genera ledger number from an 11-digit string of numbers to a more meaningful 6-digits two segment number. We only brought one year of GL history over. We kept the old system online to reference if we need to. We plan to keep the “old system” of history available as well. We won’t be changing GL numbers, but we will be changing some vendor IDs and some custo​​mer IDs.

Our GP database was split into retail/manufacturing sales and catalog/drop ship sales. We are going to explore if those reasons are still valid. You have given me food for thought.

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Thomas Hill
Staff Accountant
M&A Technology, Inc.
Carrollton TX
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5. RE: Clean Install of GP2018 vs upgrade

GPUG ALL STAR
Beat Bucher
Posted Mar 31, 2022 03:52 PM
Hi Thomas,
Great advice you got so far..
Here are my 2cts:
Either you upgrade all 3 companies and then create a new one to bring over only what you want to keep (this can be done in multiple way, but PSTL does help you to easily copy Master Data from one company to another). This way you can keep your old companies as “Historical” in your most recent GP version and still have access to consult the data in the future if needed or required by some auditors.
Or you create the new company in the old GP and carry over only what you want there to be (again, using the same tools as above), and then upgrade a single company by carrying over only the DYNAMICS & Company DB, then run the Microsoft Company clean-up script to get rid of old references.

The 2nd option implies that you’ll have to maintain an old system (legacy) with all the problems that go with it, for a certain number of years required by law. Since you own only 3-4 companies, and if they aren’t that big in data, I’d opt for the total upgrade of all of them.

Would there be let’s say 40-50 companies, and you want to keep only half of them, I’d not bother to update them, but take a full VM backup and archive that somewhere, so it can be brought back alive quickly if needed.

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Beat Bucher
Business Analyst, Dynamics GP SME
Montreal QC/Canada
@GP_Beat http://www.gp-geek.com
Montreal QC GPUG Chapter Leader
MBS MVP (2015-2018)
All-Star 2013
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