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Data migration

Loaded is not reconciled.

The quiet way a go-live fails is that the data went in, nobody counted it, and three weeks later the AR ageing does not tie to anything. This tracker exists to make that impossible to skip past.

One row per object. Two counts. One human.

Thirteen objects arrive seeded — chart of accounts, customers, vendors, open AR, open AP, inventory, open sales orders and the rest. You add the ones your client has and delete the ones they do not.

  • Source Count — what the legacy system says exists.
  • Loaded Count — what actually arrived in the new system.
  • Variance — calculated for you, so nobody has to do it in their head at 11pm during cutover.
  • Validation Method — how the check was performed, written down, so the next person can repeat it.
  • Reconciled — a yes or no that a named person sets after looking. It is not derived from the counts matching.
Reconciliation is deliberately manual. Counts matching is necessary and not sufficient — a load can bring in the right number of rows with the wrong balances on them. So the flag is a person's signature, and the tracker will not set it for you.
Data Migration — Acme Manufacturing
Object Source Loaded Var Rec
Chart of accounts4124120Yes
Customers3,1183,1180Yes
Vendors907904−3No
Open AR2,2402,2400No
Inventory18,40618,4060Yes
Open sales orders1,344No

Open AR shows the case the tracker is built for: the counts match exactly and it is still not reconciled, because nobody has tied the balances back yet.

Five states

From "not started" to something you would sign.

Each object moves through the same sequence, so at any point in cutover planning you can see how many objects are still upstream of a dress rehearsal.

  1. Not started

    The object is in scope and nothing has happened to it yet.

  2. Draft loaded

    A first load has gone into a test environment. Expect the variance column to be ugly here — that is what it is for.

  3. Dress rehearsal

    Loaded under cutover conditions, timed, with the real extract and the real sequence. The rehearsal is where you find out the load takes six hours rather than one.

  4. Prod loaded

    In the production system. Counts recorded. Not yet signed off.

  5. Reconciled

    A named person has tied it back to source by a stated method and said so. This is the state the readiness scorecard's Data dimension actually rewards.

This feeds go/no-go directly. The Data dimension on the readiness scorecard is the one most often scored on optimism. With a tracker showing four of thirteen objects still short of reconciled, it is much harder to type 90 into that box. See the scorecard →

Track the thing that actually sinks go-lives.

Load your object list from CSV and start recording counts against it this week.