Preparing your data for migration
This page explains what you need to prepare so your existing projects and their financials appear correctly in FullClarity from day one. Read it at the very start of your implementation — the decisions and data preparation it describes often take longer than expected, so it pays to begin early. It's written for the people who own your project financials together with your NetSuite administrator.
What a migration involves
A FullClarity migration has several parts. Depending on your situation you may need all of them or only some:
- Cost centres — the structure everything else depends on. Do this first.
- Projects — set up with the fields FullClarity needs.
- Estimates, contracts and schedules of values — your current commercial setup for each project.
- Historical costs — your existing project costs, so job cost reporting is complete from the outset.
- Existing claims and variations — in-progress billing, recreated so its history is preserved.
The sections below work through each part. Some are marked more detail coming shortly — we're expanding this guide over the next few days, but you can begin on the parts that are complete now, starting with cost centres.
Before anything else: define your cost centres
The single most important prerequisite is your cost-centre structure. You can't prepare most of your migration data until it's decided.
Most customers take the move to FullClarity as the opportunity to redesign their cost centres, because NetSuite had no equivalent grouping before. That makes this a genuine piece of work rather than a quick copy of what you had — so start it early.
You can have more than one set of cost centres. What matters is that each project is assigned to one cost-centre set, so every cost on that project draws its cost category from that set.
Start this first
Defining cost centres is usually the longest part of getting ready. Begin it before anything else — most of the steps below depend on it.
Your projects
Your projects need to exist in NetSuite with the fields FullClarity relies on — in particular each project's Billing Type and Cost Centre.
More detail on preparing and loading your project list is coming shortly.
Estimates
Your project estimates can be loaded from a spreadsheet.
More detail coming shortly.
Contracts
A contract is set up once its estimate has been created.
More detail coming shortly.
Schedule of values
A schedule of values is set up against the contract, and can be loaded from a spreadsheet.
More detail coming shortly.
Historical costs
This is usually the largest part of preparing your data. The goal is to make sure your existing project costs carry a project and a cost category, so each project's job cost reporting is complete — not just the costs entered after go-live.
First, decide how far back to go: either all transactions for a period of time (this can span several years), or a specific set of projects and all the transactions belonging to them.
How you bring the costs in depends on your situation.
If you already use NetSuite
Here we update your existing historical transactions to add the project and cost category. To do that, give us a spreadsheet with one row per transaction line you want migrated, containing:
- Transaction internal ID (required) — identifies the transaction
- Line number (required) — identifies the line on that transaction
- Project (required) — the project the line should be allocated to
- Cost category (required) — must be one that belongs to that project's cost-centre set
- Any other fields that need updating (optional)
Because most customers are also redesigning their cost centres, this is a mapping exercise: for each line you decide the project and the new cost category it should carry, rather than copying an existing value.
Include the cost transactions that feed your job cost reporting:
- Purchase orders
- Vendor bills
- Bill credits
- Item receipts
- Journal entries
- Credit card charges
- Expense reports / claims
Non-standard cost transactions
If you initiate project costs through other transaction types — for example, a sales order used to commit inventory to a project — flag these to your FullClarity consultant. They can still be migrated, but they need to be handled separately from the list above.
Opening balances (if you're not migrating every transaction)
If you'd rather not tag every historical transaction — for example you're new to NetSuite, or you only need each project's starting position — you can establish costs with a balanced journal.
This assumes you've already brought your opening balances into NetSuite in the usual way (a journal that sets the opening balances for the period). Those entries won't carry FullClarity's project and cost-category detail. To add it without changing your balance sheet, post a second "in and out" journal:
- Credit the account — for example, work in progress — for the balance as a single line, with no project or cost-category detail, exactly as it appears in your opening-balance journal.
- Debit the same account across multiple lines, each carrying a project and cost category, that together add back to that same balance.
Because the debit and the credit are to the same account, the journal nets to zero and has no effect on your balance sheet. But because only the debit lines carry the project and cost category, those amounts now show up in your FullClarity job cost reports and project reporting.
Each segmented debit line needs just three things:
- Project
- Cost category
- The amount
To get reporting across each project's whole life — not only its opening position — you can repeat this for each prior accounting period.
Existing claims and variations
If you have claims or variations already in progress, these are recreated so their billing history is preserved.
More detail coming shortly.
What we need from you, and what happens next
Your job is to make the decisions above and prepare the data — defining your cost centres, mapping each cost to the correct project and to a cost category from the right set, and (where relevant) preparing the spreadsheets or journals.
Once you hand that over, the data gets loaded into NetSuite for you. Where a spreadsheet is involved it contains everything needed to do this, so your own NetSuite administrator can also load it (for example, via a CSV import) if you'd prefer to handle it in-house.