How To Prepare Your Finance Team for a Platform Migration?

Digital assets and infrastructure often become outdated, given the speed at which digital solutions change. This can lead to slow performance, security risks and high maintenance costs, hindering your business growth. It’s time for an upgrade (and migration).

Platform migration, when done right, transforms the financial close from a fragmented chore into a streamlined, error-resistant process. However, without preparation, a company risks data loss, compliance breaches and operational paralysis. Here’s how to navigate this transition with confidence.

When Do Finance Teams Migrate to Other Closing Platforms?

Outdated, slow systems put heavy pressure on finance teams. These challenges often push them to seek better enterprise finance platforms:

• Legacy systems buckle under strain: Ageing infrastructure struggles with modern data volumes. Manual workarounds multiply, errors escalate and maintenance costs drain budgets. When key personnel depart, institutional knowledge vanishes, making migration unavoidable.
• Compliance demands escalate: New regulations like SOX, GDPR or industry-specific frameworks expose gaps in legacy systems. Compliance becomes unsustainable without automated audit trails, data lineage tracking or encryption.
• Mergers force consolidation: Post-M&A, finance teams inherit disjointed systems. Duplicate records, conflicting charts of accounts and siloed data demand a unified platform to enable coherent reporting.

Common Challenges of Financial Data Migration

Financial data migration comes with high stakes and potential complications. That’s why it requires proactive management in key areas, to easily deal with these challenges:

• Downtime during data migration puts the critical processes like the month-end close on hold. Revenue recognition and compliance deadlines will slip if there is no rollback plan. 
• Data migrations expose sensitive data like PII and transaction records. It's very easy to trigger regulatory penalties or risk breaches if there are inadequate encryption or access controls.
• It's important to clean embedded errors before starting the migration because legacy systems harbour duplicates, outdated records and missing entries. If you perform the finance platform migration without removing poor data, you risk corrupt reporting and analytics. 
• Financial data is found in ERPs, spreadsheets and legacy databases. Therefore, it requires accurate mapping of fields and preserving the relationships.

Steps for a Successful Financial Data Migration

When facing a migration, the question is where to start, how to deal with the process and what not to miss. Saving the data is the most challenging part, so every finance or extensive migration team needs some structure, something like this:

Step 1: Inventory and Assess Data Sources

Catalog every data repository like ERPs, spreadsheets and third-party tools. Then, document owners, dependencies and flow patterns. We recommend using profiling tools to quantify quality gaps: duplicates, missing values or inconsistencies.

Step 2: Cleanse and Standardise Data

You must resolve the identified issues before starting the finance platform migration. Start by removing redundant or obsolete records. Next, you should standardise formats in terms of dates, currencies and identifiers. And finally, validate the critical fields such as account numbers and tax codes. 

Step 3: Select a Migration Strategy

Selecting a migration strategy requires companies to match the approach to their needs and risk appetite. There are three methods you can use:

• A “big bang” migration, where all data is moved at once, is best suited for small datasets but carries a high level of risk. 
• A phased migration is ideal for large enterprises because it moves data in stages and offers a medium risk profile. 
• For particularly sensitive or critical data, a pilot migration is the safest option, as it allows you to test the process on a smaller scale with minimal risk. 

It is advisable to begin data migration with low-risk data, such as historical records, before progressing to live transactions.

Step 4: Execute and Validate

Begin by running a pilot migration using non-critical data to identify any potential issues early on. It's recommended to carefully compare the source and target records to ensure data accuracy and consistency throughout the process. 

Test compliance controls, including audit trails and access logs, to confirm that regulatory requirements are fully met. Finally, validate the system’s ability to handle month-end close procedures by simulating the process, ensuring that the new platform supports your financial close operations without disruption.

Step 5: Train Your Teams

Having a well-trained team comes in handy in any given situation,  but this is especially helpful for data migrations. It's the responsibility of the company to conduct a hands-on workshop on the following:

• Navigating the new interface
• Running key reports
• Troubleshooting common issues

Post-Migration Optimisation

After migrating your finance platform, shift focus to performance and efficiency. Start by tracking key metrics such as processing speed, error rates and downtime. Use cloud tools for real-time alerts and fix bottlenecks within 72 hours to prevent bigger issues.

Every two weeks, audit your resource usage to eliminate unnecessary costs. Downsize overprovisioned services, remove idle resources and use reserved instances for stable workloads to save money.

Security is just as important. Run monthly vulnerability scans, keep records for compliance, encrypt data in transit and at rest and apply least privilege access controls.

How to Spot the Best Alternative to Your Current Finance Tool?

So, it all comes down to choosing what's best for your company. How does one select the best financial platform for corporations? There are four non-negotiables that every company should know about before deciding on one.

Seamless Integration

Always prioritise platforms with real-time ERP synchronisation. For example, Aico eliminates reconciliation lag with live SAP/Oracle feeds, slashing close cycles significantly.

Intelligent Automation

You will want to demand AI-driven workflows for repetitive tasks. This is where Aico excels. It replaces error-prone spreadsheets with automated journal entries and reconciliations, reducing manual effort by almost 70%.

User-Centric Design

It's always best to opt for intuitive interfaces to assist your teams. Half the time, they adopt platforms faster when onboarding takes under a week. You may wish to check out Aico’s unified dashboard, which centralises tasks from reconciliation to reporting.

Unified Functionality

A good finance platform for corporations should consolidate close, compliance and forecasting in one platform. Aico’s merger with Mercur delivers this holistic approach, eliminating context-switching.

Feature Comparison of Leading Alternatives

To facilitate your decision, here is a brief overview of the leading enterprise finance platforms you will find on the market:

When you compare Aico with Blackline and Cadency, you'll see that we are a finance platform for corporations that outperforms peers with live data flows, intelligent automation and a unified workspace

Final Tips on Financial Software Migration

Finance platform migration does come with high risks, but it's not impossible. If you do the planning correctly and assess the risks, it can lead to a successful and seamless process. Not to mention that platform migration is unavoidable for finance teams targeting efficiency. 

Therefore, prioritising data integrity, adopting phased pilots and selecting agile platforms like Aico means you can turn migration from a risk into a strategic accelerator. The result? Faster closes, bulletproof compliance and finance teams empowered to drive growth.

If you are ready to transform your financial close, then explore Aico's closing platform.