Testing Your Conversion

Make it a priority to test your conversion. You will want to test a complete collection or accounting cycle.

Testing is well worth every minute spent. Often, you can optimize the conversion routine. Testing may point out gaps in the accounting process caused by the converted data. Testing gives you important information to use when you are ready for the final cutover.

When you have finalized your data sets and created the import routine, doing this test run gives you two great bonuses.

One bonus is that you will be able to benchmark, or time the conversion process. This helps you schedule the time you'll need to get your data into Collect!. You may find that it takes 3 hours to complete your test. Then, you can simply schedule an afternoon. If it takes you a few days to import your data, then you will want to know this before allowing for just one night to complete the task!

Another great bonus is that you end up with a seeded database to use in the next step, working with Collect! and your newly converted data. You and your operators can learn Collect! reassured that this is just a test. Mistakes are not a problem, as you will be reimporting when you are finally ready to go live. Let yourself and your operators play with this test data, getting comfortable with Collect! without any pressure of making errors using the new software. They will love you for it. Their learning curve will be much shorter and they will have a great opportunity to learn how to work with your information in Collect!. Most importantly you will not end up with the nightmare, "There you are operators, we have the 60,000 accounts in Collect!, get to work!"

Test, evaluate the process, document thoroughly, and the conversion should go very smoothly with few scary unknowns. Some users choose to run both systems side by side for a given amount of time before deciding on a date for the final conversion.

See Also

- Successful Data Conversion
- Preparing For Conversion
- Going Through With The Final Cutover