Can you Keep Your Condo or HOA’s Financial Data During a Transition

Your community recently decided to switch management companies or go from “full management” to self-managed or change software systems. Can you keep your Condo or HOA’s financial data during a transition?  That is what we’ll discuss in this post.

Is there a way to bring your financial and administrative data over from one system to another?  Yes, maybe, it depends, not really are all correct answers.  Read below for more information on transferring data into the most widely used software in the industry.

Tops Software

As of January 2019 Tops has a software “Import Tool” which will bring over 2 years of financial history from an older version of Tops desktop software to their next generation cloud based Tops One software.  The import will include: general ledger data, financial reports, accounts receivable and accounts payable information.

This historical data will not allow drill down functionality.  The data is static history, not active, as such the 30, 60 and 90 day AR and AP figures will be off for a few months, but this will self-correct after enough time passes for new data to take its place.

Whatever you want in the software but doesn’t come over using Tops’ import tool will have to be data entered.

A key benefit of using this tool is it performs data validation, picks up errors and helps cleanup – instead of doing this manually.

The process can take thirty to forty-five days depending on the software company’s schedule.

Caliber Software

As of January 2019 Caliber has an “Account Transfer Tool” that makes it easier to transition from one management company to another company that uses Caliber.

The tool provides for a basic transfer which includes: unit info, homeowner info and contact info and you can also choose to add limited financial data which includes: owner balance forward, posting codes and your chart of accounts.

No other history is brought over.

To start the process Caliber needs an email from your management company, someone higher up in the organization, saying they give authorization for Caliber to transfer your property from their account to Community Financials’ account.  Send the email to Caliber and courtesy copy Community Financials.

The process can be completed within two days to one week from receipt of the email.

Strongroom – Accounts Payable Solution

Strongroom can’t move property invoices from one company’s Strongroom account to another.

Their Support team can provide an archive of the association’s payment information which would contain all of the paid invoice information and images, but this would be kept on your end for audit purposes.

QuickBooks, Village Management Systems (VMS), and others

What if you are using other software systems to organize and perform your community’s accounting?

Both Caliber and Tops allows the use of import spreadsheets if you are switching to their software from a different system.  While not everything can be imported a good handful of base data can be.  History is always the most finicky data.

You can export some spreadsheets out of your old system, format the output to match the software’s spreadsheets or cut and paste into the Caliber or Tops’ import spreadsheets.

The timing of this process is generally one or two weeks and depends on the availability of Community Financials staff and the amount of data to be brought over.

What if the answer to can you keep your Condo or HOA’s financial data during a transition doesn’t meet your needs?

Historic Info

Your community probably already has files of prior period financial reports and other records that you can refer to.  If you are transitioning away from a management company or an older version of the software or from one software to another you can run some historical reports as PDFs and spreadsheets and save them.  Alternatively, if your community has its own version of the older desktop software, you can keep the history running on a computer so you can access it in the future.

Additional Help is Available

Community Financials is available as a resource to help your community transition from one software to another.  We have team members that are database management professionals that can update additional history files from your older software into our software for an hourly charge if your community needs the help.

Is Data Migration Even Necessary?

In almost all of the transitions I have experienced, clients are not concerned with and did not carry forward their historic information into a new company’s software.  The new company would input the chart of accounts, budget, owner information and payment balances and pick up where the old company left off.  You can just move forward with new information.  So the answer to can you keep your Condo or HOA’s financial data during a transition may not be that important after all.

If you have questions about this post give me a call – Schedule a call today.