My WorkflowMax Test Migration
My WorkflowMax Test Migration
16 March 2024
Here are my learnings from running a test migration with my own Living Business data. I had opened a new trial file a few days prior.
Friday 4pm
Access in WorkflowMax by Xero
I checked to ensure I had permissions in WorkflowMax by Xero including Administration and 3rd Party API.
WIP Lock Dates
I went into Business / Settings to lock down the WorkflowMax by Xero file before starting the migration. I was surprised to find the both the WIP Lock date, and the Period Lock date could only be set to the day prior (Thursday).
LEARNING: This means it's not possible to prevent staff adding data into WorkflowMax by Xero on the day of the migration. It means relying on communications with staff to ensure no new data is going into WorkflowMax by Xero once the migration has started. The risk is that when a GoLive data migration is run, there could be data entered into the old WFM file, that is not migrated to the new WFM.
Xero Integration
I went into Business / Settings / Xero and disconnected the integration. I chose the option to keep the settings.
Initiate Migration
A few days ago Blue Rock made the decision to temporarily remove the ability for clients to self migrate, until more of the known migration issues have been fixed. However, as a WorkflowMax partner I am able to initiate a migration from a direct URL, so I did that.
The process was pretty much the same as in the 3 min Migration Video.
The Data Migration
The migration took a couple of minutes to show any progress, and then moved quite quickly. I navigated away from the page and decided to come back the next day. My Living Business WorkflowMax file dates back to before 2015 when I bought the business. I save emails but not a lot of documents in the file and my jobs are generally a simple structure.
I received 3 emails from BlueRock during the process. The first was saying that I was in the queue for the migration. The 2nd email arrived about 3 minutes later and said that my migration had started. The third email arrived about 80 minutes later to announce that the migration had been completed.
After the Data Migration
The next morning (Saturday) I went back into WorkflowMax by Xero and removed the WIP Lock dates, and re-connected the integration to Xero.
So access to WorkflowMax by Xero was restored, and work can continue in that file as normal.
So then it was a case of comparing the two files to re-assure myself that the data migration was successful and without error.
First I had a look at the timesheets. Even just looking at the timesheet summary I could see that the time entered on the Friday for one team member was different than the time showing in the new WorkflowMax file. I couldn't see exactly when the time was entered, but I can only assume it was after I had started the data migration.
I wanted to check WIP, and I could see things looked the same at first glance in the WIP Manager. I wanted to run a report which would give me total WIP to compare totals, but that Standard Report was not yet available, and I couldn't find a custom report available yet that worked for me.
I found the same issue with trying to run a report to compare costs - the Cost Summary report was showing as not available yet.
I tried an Estimated Billings Report and the new WFM report had all time and costs since the beginning of time in my file, whether it had been invoiced, written off or not. So that wasn't helpful. I logged a ticket on that one.
I noticed a Client with a name comprised of Capital Letters was showing in a different position in the list. I'm currently checking with BlueRock to confirm if this is a change in policy.
In comparing a couple of jobs directly, I noticed the custom fields were not populating. I have since heard from BlueRock that a fix was released for that shortly after I ran my migration.
I noticed that the Alphabetical sorting order in lists is slightly different between WFM by Xero and WFM by BlueRock. BlueRock uses the more recent convention of capital letters coming before lower case letters. WFM by Xero does not and treats capital and lower case letters equally.
Summary
It's great to have some test data in my new WorkflowMax by BlueRock trial file. But I'm not relying on the data being 100% correct and I'll be running another test in April. I don't feel confident in being able to run sufficient tests until some more of the reporting functionality has been released.