Practical guide · Migration
Migrating from Acomba or Sage 50 to Odoo
Acomba, Sage 50, Avantage, or a folder of Excel files that has grown year after year: many Quebec SMBs come to Odoo from one of these starting points. Here’s what really happens during a switch.
Why Quebec SMBs leave their current software
The reasons that come up most often in our conversations:
- the software does the accounting, but nothing else: you need a second tool for quotes, a third for inventory, a spreadsheet for the rest;
- the same information is entered two or three times, in three different places;
- remote access is complicated, or goes through a single computer at the office;
- licence and support costs keep rising, without the features keeping up;
- nobody on the team manages to get a useful report out of it.
None of these reasons is a flaw in this software: they are excellent accounting tools. The need has simply outgrown accounting.
What Odoo does that your accounting software doesn’t
The difference comes down to one word: continuity. In Odoo, an opportunity becomes a quote, the quote becomes an order, the order leaves the stock, the delivery triggers the invoice and the invoice lands in accounts receivable. One single entry, from start to finish.
On top of that come project and time management, a website connected to the same system, the point of sale, and dashboards that build themselves because the data is all in the same place.
What data can be recovered?
What transfers well, and what we always bring over:
- 🔹 The list of customers and suppliers, with contact details and payment terms
- 🔹 The product or service catalogue, with prices and taxes
- 🔹 Stock quantities as of the switchover date
- 🔹 The chart of accounts and opening balances
- 🔹 Unpaid invoices — accounts receivable and accounts payable
The method is the same in every case: we export from your software to a file, clean it up, import it into Odoo and check it. The cleanup is the step that takes the longest, and it’s also the one with the most value — many businesses discover ten-year-old duplicates along the way.
What doesn’t transfer, and why that’s fine
The detailed accounting history isn’t migrated entry by entry, and that’s a deliberate choice. Rebuilding ten years of entries in a new system is expensive, introduces errors, and is almost never useful.
The usual practice: we enter the opening balances as of the switchover date, and keep the old software read-only to look up history if needed. Your accountant has always worked this way.
Also not migrated: document templates specific to the old software, custom reports and home-made automations. They are recreated in Odoo, often for the better.
How a migration unfolds
A typical switchover goes like this:
- Inventory of what exists — which software, which data, who uses it.
- Trial exports — we pull the data out and look at its real condition.
- Dry-run import — into a test Odoo, to see what breaks before it counts.
- Configuration — taxes, numbering, templates, access rights.
- Training — before the switchover, not after.
- Switchover — final import, opening balances, and we’re off.
- Short parallel period — two to four weeks during which the old system remains available.
When in the year should you migrate?
The best time is the start of your fiscal year: opening balances are clean and your accountant has only one system to deal with for the year.
The second-best time is the start of a quarter. The worst is the middle of a peak period — a store doesn’t change its cash register in November, a contractor doesn’t change systems in the middle of construction season.
Since our implementations are scheduled by appointment, you can easily book a date several months in advance.
And where does your accountant fit in?
We recommend involving them from the very first conversation. They are the one who will tell you which chart of accounts to keep, which date to switch over and which balances to bring in.
Odoo lets you give them read access, or export what they need in the format of their choice. No Quebec firm will feel out of place: the concepts are the same, only the interface changes.
Let’s talk about your migration
Tell us what software you use today and how many people use it. We’ll tell you what can be recovered, how long it takes and what it costs.