Ledger Migrator: Automating Financial Migration for Business Central Partners
If you've ever worked on a Business Central implementation, you already know this truth. Migration is where projects either stay on track or completely unravel. It's expensive, it's fragile, and for years, most of us just accepted that as part of the process. But today's guest didn't. Welcome to IAMCP Profiles Partnership, the show where we spotlight the founders, partners, and innovators shaping the Microsoft ecosystem from the inside out.
Anthony Carrano:In this episode, I'm joined by the founders of Ledger Migrator, a company that saw financial migration not as an unavoidable pain point, but as a problem worth solving. We'll talk about how they went from partner frustration to product innovation, why they built explicitly for Business Central, and what it means to finally make data migration faster, more reliable, and scalable for partners. We'll also dig into the role IAMCP's played in their journey and why showing up in community isn't just good networking, it's good business. Let's get started. Robert, Gerry, welcome to the podcast today. We're really excited to have you guys on.
Gerry Allen:Thanks, Anthony. Good to see you.
Robert Papier:Thank you. Good to see you.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. Excellent. Well, I know we have a lot of ground to cover. Really excited to kind of get into it today. But let's start off. Tell us a little bit, you know, about yourself and the company.
Robert Papier:Well, I've been in IT since 1986 for a while now. In fact, my whole family is in IT. And I've been predominantly working within the Microsoft partner ecosystem since about 2013. I joined IAMCP, I think the first time I joined them in the UK was 2014. And since then, even when I wasn't working for Microsoft Partner, I have maintained my membership or association and kept in touch via LinkedIn and WhatsApp.
Robert Papier:But predominantly, it's been in the Microsoft partner ecosystem. I did a contract for Microsoft for a while working as a partner enablement manager in their Teams meeting room group. And one of the cool things that happened to me there was I, one of my colleagues, a lady called Janet Harris, was the original, worked on the original design of MS Config. And she even had a framed napkin from the restaurant where they'd done the initial sketches of it.
Anthony Carrano:Oh, wow.
Robert Papier:Which quite I thought nice. Knowing Gerry, we've been working on and off together on various projects and businesses since the turn of the century. So getting on for twenty six years now.
Anthony Carrano:That's great. That's great. And Gerry, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Gerry Allen:Yeah, sure. So I haven't been in IT quite as long as Robert, but I've I've still done a fair few years. Two areas really in my background. One is software development, I've done a lot of Python and Java software development. I've also been involved in a lot of ERP migrations. So things like Oracle Financials, JD Edwards initially, and then more recently, some of the Microsoft ERP suites, especially Business Central.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent, excellent. And now I know, I mean, Robert, I know you're a big fan of IAMCP. When did you join IAMCP?
Robert Papier:So I joined the first time in 2014. As far as I can work out, I was actually looking back through old emails to see when I first got in touch and it looks like it was either the very 2013 or the 2014. And I was working at a time for a company there called Systems Up. And if you think of what's happening in Microsoft now in that if you don't mention Copilot, they don't wanna talk to you.
Robert Papier:At that time, it was exactly the same, but it was Azure. It was cloud because everybody was doing on premise things, and they wanted to get you to the cloud. In fact, in the very beginning, Azure hardly existed and there were no accreditations, it was very early in the at that stage. Needs to be said as well. I just embarrassed my colleague there. One of the things that I was lucky was working with Gerry around 2011, 2012, and he was one of the first people to introduce me to the idea of cloud computing. So this is almost before the cloud existed, but it was more Hosted through, RAC server and places. So Gerry was very much leading edge on that.
Anthony Carrano:Well, I wasn't planning to go there, but he he kinda opened up a he opened up a start there. Just, you know, Gerry, maybe a little briefly. I mean, Robert's talking about how he's kind of a leading edge early adopter into cloud. Maybe just, you know, share a little bit with the audience about that, and then we'll jump into about Ledger Migrator.
Gerry Allen:Yeah, that's a really great question, actually. Robert, that's right. It was very early. We had just colo servers initially, and running things like remote desktops onto colo servers, which was kind of a Heath Robinson version of what things like AWS and Azure became a couple of years later. We kind of saw that direction of travel quite early luckily, and didn't really get involved in AWS very much, but as soon as Microsoft launched Azure, then we did a lot of work around that and helped a lot of customers with that transition from on prem into the cloud, which is really exciting.
Anthony Carrano:Well, definitely then, and looking forward to hearing about that, just being able to see into the future and hear around that innovation curve and how brought that to Ledger Migrator. And for folks listening, let's talk about that, about what is Ledger Migrator for someone hearing about for the first time. How would you describe you know, the company and what you do in just the simplest terms?
Robert Papier:Okay. So I'll go first with the simplest terms. Basically, we migrate financial data from systems into Business Central and its various systems, mostly on prem. And the key thing that we do is we don't just migrate the master data, so the ledger of accounts and the opening balances. We allow for the migration of all the financial data, so all the history going back to however much data they have in the system.
Robert Papier:This in some ways makes us virtually unique. We can't find anybody who does exactly the same thing. And it's probably worth saying that when I started doing some market research about this, one of the interesting things that I found was I would speak to Business Central Partners and ask what they do about financial data, historical getting in. And really what they would say is, well, we normally speak to the customer and persuade them they don't need it. When we have a proper discussion with them, they say they don't need it.
Robert Papier:But then the observation they have is, yeah, I guess we kind of lead the witness to get the answer we want because it's difficult. And that that was what we found in the initial market research. I think for more detail about how the genesis of this, I'm better to pass to Gerry, because in many ways this was his brainchild, which he invited me into.
Gerry Allen:Yeah, that's right. It's, some of what Robert called out that I've been involved in a large number of ERP migrations over the years, and the data migration is always one of the more challenging and risky parts of it as well. It's the one that normally causes the project to be delayed because it's always more complex than people imagine it's going to be, and that just keeps biting people over and over again. So we saw an opportunity really. I think we were genuinely surprised that nobody's done this already because it's such a big issue and such a big pain point for most ERP migration projects.
Gerry Allen:So we were surprised that we couldn't find anything that did something similar. But having convinced ourselves that there wasn't anything out there, we took up the challenge to be the first to market with that. Also touching on something we talked about earlier, it also just continues that kind of on premise, the cloud journey as well, because what we're seeing now is the infrastructure has been done or is being done. But this is a continuation of that. Now the business applications need to get into the cloud as well and the ERP applications. So we're facilitating that process as well.
Anthony Carrano:What caused you to actually look into that to realize that this is a problem?
Gerry Allen:Just the experience that we'd had of doing it the old fashioned way, in every ERP project I've worked on, it's been a case of running extract programs against the legacy system, producing more Excel workbooks than you could possibly want in your lifetime, and then trying to get that Excel workbook information uploaded into the new system and then trying to cleanse the data and validate the data as you do that. And as I said earlier, it just gets more and more complex and you spend more and more time on it. And yeah, it's just I just can't find the words to explain how painful that process is. So we were just desperate to solve that problem really. Ledger Migrator is our answer to how we solve that.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. Excellent. Now with all just with the ERP solutions that are out there, why did you decide to, you know, to build specifically, you know, for the Microsoft ecosystem and, you know, just, you know, to be, you know, even more specific like Business Central?
Robert Papier:Well, there's a few reasons for that. First of all, and Gerry can contradict me here, but the problem he's described when you look at enterprise customers and the enterprise systems, they solve it through pure grunt and cost. They will spend hundreds of thousands minimum and probably millions on doing the data migration. So when you look at the larger systems, they're kind of sorted. But when you look at Business Central, which is very much a mid market play, companies really can't afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on migrations, and certainly not if it's going to get into 6 figures.
Robert Papier:So that's that's the first thing that interested us about that particular part. As well as that, Microsoft themselves are putting a lot of effort and resources into growing Business Central, and they have their on premise systems like Great Plains and Dynamics SL, which used to be known as Solomons and the Vision, they are pushing us customers all the time to come off them and go into Business Central, which is their cloud based system. And lastly, it's because we are very much a partner play and we'll talk about that a little bit more. And if you're going to sell to partners, there is nothing better I'm slightly biased here, but I'll still say it there is nothing better than the Microsoft partner ecosystem. And I said I've been in IT for nearly half a century about forty years and no software company treats their partners with as much care and as much diligence as Microsoft. They really invest, they scale through partners. So if you are a partner play, it's a really good place to focus on.
Anthony Carrano:That's excellent. That is that's excellent. So let's piggyback on that. So when you talk to Microsoft partners, right, and, you know, business like finance leaders, what do they say is the hardest part about migrating, financial data into Business Central?
Robert Papier:I'll have a first step, but bear in mind that, Gerry is more of a technical expert. It's always around the same thing. Once you get past the opening balances and the ledger of accounts, anything beyond that is really difficult to do and is manual. So you have almost this diminishing returns that it becomes harder to take that history in. And the big question becomes the value of that history within Business Central, which is growing all the time because of Copilot and AI.
Gerry Allen:Yeah, I'd agree with that. But I'd emphasise what I said earlier about how difficult the part of the project this is. It's probably, in most projects, it's the most difficult part, which is why Robert alluded to earlier, a lot of partners eventually taught their customers out of migrating the data, even though they would really like it and they see it as sometimes not a must have, but a very strong nice to have. But when presented with the cost and the complexity and the risk, they kind of get beaten into 'okay, we can live without it, it's not ideal but we'll start with a clean sheet of paper and live without it'. But they really, you know, if you speak to the finance directors and the CFOs, they really do want the data.
Gerry Allen:They've just been persuaded that it's just too difficult to do. If we can go back round to them and say 'actually, you know, there's new tools available and it's not so difficult' then that's a completely different conversation. And that's the conversations that, you know, that we want the partners to have now with our tool in play.
Anthony Carrano:You know, just listening just baffles me that it's like, man, it's 2025. What? Financial data just seems like something that really should have been figured out a long time ago. And so I think it's just amazing, just I guess what it hasn't been dealt with, and two, the fact that you saw that, but just share a little bit, we have to go into a lot of detail, but why has financial data migration just traditionally been like either expensive, risky and time consuming for partners and clients?
Robert Papier:I think it's a Gerry question.
Gerry Allen:Yeah, I think I'll take that one. So trying to drill down to that complexity a little bit. So obviously you're changing, the first point is you're changing ERP systems. So you've got issues other than data migration to address. You've got to make sure that the new ERP system fits the business processes of the customer and they're happy with it and so forth.
Gerry Allen:Once you've done that, then the data migration is kind of the next biggest challenge. And they're two different systems. So, you know, the data is held slightly differently, slightly different terminology, things are structured differently in source system and the target system. So every project is kind of addressing that complexity from scratch. There's no other tooling available.
Gerry Allen:There hasn't been tooling available in the past. So every project is looking at the source system in detail, working out where all the data is, how do we get it out? And then they're looking at the target system and, you know, the opposite problem, how we map this data and get it into the new system? And it's just very time consuming, very complex, and as I said, very risky. There's a variety of legacy systems that people are moving from.
Gerry Allen:So that means that there's not the opportunity to just repeat what you did last time unless you're moving from the same migration path every time, from the same source system to the same target system, then you haven't got that repeatability that, you know, the partners would ideally like. So we're kind of building a tool that will take that problem away. We'll find the repeatable pain points and code those out. And then if partners are dealing with a variety of source systems, we've done the heavy lifting to make sure that we support all those different source systems. And we've built the repeatability into our product.
Anthony Carrano:So let's talk about that, about the now you've mentioned about the repeatability. I think this you might be able to unpack this even further about just your general approach, how it's so fundamentally different from a lot of the manual or semi manual migrations partners have been doing just the past several years. So maybe let's unpack a little bit about how your approach is so different.
Gerry Allen:Yeah, this is the automation. So as I said earlier, the old way of doing things was to extract the data from the source system, manipulate it manually, check it, validate it, cleanse it, and then take all of that data and import it into the new system. And you have to do that a number of times, don't forget, because this is a long running project where you're configuring the system and training people on it and all that kind of stuff. So you've got to do the data migration over and over again because the source system is still moving through the life of the project and the data is changing. What we do is we reduce that to just literally a click of a button awaits for some elapsed time obviously, and then the data is migrated.
Gerry Allen:And we can date chunk it as well, which makes the whole process much less risky because what you can do is that earlier in the project, you can take the historic data up to say the start of the current financial year or the end of the previous financial year. And then closer to the project end all the way up to the go live, then you're just dealing with the last few open periods or periods that were open when you started the project. So you're taking a massive amount of risk out of that final cutover as well. Proof is in the pudding, can fully reconcile the data, the trial balance, the vendor balances, the customer balances. You can reconcile all of those things at any point in the project.
Gerry Allen:And then finally, after the production cuts over, you can re reconcile those reconciliation points.
Anthony Carrano:So I know in addition to the automation, what you were just sharing a little bit about, one of the other things that really stands out is like your pre sale license model. Can you explain how that works and why it's such a game changer for partners?
Robert Papier:So the pre sale license does exactly what the full software does. So you can migrate any chunk of data, you can migrate all the data, you can do timestamped migrations, but only into a sandbox, not into production. So this allows for a couple of very big things. First of all, now when you demo the system to a prospect, you don't need to use Microsoft sample data. You can actually demo it with the customer's real data in a sandbox.
Robert Papier:The second thing you can do is proof of concepts. Proof of concepts can be very expensive to set up if you're going to migrate real data in, or you have to use once again synthetic data. But with the presale license, you can actually migrate the real data as much as you want and the customer can run it alongside their real production system. So this helps kind of ease the process internally from the customer, you know, so that people who are naysayers or worried or wondering whether it will work can actually see it work. The other thing about the presale licence, which we're not going to get into commercials at this stage at all, but it's fully refundable.
Robert Papier:We do not see this as something to make money on, we see this as an enabler. So when we say fully refundable, we we literally give the money back when you buy a licence. It's there to help partners grow their sales. And of course, that means reducing, the risk to the customer, which the internal sponsors are going to like and short and shorten the sales cycle, which, you know, when you speak to, everybody in the Microsoft ecosystem and particularly Microsoft, anything that gets license used quickly is something that you see their eyes light up.
Anthony Carrano:That's fantastic. So, I want to, you know, kind of build on that a little bit for those, you know, partners that are listening that either have migrations, things that just some clients that are needing migrations. Maybe can you kind of unpack a little bit more about what kind of impact does being able to spin up a sandbox proof of concept have on building trust with clients?
Robert Papier:It obviously, you're getting my view of this and not necessarily speaking to departments. It's a game changer. The other thing we did very early on was we when we looked at our pricing model, we decided that we didn't want to have any limitations on how many times you migrate, on how much data you migrate. We didn't want to get into that the bit titan world of paying more if you've got a lot of data to migrate.
Robert Papier:So the way we've set up our licensing is we tie the license to the customer migration. Now this allows both in the pre sale and the real license to partner to migrate as many times as required. So if we need to do five different time slice for various reasons to fit into the business needs of the of the customer, they can do that. That that was something that we intentionally did because we see this as a key tool to enable the smooth transition. There's a lot going on when people change their financial systems.
Robert Papier:I kind of liken it to a bit of a heart transplant in a person. You know, this is if you speak to companies, it is probably outside of email, their core system. Everything runs on their finance and ERP. So changing it changing it is is high risk and, you know, they don't do it lightly.
Anthony Carrano:Mhmm.
Gerry Allen:And the other point I'd add to that is that you're actually, by using the presale license and showing customers their data moving across, you're actually removing one of the biggest objections, which is it's going to be difficult to move my data. You're kind of addressing that upfront. An experienced CFO that's done ERP migrations in his career will know that the data migration is a massive headache. So you showing them some of their data in the new system kind of on day zero, you're getting ahead of that objection before they've even raised it.
Anthony Carrano:Well, that's the thing, just listening, as I was just thinking about from the sales conversation standpoint, that in essence, you're removing just about I mean, like the main obstacle to why, you know, somebody would, you know, would make this migration. So, you know, to the point, you know, Robert, that you made earlier about, you know, with Microsoft, the big push, especially a lot of migrations from, GP, SL, and NAV, this can really create just an immense opportunity, you know, you know, for for customers who need to, you know, make that move, but also for the partners. I mean, this that's gonna be pretty exciting. What, you know, is there anything else maybe like in addition to, you know, like what Jerry said, just, you know, how else do you see this really change in the sales conversation?
Robert Papier:I'm not sure there's much else. It's to me so if I look at the sales hat on it, anything you do to derisk a project upfront, any guarantees you give because as far as the customer is concerned, it's almost like as I go back to my heart transplant analogy, I've got to do this. I want to do it. We need a better ERP system or we need to get off our on premise system, but, oh, boy, I'm worried. So anything you do to calm the nerves, derisk, overcome the biggest hurdles, that's got to be an asset in the sales process. ERP sales are not something that happened on a whim or overnight. They are long drawn out cycles.
Anthony Carrano:And did I hear you correctly when you said kind of at the beginning here of, you know, this segment where it's fully refundable?
Robert Papier:Yeah. So the way the way we do the the way we do the presale licenses, and I'm not going to into numbers, but it's 10% of the real license. And when you buy a real license, you get it back. And that's unlimited. If you need three pre sale licenses before you get your first sale, and of course, Microsoft partners don't need that many, you'll get 30% back. There is no limit on this. We we really do not see it. We see this as an enabler, not a profit center.
Anthony Carrano:Mhmm. Mhmm. That's fantastic. That's fantastic. I also would like to kind of, you know, maybe even just backtrack a little bit, just talking about like with the migrations, and I think, know, you talked about just being at just with one click, right? So this idea of at the touch of a button. And what a simple experience. Without revealing too much of the secret sauce, right? What does that actually look like in the real world for our partner?
Gerry Allen:Yeah, I mean, it's exactly that. There's obviously a bit of setup to do, and there's a couple of options on the setup. So one option that we offer, for example, is to change the chart of accounts as part of the migration process. So CFOs love to change their chart of accounts. So we've had this chart of accounts for a few years where, you know, it doesn't meet our business requirements anymore.
Gerry Allen:We'd love to change it and changing your ERP system, you know, is a good opportunity to start with a fresh chart of accounts. So if you take that option, then we need you to feed the mapping of the old chart of accounts and the new chart of accounts into our migration tool. If you don't want to do that and you just want to live with the same chart of accounts, then you don't have to do that config piece, you just leave it to run. The only other thing you have to do is log into the legacy system, log into the new system, choose a date range, which is quite important because if you've got ten years data in the old system, doing that in one run is going to take days potentially. So what we do is we'll chunk that up usually by financial year.
Gerry Allen:So you'll do a year at a time. Once you've chosen the date range, once you've logged into the source and target system, you literally just press the Migrate Data button. It reports back to you obviously on progress as it goes along. Starts with the master data, then does all of the sales ledger, purchase ledger, cash book, journals, just chugs its way through, and then gives you a nice report at the end to show you how much data has been migrated across. Once you're happy with that period, then you just run it again for a new period.
Anthony Carrano:That's fascinating. Still, you know, I believe you. Just seems really that you you've really reduced the you know, removed the the risk and the complexity. You know, it's also something, you know, that that was mentioned earlier. I kinda go back to about a lot of companies, you know, they wouldn't they would have to settle with just only migrating a certain amount of data.
Anthony Carrano:And, again, as as somebody, you know, as an as an outsider, if you will, just the idea of not migrating all of your, you know, historical financial data just, you know, it just didn't seem real. It's like, why would you not move that over? And so, you know, hearing you guys talk about, you know, what's unique about your approach is that it's not just about moving data, but because you're able to move all that historical data, in essence, what you're doing is preserving financial intelligence, which can really give, these companies, building on giving them a competitive advantage because they have preserved all that financial intelligence, especially now with what AI can do. So again, without maybe revealing all the secret sauce, how does Ledger Migrator ensure the historical financial data becomes usable and not just stored?
Gerry Allen:That's done out of the box by Business Central, Anthony. So all we're doing is making sure that history comes across from year one, whatever that is. It can be five years, ten years, twenty years. If you just go into Business Central with your master data and your opening balances, all that fantastic work that Microsoft are doing with Copilot and agents and all their AI functionality, that's not gonna be usable for you until you've built up a fresh history. So you're probably gonna be two or three years down the line before you can do anything with Copilot because it just doesn't have any data to train the system with.
Gerry Allen:With our tool, you're bringing all that history across. So that means from day one on Business Central, you've got the full functionality available for you. You've got enough data in there to train all your AI tools and your agents. And then you can just leave Microsoft and Business Central to do its wonderful work and give you all the help that you can get from those AI tools. And as you know, they're developing all the time with more agents and more Copilot functionality.
Gerry Allen:So the sooner you've got your data in there, the sooner you can start making use of that functionality.
Anthony Carrano:So can you guys share one example of a partner who's used Ledger Migrator and what changed for them like before versus after?
Robert Papier:So I'm going to talk about a partner without giving their name. So an American partner. Very specifically, they had a customer who had nine companies, has nine companies in a group. Wow. And the challenge was to migrate all nine companies as a group into Business Central.
Robert Papier:And it was very uneven in the amount of data. The operating companies, each individual operating companies varied between lots of data and just a little bit of data. So we even have a special license for this where after the primary license against that customer, where you've got to do additional companies, you get a reduced price additional license at a quarter of the cost. So they were able to use our tool to migrate online seamlessly into Business Central. So that was I think the way it was put to me is they just couldn't have done it.
Robert Papier:I mean, they could have sold some licenses, but there is no possible way manually that this company could have afforded to do it without automation. Just just would have been, you know, it's just broken all the budgets they were ever going to have.
Gerry Allen:And that's not an uncommon scenario to have some sort of group structure, you know, which just makes that migration even more complex. It's already complex just for a single set of books, a single business, you know, where you've got a group structure, you've got multiple sets of books and some consolidation going on, it just makes that challenge. That was already difficult even more difficult. So the fact that we've managed to solve this for a nine, mean, nine is the most that we've done so far, but you could have a group of companies even larger than that potentially. We'd offer the same service to them as well.
Anthony Carrano:So going from on one end of the spectrum, being able to successfully do this migration with these nine companies. The other unexpected term is impossible. Is there any way you can try to ballpark maybe quantify like what if somebody did try to attempt to do it manually or semi, you know, manually, what would be the man hours? It's like just
Robert Papier:Yeah. That that is a little bit about how big is a bit how long is a piece of string. But the average migration, if you just talk about not even a medium company, more in the small in the SMB is probably going to be at least fifteen to twenty five days of labour if things go smoothly, And that's by no means on the larger size, that would be small. And that's why, of course, a lot of these companies didn't do it because you ended up with a project to get you started in Business Central that was costing you the equivalent of five years licenses. And, you know, once again leading the witness to say, well, do you really need that data? So it literally saves tens of thousands of dollars.
Gerry Allen:Yeah, I think the good example that Robert's recognizing is at the smaller end. You know, this group of companies that we talked about earlier, know, I think you'd be looking at a minimum of six man months to do something like that manually in the old fashioned way. Bringing that down to being able to do it all in a day or two, just an overwhelming change for partner. They're delighted and the customer as well.
Anthony Carrano:Yeah, I would think. I mean, if I heard you correctly, you said typically something like this, not for the six to nine, oh, excuse me, the nine company example, but for small to medium, you said it's usually about a six to a nine month process. And using with Ledger Migrator, you can get it down to one to two days. Did I hear that correctly?
Gerry Allen:Yeah, that was for the group of companies that we were saying.
Anthony Carrano:Oh, that's true.
Gerry Allen:So for the smaller simple companies, you're talking maybe taking four to six weeks, one weeks of work down to, again, taking it down to a single day.
Robert Papier:There's another thing you need to think about with this, and that is the type of companies that are buying Business Central. So there are really a couple of broad types, which is really broad. There are people who are you know, companies who are buying Business Central because they've outgrown their old system. So already they've got you know, they're they're a growing company. They need new features.
Robert Papier:But now when we talk about what's happening with Great Plains and SL, and that there are big companies out there who Microsoft are trying to migrate into Business Central. So now we're not talking about a growing company necessarily. We're talking about a company that's already reached quite a lot of maturity and has a lot of data. And that's in line with what Microsoft are trying to do over the next well, as you know, there's a lot of focus they're putting on to getting people off great planes in their cell at the moment.
Anthony Carrano:Well, you guys have definitely developed a solution that's obviously, you know, it helps facilitate obviously smarter, faster and easier, you know, data migrations. One question I have and it just popped up as just hearing you guys talk is, how do you ensure accuracy and quality with the data migrations?
Gerry Allen:That's a good question. So we touched on this slightly earlier, but it's guaranteeing. So what we're doing is warranting our software against those reconciliation reports. Running things from the old system, like your trial balance, your vendor balances, your bank balances, supplier balances, and making sure that all of that matches in the new system. We provide unlimited technical support to make sure that's achieved.
Gerry Allen:If there is a reconciliation error anywhere in that process, then it's our responsibility to resolve that. So that will be reported through the partner back to us, and we'll work with the partner to fix that and rerun the migration until they're happy with that.
Anthony Carrano:So I know throughout I've heard you're very partner focused, I know Robert, you've got ten plus years involvement, experience with IAMCP, and you've spoken openly about IAMCP's impact on your journey. How has, this community shaped how you built or how, not necessarily maybe how you built, but how you're planning like with going to market, you know, with Ledger Migrator?
Robert Papier:First of all, I think it's worth examining why we are a partner only play. So I'm going to steal an analogy that Gerry uses that I really like. He calls us the removal vans and people are moving home. And the truth is, if you move home, having a removal van is important, but you can't just move home with that. You need a realtor, you need a title company, you need all the other things.
Robert Papier:So what we provide is a tool, but it's only one of the tools that partners bring to bear when they are bringing customers into Business Central. So once we identify that this was purely a partner play and we were going to Microsoft partners, in my view, there is no better ecosystem than the IAMCP. I took part in P2P as they call them, partner to partner events both on the web and also locally in The UK. Needs to be said that we have got the majority of our active partners via IMCP from these events. IAMCP have introduced me to people at these events.
Robert Papier:What I found really helpful is you've just got to ask and there's lots of mentoring and lots of advice that you get free of charge, people just are willing to contribute to give you good advice. So we have now got the majority of our partners to IAMCP. It's enabled us to grow more quickly in North America than The UK, which sounds a bit counterintuitive as we're a UK company, but there are various reasons for that, including Microsoft's footprint and where they're putting their focus and where the the legacy systems are larger. The IAMCP has provided that that that medium for us to get our message out. And I I actually think it's been the most successful of all our marketing campaigns has been through IAMCP.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent, excellent. Well, when you, and this could be for, you know, either you, Robert or Gerry, but when you guys were decided, you know, to go, focus on selling through partners, why did you decide to go all in on a partner only model instead of selling direct?
Robert Papier:Do you want to take that, Gerry?
Gerry Allen:Yeah, I'm happy to take that. I mean, I think if a customer is making that journey anyway, the ERP journey from one system to another, they need to engage with a partner that can cover all of the aspects, as Robert was alluding to. They have to be able to configure the system, they have to be able to train the end users, They have to be able to customize if necessary, integrate with other systems. So the data migration is just one part of that overall ERP migration. It's a big part of it, but it's not the entire project.
Gerry Allen:So the partner has to be there. And, you know, we are not that partner. We're just helping the partner with that data migration piece. It doesn't really make sense for us to try and sell our tool to the end user because they're still going to have to engage with the partner to do all the other pieces. So I think it was clear to us from the outset that our customer was the business central partner and we're just helping them help their customers.
Robert Papier:I think I'll come in on something here and kind of links a bit back to IAMCP and advice. Originally, we were we were circulating our name, you know, Ledger Migrator, but it soon became clear that when you spoke to partners and IAMCP people said this to me is that we should be a wide label programme. But actually, how the partner uses our tool, how the partner presents our tool is up to the partner. We're just a tool that they are using. We're going to underwrite it to the partner.
Robert Papier:But as far as the customer is concerned, the customer is expecting the partner to deliver And the customer actually has no interest in us. They really don't care what tool the partner is using because they're saying, we've engaged you, mister partner, and you have to deliver for us.
Anthony Carrano:Oh, that's that's excellent. That's excellent. You know, Robert, I know just in the course of our conversation here today and even in some of the prior conversations, you didn't just join IAMCP, you showed up. So maybe tell us a little bit about that. You know, why did you reconnect with the community years later and how has that changed things for you?
Robert Papier:He's not here on the call, but I can name check Eddie Bader.
Anthony Carrano:Yes.
Robert Papier:One of the reasons first of one of the reasons I stayed involved in IAMCP even at a distance when I wasn't necessarily working for partner was because I believe in the ethos they have of self help of actually being a community that helps its members and also the ties into Microsoft because they've got people who really understand Microsoft and much as I'm a Microsoft fan, understanding Microsoft and everything is a full time it's it's a full time job. So they were really helpful with that. So that was the kind of long term keeping in in touch.
Robert Papier:And although, as I said, I took a contract with Microsoft for a while and did a couple things, I always wanted to stay in the Microsoft partner ecosystem. When we launched this and I looked at the best routes to market and there are other routes, there's CSPs that sell licenses that also provide professional services that we can sell through. IAMCP provides the best community to have instant conversations not just one way conversations where you where you speak to people and, you know, you get your ten seconds, you get your elevator pitch. I mean, was even one session I went on where I won't mention it was running it, but they listened to your pitch that you and what you're offering. And then the whole room gave feedback and said, well, that's good. But have you thought of? Have you thought of? Well, have you got this covered? So it was that feedback loop in that positive environment. As I said, I've been a member a few times with different offerings, and I've always found that feedback that that partner to partner motion that the sell with.
Robert Papier:And it's interesting with Microsoft with the way they're now doing the market place, making it more formally easy for partners to cooperate than it used to be. But I think IAMCP was ahead of Microsoft in its game there in partner to partner cooperation.
Anthony Carrano:That's awesome. I love that quote. You said the best community to have instant conversations. I know when Eddie listens to that, as well as from others, that's that's going to put a smile on their faces. That's so true. I mean, you hear that a lot. So I appreciate you sharing that. Let's now kind of maybe shift a little bit to talking about kind of the road ahead and just the future of migrations and Microsoft partners. Years from now, how do you think the automated migration will change the Microsoft partner model?
Gerry Allen:Yeah, mean, for us, if we look at it from a Ledger Migrator lens first, for us it's about covering all of the most common migration paths. So we're constantly looking for the partners to feed back to us, you've got all of these migration paths covered, adding this one and this one would be really helpful. So that's a continuous dialogue really, and we're trying to focus on the migration paths that are most useful to the partners that we're talking to. The end goal for the Business Central partners is that the whole world is using Business Central, you know, and eventually they put us out of business, don't they, by getting everybody onto Business Central and the partners can just happily keep their customers happy with ongoing support and customizations and so forth. And our job is done at that point.
Gerry Allen:But until everybody's on Business Central, then there's a role for us in that ecosystem. We're here to evolve with the partners and make sure that we're supporting them wherever they need support to get their customers across to Business Central.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. And so I do have just kind of a final question, but it's actually going to be it's gonna kinda split it a little bit. So it's gonna be the you you'll hear where it says kind of in essence, there's the same question, but there's there's there's two different angles that's like, if you can give one piece of advice to Microsoft partners navigating data migrations right now, would it be? But then I'm also as a as a piggyback on that is, because I know, Robert, you've talked so much about partners. If you can give one piece of advice to Microsoft partners, you know, navigating, you know, partnerships and building partnerships right now, what would it be?
Anthony Carrano:So let's, let's start with maybe the first one. If you can give one piece of advice to partners navigating data migrations right now, what would it be?
Robert Papier:Okay. So this is gonna be biased, but it would be use Ledger Migrator. You automate everything, have a little manual input. I mean, so, yes, it is biased. But, you know, we would say, why do things manually when there's tools?
Anthony Carrano:Yeah.
Robert Papier:So when you talk about financial data, use Ledger Migrator.
Anthony Carrano:Now what's the what's the best way then to to get a hold of you guys? Is it through LinkedIn, your website?
Robert Papier:Either would be good. We have a a form on our website a partner can fill out for a demo. Both Gerry and I are on LinkedIn, and I put all my contact details on LinkedIn so people can just reach out by phone. For the American partners, we have an American number as well. So we do we do operate in both continents.
Anthony Carrano:I was just saying, we're gonna have all those links in the show notes for those that are listening or watching. So we'll have we'll have that have that available for folks as well.
Robert Papier:And with regard to advice from Microsoft partners, I mean, I've always felt, and this is growing now because Microsoft, what they're doing with the marketplace, you can't be all things to all customers. So having strong alliances with other partners that complement you is the way to go. I mean, there obviously, there's a there's a few enormous Microsoft partners, but that's not really who I'm talking about. I'm not not talking about Accenture and people like that. Most partners have a specialisation and having an ecosystem of other partners that complement your specialisation.
Robert Papier:That's, I believe, a very powerful message to the market.
Anthony Carrano:That's fantastic.
Gerry Allen:The one thing I would add as well is it's a two way process, as Robert touched on earlier. So if we haven't got a migration path covered that you really need, then come and talk to us. We can build it.
Anthony Carrano:Excellent. Well, Robert, Gerry, this has been fantastic. I mean, it's been very insightful, as you've covered a lot just in terms of with the migrations and I know our company, we work with a lot of partners and we've not built many campaigns to customers migrating from GP SL and NAV to Business Central. And so this has been fantastic, as well as just your insights on partnering and the value of the IAMCP community. So really appreciate your time today.
Anthony Carrano:And you guys have a great rest of the day.
Gerry Allen:Cheers, Anthony. Thanks for your time.
Anthony Carrano:Big thank you to our guests from Ledger Migrator for joining us today and for sharing how they're rethinking one of the toughest challenges in Business Central implementations and turning it into a strategic advantage for partners. Episodes like this remind us that innovation in the Microsoft ecosystem doesn't just come from new features. It comes from partners solving real problems together. If you're a Microsoft partner navigating data migrations today, this is one of those conversations that should spark new ideas about how you serve clients and how you can scale your business. You can connect with Robert and Gerry on LinkedIn or visit their web site at www.ledgermigrator.com.
Anthony Carrano:If you found today's episode valuable, be sure to subscribe, share it with a fellow partner, and leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. It helps more people in the community find these stories. And if you're not already a part of IAMCP, consider joining your local chapter and getting involved. The connections you make here can shape your next opportunity. To learn more about IAMCP, visit the website at www.iamcp.org.
Anthony Carrano:Thanks for listening to the IAMCP Profiles in Partnership podcast. We'll see you in the next episode.
