Resources or Best Practices for Merging Two NetSuite Instances

Hi Jenny,

First – I wouldn’t assume that just because they use NetSuite that their terminology is the same as yours – check the “Rename Records” page.

If you are transitioning to a one world account from a midmarket account – please please please do this in sandbox first. The transition to one world can be a bit bumpy (though admittedly its much better than it used to be)

Don’t trust the “download all data” function. (honestly – I’m not sure why NS even bothers with it, it’s woefully inadequate)

One thing to bear in mind – you can actually download a list of all the custom fields from the account from each page (I’m not sure how new this is)

Just a few things to get you started – if I think of more, I’ll edit this.

Hi Jenny,

I have done the opposite of your scenario, I had to curve out one large company to 2 separate and independent entity. Main company had 11 subsidiaries in 10 countries with close 800 employees. I had to segregate employees, products, customers, project, salesorder, invoices, customer payments, vendor, bill, payment, credit memo etc (everything had to be separated even the fixed assets, though there were no fixed asset module).  One thing was good that the business process was same for the segregated companies – thus eliminated headache with customization (there were too many scripting). It took me and 2 others (CPA’s)  close to 5 month to complete this curve out 12-18 hrs per day. Main headache was the extraction of the data and transforming them for the load.

In your case I guess you will have  instance of  a blank account and migrate the combined the data from 2 instances. You have to decide which company’s instance would be your template to replicate on the new instance or build the system in new instance from scratch that can satisfy needs of both the source companies. I am putting down some logical steps below:

• Decide which company’s instance would be the template. Note this for data migration only, if there are business process, scripting and customization in both the instances and they are different, then you have to decide which instance is optimal for both the company. Also, remember customization and scripting amalgamation would be a nightmare.
• Create COA (GL) in the target instance – make sure they align with both the companies chart of accounts (COA)
• Replicate all the record type including custom fields, list, custom records etc
• Create saved searches for every record types with every fields which will act as your load template. Make sure the template headers aligns with the target instance.
• Extract record data using the saved searches, transform data to match the templates – most tedious and tricky part, you will thank VLOOKUP feature of excel.
• Don’t forget to use the source instances’s internal id or record id from the source instance as the external id in your load file, this will help you to debug issues and trace where the data came from. I usually add prefix to the internal or record id for each instance.
• Consideration during loading data via CSV import – make sure all the fields are set as normal in the target instance, use internal id for referenced records in the mapping (small pencil icon) ie while loading transaction use the customer’s internal id (from target instance)
• Load employees first, then items, vendors, customers etc.
• After all the entities are loaded you can start with projects if any, transactions, events, tasks etc
• Make sure to check your transformed data for validity. Always validate with a small test batch.
• Make sure to have unlimited supply of RED BULL

I hope this helps, if you need more help hit me up in slack

Sam-I-Am

Bundling is going to be your best friend. The less you manually do the better.