How to Handle NetSuite Data Migration Successfully

Your IT management team is excited about transitioning from legacy systems to NetSuite ERP, and for good reason. 

This shift addresses many critical needs of your organization: scaling operations, breaking down data silos, reducing maintenance costs, and meeting regulatory guidelines. With NetSuite, you can also unify data across teams and improve operational efficiency.

But here’s the catch: all that potential hinges on a single process — NetSuite data migration. Without a well-planned strategy, these benefits will remain out of reach. That’s why organizations rely on NetSuite consulting services to plan and execute the data migration process for a seamless transition. 

Accurately migrating business data to NetSuite is crucial for the success of your cloud ERP transformation. When done well, it simplifies operations, enhances automation, and provides real-time insights to support informed decision-making. On the other hand, a poorly executed data migration can prevent your organization from fully realizing NetSuite ERP's potential.

Why is NetSuite data migration important?

NetSuite data migration helps you consolidate data and gain actionable insights for strategic planning.

Data silos occur when departments store data in isolated systems for specific functions like customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, or inventory management. This lack of integration restricts an organization’s visibility into the data. With NetSuite, migrating data brings all your business data into a single, unified platform. 

Consolidating financial records, customer details, inventory levels, and operational metrics eases how you monitor performance across departments. NetSuite’s built-in analytics enables you to create forecasts through predictive analytics and scenario planning. You can also use NetSuite’s reporting tools to simplify audit processes and regulatory compliance.

What are the benefits of NetSuite data migration?

Data migration is more than a technical step. It’s a strategic opportunity to clean up fragmented systems, eliminate silos, and build a reliable foundation for your ERP. When done right, it enhances the value of NetSuite across your entire business. Here are the key benefits you can expect.

1. Improve data accuracy and trust across the business

Legacy systems often contain duplicate entries, misaligned formats, and conflicting records across departments. During data migration, you can validate and standardize data to match NetSuite’s structure, ensuring consistency from day one. Clean data improves the accuracy of reports, KPIs, dashboards, and forecasts. It also builds trust across departments, enabling everyone from finance to sales to make decisions based on the same numbers.

2. Enable scalability and operational agility

Once your data is centralized and structured, scaling becomes much simpler. Whether you’re adding new entities, launching in a new region, or rolling out new product lines, you won’t have to rebuild data models or reprocess workflows. NetSuite’s cloud-first design is made for growth, but it depends on a solid data foundation. A clean migration clears the way for automation, faster close cycles, and operational efficiency that grows with you.

3. Strengthen compliance and audit readiness

Data migration is also an opportunity to reinforce data governance. With NetSuite’s built-in access controls and audit trails, it’s easier to meet internal and external compliance requirements. But only if your data is properly mapped and historically complete. A structured migration allows you to align fields with regulatory expectations, retain necessary records, and produce clean audit trails, saving time during financial audits and reducing legal risk.

4. Boost business intelligence and decision-making

Migrating clean, well-organized data into NetSuite allows you to fully leverage its built-in analytics tools. Finance can monitor real-time cash flow. Sales teams can track pipeline performance. Executives can slice and dice reports to understand trends across entities or departments. With better data in place, NetSuite becomes more than a system of record; it becomes a strategic engine for insight and agility.

Migrating data to NetSuite has challenges, but knowing what to expect helps you plan and tackle them with the right strategy.

What challenges should you expect during NetSuite data migration?

Even with the right tools and planning, data migration comes with friction. From mismatched fields to downtime risks, understanding the common pitfalls ahead of time can save you costly fixes later. Here are the top challenges to prepare for:

1. Data redundancy and mapping

Duplicate records across various departments result in inconsistencies. For example, sales and accounting departments may store customer information differently. Your data migration team must spot and reconcile these discrepancies to ensure data consistency. 

A well-defined data mapping strategy ensures information flows seamlessly from legacy systems to NetSuite. 

2. High data migration costs

Data cleaning, restructuring, and extraction can be costly, with migration expenses often adding up to 15% of the new system cost. These costs vary based on the volume and quality of data you migrate. 

To manage this effectively, organizations must prioritize budgeting and resource allocation to manage data migration costs.

3. Business disruption and downtime

Data migration requires temporary halting of operations to transfer and validate data from legacy systems. This downtime can be costly, as employees can’t perform regular tasks without essential tools.

The good news? You can tackle these challenges head-on with the right NetSuite data migration strategy.

What are the key steps to building a NetSuite data migration strategy?

Organizations must plan meticulously and assess process requirements before moving data to the NetSuite ERP system. While this planning may seem less exciting than actual ERP implementation and go-live, it’s important for a successful data migration.

Source: Medium

1. Understand the data migration process

Start by looking at all your current systems holding essential data like customer details, inventory lists, operational details, and financial transactions. Pinpointing these data sources can help map them to the correct fields in NetSuite ERP. 

2. Create a data migration team

Your data migration team is typically part of your ERP implementation team and includes sales, finance, and operations representatives. These members offer valuable insights into how their departments use data, helping you identify data you need to transfer and how to clean it up. Your IT team is vital in ensuring data integrity and system compatibility. 

Collaborating with NetSuite consultants can help your team clearly understand your existing systems and NetSuite’s complexities, ensuring a smoother migration.

3. Clean and refine data

Sourcing clean data is critical, as poor data will result in an ineffective ERP system – emphasizing the principle of ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ Before migration, you must identify and fix data errors, duplicates, and inconsistencies using data validation tools, manual cleaning efforts, or data enrichment services. 

Format your data properly by aligning currencies, date formats, and field mappings with NetSuite’s preferred language. This ensures your data fits the system’s specifications and provides a smooth integration.

4. Choose the right NetSuite migration method

Evaluate all data migration methods available and choose the approach that best suits your needs. Common methods include:

• Direct imports using CSV files or Connector SuiteApp are ideal for specific, small-scale migration tasks.
• Extract and load involves extracting data from other ERP systems and loading it into NetSuite. While this method is straightforward, it doesn’t allow data validation during migration.
• Extract, transform, and load (ETL) is another approach that allows you to convert data either in-stream or after temporarily storing it. This method lets you manipulate or clean data before moving it to NetSuite.
• Integrated platform as a service (iPaaS) solutions offer a cloud-based centralized console for managing all data. It’s ideal for handling challenges that usually occur during NetSuite data migration.

5. Migrate and validate data

After selecting your migration method, it’s time to move on to the actual data migration process.

• Data extraction involves extracting data from existing systems. For example, if you’re migrating data from a CRM system, you might collect data points like customer profiles, sales history, and interaction logs.

• Data transformation requires you to clean data, fix inconsistencies, and map source fields to NetSuite’s format. For example, you can break down customer addresses into separate fields like street, city, and zip code to meet NetSuite's specific requirements.

• Data validation and testing involves checking data for accuracy before going live. Consider conducting trial runs with smaller data subsets to ensure the data transfer to NetSuite is accurate and error-free.

• Go-live marks the execution of data migration tasks while safeguarding business continuity, data accuracy, and system reliability. Consider migrating data during low-activity periods to minimize the impact on business operations. 
• Post-migration activities let you monitor data quality and address discrepancies quickly. 

Migrating data is a vital part of implementing an ERP system, and it can impact the project's success and overall costs. Knowing what drives data migration expenses helps you set a realistic budget and allocate resources.

What are the best practices for NetSuite data migration? 

Keeping your ERP project on track isn’t easy. Consider following these best practices to avoid the common data migration pitfalls. 

1. Assess the data landscape 

Before starting the data migration process, analyze your existing data, the systems where it’s stored, and its overall quality. Consider how the new ERP system will use this data, how to map it to the ERP’s database structure, and how to establish data translation rules for migration. 

Thorough data analysis upfront helps you understand the scope and complexity of the migration project, setting the stage for a smoother transition.

2. Create a comprehensive plan

Develop a detailed plan with clear objectives, scope, timeline, and resource allocation. This plan ensures your migration activities align with business goals and helps you anticipate challenges. 

Establish a communication strategy to inform and engage stakeholders like management, the IT team, end users, and external partners throughout the process.

3. Build a team

Create a data migration team with representatives from various departments to ensure everyone understands their roles, responsibilities, and contributions. To simplify the process, effectively delegate tasks among your internal team, data migration partner, and any third-party consultants. 

Finally, carefully review your implementation partner’s statement of work to define their responsibilities and avoid misunderstandings.

4. Establish data mapping rules

Data mapping connects data fields from your current system to the new ERP system. Develop a thorough data mapping plan to outline how you’ll transform and integrate each piece of data into the new system. Consider adding clear transformation rules to standardize, cleanse, or reformat data. 

5. Conduct test migrations

Running test migrations with sample data allows you to identify and fix potential issues before the full migration. It allows you to validate data accuracy and integrity in the new system. 

6. Implement data security measures 

Consider using encryption and secure transfer protocols to keep data safe during migration. Also, create full data backups before migrating, especially when transitioning from on-premise systems. This protects your data from potential loss or corruption.

7. Create a detailed go-live plan

Plan the go-live stage along with steps like final data migration, system testing, and validation. Assign clear roles to address issues quickly and ensure coordination among teams.  After go-live, have a team ready to handle user queries and fix problems. 

8. Offer training and support 

Train your team thoroughly on how to use the new ERP system effectively. Make sure they understand its features, workflows, and data access procedures. Consider providing ongoing support during the transition to address any questions or issues. 

Data migration isn’t a one-and-done process. After the migration, monitor data and system performance to catch and fix issues quickly. In addition to regularly updating, backing up, and validating data, set up regular maintenance schedules to stay on top of potential issues. 

How can NetSuite consulting services help with data migration? 

Working with NetSuite consulting services helps you with strategic planning, comprehensive data cleansing, and data transformation.

Strategic planning

NetSuite consulting services offer strategic planning for the migration process. They help define objectives, scope, timelines, and resource needs. 

Consultants also create detailed migration plans that align with your business goals and address potential challenges. They establish clear roles, set responsibilities, and strong communication channels to ensure a smooth transition to NetSuite.

Data cleansing 

NetSuite consultants carefully analyze existing data to spot and fix inconsistencies, duplicates, and errors. They apply various data cleansing methods to ensure you migrate only high-quality data. After migration, they validate the data to confirm its integrity and accuracy in NetSuite. 

Data transformation

NetSuite consultants are experts at aligning data fields from legacy systems to NetSuite's structure. They carefully create a data mapping plan that outlines how to transform and integrate data into the new system. This process includes setting data transformation rules to clean, format, and convert data, which ensures data accuracy within the NetSuite environment.

Frequently asked questions about NetSuite data migration

Got more questions? We have the answers.

Q1. Can I migrate only part of my data to NetSuite?

Yes, partial migration is common and often recommended. You might choose to migrate only current customers, open transactions, or last year’s financials. This reduces complexity and allows you to go live faster, while keeping historical data archived or available in a separate reporting system.

Q2. What's the difference between real-time and batch data migration?

Batch migration moves data in scheduled chunks, typically during off-hours or before go-live. Real-time migration syncs data continuously between systems. Batch is simpler and more common during ERP transitions, while real-time is used for integrations where legacy and new systems must temporarily run in parallel.

Q3. Should I handle data migration in-house or outsource it?

It depends on your team’s capacity and complexity of your systems. In-house gives you more control but requires dedicated resources and NetSuite knowledge. Outsourcing to experienced consultants accelerates the process, reduces risk, and helps with edge cases like custom fields or third-party integrations.

Q4. Do I need to archive legacy data after migrating to NetSuite?

Yes. Even if you don’t move all data into NetSuite, it’s important to archive what you leave behind, especially for tax, audit, or historical reporting purposes. Make sure archived data is secure, accessible, and formatted for future use.

Q5. How is data privacy handled during migration?

During migration, sensitive data like financial records or customer PII may be temporarily exposed. Use encrypted transfer protocols, strict role-based access, and secure storage environments. If you’re using external vendors, ensure they follow GDPR, HIPAA, or industry-specific standards.

Q6. Does migration time vary by data type?

Yes. Simple data like contact lists or SKUs migrate quickly, while transactional data (invoices, journal entries) and custom workflows take longer. Financial and compliance-related data also require extra validation, which can extend timelines.

Ready to move data?

Switching to NetSuite is a smart move for businesses looking to retire their old legacy systems. Those outdated systems can’t keep up with the flexibility, integration, and real-time insights you need. Migrating data to NetSuite lets you combine all data in a cloud-based platform. 

Plus, you can improve efficiency and drive business growth by simplifying operations and automating repetitive tasks. Consider teaming up with a NetSuite consulting service to avoid migration headaches and maximize your investment.

Thinking of how to keep data secure? Check out the best data security software to minimize the risk of data loss and improve user governance. 

This article was originally published in 2024. It has been updated with new information.

Edited by Monishka Agrawal