Earlier this month, one of our clients sold his company, and the new owner needed us to move all of the accounts from the old company into his new company. The original company had been operational for over fifteen years, and naturally, had steadily accumulated a lot of accounts—over 35,000, actually. But the vast majority of them hadn’t been used in years. The ownership transition seemed like a great opportunity to do some account cleanup and make things a bit easier to navigate for the Account Manager.

We decided the best approach would be to write four different scripts: one for all the accounts; one for accounts that had never been used; another for accounts that hadn’t been used since 2008; and finally, one for accounts that had been used after 2008. Fortunately, Victoria Yudin’s wonderful blog made these scripts simple. We tweaked the base scripts we found here by adding a “group by” at the end of the script that included the date range we were looking for:

It turned out there were over 27,00 accounts still on the books that really didn’t need to be there. So once we were confident these queries produced the results we needed, we used the very handy Copy Company tool to setup the new company in GP. The Copy Company feature—free, and available with Microsoft GP 2010—turned a generally laborious process into a quick and easy transition with only minimal manual information importing.

Then, with the new company built, we wrote a query to delete all those excess accounts we found earlier. The result: a slimmer, more relevant, and more manageable list of accounts.

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