One of the toughest questions in any NetSuite migration isn’t about configuration or customisation. It’s about history.
Do you bring years of invoices, payments, and credit memos into NetSuite? Or do you draw a line in the sand, bring only open balances, and start fresh?
At first glance, the answer seems straightforward: “Of course we want everything. Why wouldn’t we?” But anyone who has attempted a full migration using spreadsheets knows the reality. The more history you pull in, the more complex, time-consuming, and error-prone the process becomes.
This is why consultants and finance leaders often find themselves debating not just how to migrate data, but what data to migrate at all. Some would also say it is a great opportunity to tidy things up.
Why Historical Transactions Matter
Historical data is the DNA of your business. It tells the story of how customers have interacted with you, how revenue has grown, and how cash flow has ebbed and flowed.
Bring it into NetSuite and you unlock:
- Deeper reporting: True year-over-year comparisons and long-term trend analysis.
- Better forecasting: More accurate models because your base isn’t just the last quarter, it’s years of transactions.
- Customer context: When service or sales teams look up a customer, they see the full relationship, not just the last invoice.
NetSuite’s ERP Data Migration Guide notes that poor decisions about data scope are one of the most common reasons implementations stall. Cut corners on history, and you’ll feel the consequences for years.
The Case for a “Clean Break”
On the flip side, there’s an undeniable appeal to keeping things simple. Migrating only active customers, open balances, and recent transactions can save time and cost upfront.
For some businesses, this approach makes sense:
- High data volume: If you’ve got millions of legacy transactions, the workload may outweigh the benefits.
- Poor legacy data quality: If history is riddled with inconsistencies, errors, or duplicates, pulling it into NetSuite just pollutes your new system.
- Limited use cases: If historical analysis is rarely needed and compliance requirements are minimal, a clean start can be practical.
As one Reddit user advised in a QuickBooks-to-NetSuite discussion:
“I would strongly recommend you only bring over open transactions and balances. I imagine most here will advise the same. It’s the normal thing to do.”
OptimalData Consulting similarly cautions that every organisation must weigh cost, compliance, and usefulness before deciding what data to bring forward.
The Hidden Costs of Leaving History Behind
While a clean break looks attractive, the costs are often hidden:
- Fragmented reporting: Finance teams end up running reports in two systems, reconciling data across NetSuite and the old system.
- Compliance risks: Auditors may still need historical data, forcing you to keep legacy systems (and their licensing costs) alive.
- Customer friction: When a customer calls, your team may only see recent activity. Someone has to dig through the old system to answer basic questions.
A Reddit user who migrated NetSuite-to-NetSuite after a regulatory change explained:
“Consultants migrated all our historical data dating back to 2021 across five entities. … I’m now looking to review their work and ensure that all transactions and balances were migrated accurately.”
In other words: leave too much behind, and you spend months cleaning up after the fact.
Why Historical Data Makes You AI-Ready
There’s another angle many businesses overlook: artificial intelligence.
AI in ERP is no longer a buzzword. From predictive forecasting to anomaly detection, NetSuite and its ecosystem are rapidly building AI-driven tools. But AI is only as smart as the data it has access to.
- Forecasting and Planning: A model trained on two years of transactions can only guess at seasonal trends. Feed it ten years of history, and it starts to predict with confidence.
- Risk and Anomaly Detection: AI thrives on patterns. Without historical context, it can’t flag outliers or spot subtle issues in payables, receivables, or cash flow.
- Customer Intelligence: Imagine using AI to recommend credit terms, upsell products, or score churn risk. Without a full customer history, those insights collapse into guesswork.
NetSuite highlights that AI and machine learning in ERP rely on large, structured, and accurate datasets. Which means: the more history you bring into NetSuite today, the more AI-ready you’ll be tomorrow.
Put simply: migrating history isn’t just about compliance or reporting. It’s about future-proofing your ERP for intelligence.
Why Spreadsheets Make the Problem Worse
This is where spreadsheets show their cracks.
Every additional year of history means more CSVs, more VLOOKUPs, and more opportunities for errors. Teams try to build macros, patch formulas, and troubleshoot inconsistencies. If they’re lucky, they catch one mistake before go-live. More often, fixing one broken formula just exposes another.
Revelwood highlights that spreadsheet-driven migrations almost always underestimate the error risk and especially when dealing with large transaction sets.
Another Reddit thread on NetSuite concerns captured the issue well:
“The majority of our data that we’re moving is Vendor Bills, Bill Credits, Bill Payments, and Journal Entries. … transferring all as Detailed Journal Entries may cause issues in the future … what happens when open bills don’t technically exist?”
The irony? Many companies end up choosing a “clean break” not because it’s strategically better, but because spreadsheets make the alternative unmanageable.
The Balanced Approach: Choice with Control
The smartest migrations aren’t “all or nothing.” They’re controlled.
With SuiteMigration, businesses can decide exactly what history to bring and do it with confidence. That means you can:
- Bring all history if compliance or reporting requires it.
- Selectively bring only what matters (e.g., the last 3–5 years).
- Skip records entirely if they add no value.
Because the tool provides record-level control and error logging, you avoid the all-or-nothing trap. One broken record doesn’t derail a full batch. And with support for NetSuite custom fields, history isn’t just dumped in, it’s mapped properly into your existing setup.
What Consultants Should Tell Clients
For NetSuite consultants, this is where value shines. Instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all decision, you can guide clients through a structured choice:
- Compliance: What historical data are you legally required to keep in your ERP?
- Business Value: What history is actually used for reporting, forecasting, or customer service?
- Cost vs. Benefit: Does the cost of bringing everything outweigh the insights it provides?
AlphaBOLD’s NetSuite lessons emphasise the consultant’s role in steering clients away from “lift and shift everything” mindsets toward smarter, scoped migrations.
Reddit thread on merging NetSuite accounts illustrates, even experienced teams struggle when combining instances after M&A without the right tools or strategy.
SuiteMigration’s Take
At SuiteMigration, we’re not here to tell you that spreadsheets are bad. We understand why teams default to them. For years, Excel has been the lifeline of finance. We’ve all written macros, relied on complex formulas, and spent hours chasing errors across rows and columns.
But history migration is where spreadsheets hit their limit. The stakes are too high. The risks are too great.
That’s why SuiteMigration was built:
- To give you freedom of choice about what to bring.
- To make history migration as fast as current data migration.
- To preserve audit trails, reporting depth, and customer context without the migraine.
Final Thoughts: History Without the Headaches
Migrating to NetSuite is about more than just moving data, it’s about bringing the full story of your business into a platform built for growth.
Leave too much history behind, and you cripple reporting, compliance, and customer visibility. Bring it all in via spreadsheets, and you drown in errors and delays.
The solution is control. Control over what comes across. Control over how it’s mapped. Control over errors and retries.
With SuiteMigration, you don’t have to choose between speed and completeness. You migrate history on your terms, with full accuracy, and without the headaches.
That’s how you make NetSuite not just your next ERP, but your single source of truth from day one.