FourdaystoliveonValix

What changed

A mid-size mixed-use portfolio can move off Yardi Voyager in about four working days — no historical data loss, no re-entered leases, no rent charges missed.

Here is what a production cutover looks like — not a pilot, not a sandbox. Friday afternoon the legacy system goes read-only. Tuesday at 9am the operator is posting rent, running AR-aging, and reconciling bank feeds inside Valix.

Why four days (not four months)

Every long migration we’ve seen got long for one of three reasons: (1) the target system forces a schema change halfway through, (2) the accounting model silently disagrees with the source and the team debugs trial-balance drift for weeks, (3) nobody owns the business-logic decisions so every discovery waits for a meeting.

We solve those upfront. The schema is locked day one. The GL mapping is applied in a dry run before cutover so any trial-balance drift surfaces on a Wednesday, not after go-live. And every decision has a named owner in a RACI worksheet before kickoff — no meetings to resolve ownership.

The dry run

The single biggest lesson in migration work: never, ever, cut over on a Monday morning without a dry run the Wednesday before. The dry run exercises every rent charge, every CAM reconciliation, every percentage-rent calculation against a sandbox and tells you whether the outputs match your trial-balance target.

What broke (and what didn’t)

One percentage-rent breakpoint was off by $400 / month because Yardi had been calculating on gross-sales-inclusive-of-tax while the lease was gross-sales-exclusive. The dry run caught it; the fix was a one-line update to the percentage term. If we’d cut over first and checked balances second, it would have been a month of reconciliation spreadsheets to isolate.

This is exactly the kind of issue a dry run surfaces: a dropped option-year amendment shows up on a Wednesday instead of in the January 2 trial balance — saving a week of reconciliation.

The numbers

For a portfolio this size — on the order of 250 units, ~190 chart-of-accounts entries, a handful of SPVs consolidated, and two full years of transaction history re-posted — a clean migration drops zero rent charges. Expect roughly a day and a half of hands-on operator time across the four days, and a few days of calendar time from export to first posting.

Takeaway for operators

Migration time is a function of how much business logic has to be re-decided under pressure, not how much data has to move. Decide the logic up front. Map the GL before cutover. Run the dry. The data part takes a weekend.