FourdaystoliveonValix

What changed

A boutique property manager with 247 units across 5 mixed-use buildings moved off Yardi Voyager in four working days. No historical data loss, no re-entered leases, no rent charges missed.

The move was a real production cutover — not a pilot, not a sandbox. Friday afternoon the legacy system went read-only. Tuesday at 9am the operator was 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 from doing this 40+ times: 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.

“The dry run caught a 2019 option-year amendment that our prior system had silently dropped. Finding it on a Wednesday instead of in the January 2 trial balance saved us a week of reconciliation.”

The numbers

247 units, 187 chart-of-accounts entries, 7 SPVs consolidated, 2 full years of transaction history re-posted, and 0 dropped rent charges. Total hands-on time from the operator: 11 hours spread across 4 days. Total calendar elapsed time from Yardi-export to first Valix posting: 4 days and 2 hours.

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.