Don’t you hate when a vendor sells you “plug and play” and you end up stuck on onboarding calls, redoing reports, and waiting days for support to answer basic questions? We get it. You worry a new back office will drag you into support desk chat hell, eat staff time, and turn closing the books into a moving target. You want a clean start, a short learning curve, and a team that actually shows up when you need help. You do not want surprise fees, endless “training,” or a system that takes months to feel usable.

Promises of seamless onboarding fade fast when workshops drag on, mapping rules change midstream, and history refuses to load cleanly. Close dates slip. Dual runs linger. Tickets stay open for weeks while vendor teams pass them around. Budgets swell and trust shrinks. After one or two cycles like that, the next “upgrade” reads as risk, not progress.

Migration pain

You sign the contract and expect a clean start, then the ticket queue starts to grow. You resend the same files, answer the same questions, and sit through calls that circle back to step one. The go-live date slides, so you run the old system and the new one side by side, and the totals do not match. Principals ask why last quarter’s number moved, you cannot point to a clean history, and training sessions focus on basics while simple fixes wait in the queue. A connector you thought was included needs extra work, a small change at a bank stalls the import, and you spend evenings checking reports that should have held on their own.

It is tiring and it is expensive. Staff time disappears into follow ups and screenshots, the close takes longer, and confidence in the numbers fades. You are not looking for miracles, you want someone to own the issues, give clear timelines, and stay with you until everything ties out and stays tied out.

FundCount’s approach to integration, onboarding, and support

In order to avoid headaches and frustration, your office needs a plan that everyone can read and follow. A workable methodology fixes scope early, names owners on both sides, sets acceptance criteria you can test, and defines a rollback if the first cutover does not clear. It inventories real files, proves them in a pilot, and requires two clean closes before anyone declares the project done.

Implementation governance and onboarding

FundCount frames implementation as a staged program that begins with business analysis and a formal Business Requirements Document. The BRD fixes scope, defines reporting and workflow needs, and sets project costs. Client teams complete role-based training through FundCount Academy. A guided or self-implementation path follows, with consulting available as needed. The intent is to reduce ambiguity about deliverables and ownership before configuration starts.

In practice, the plan includes a data inventory and sample sets for every source, a mapping register with named owners, and milestone dates for a pilot entity, dual run, and full cutover. Acceptance is defined up front as two reconciled closes on live data. There is a short freeze window after go live, a documented change log, and a clear handoff into support with named contacts and response times. The goal is predictable movement of history into one model and a timetable that stays visible from kickoff to sign-off.

Once scope is set, you should be able to focus on clean data movement rather than fighting formats. The platform’s organizing principle is a single, real-time general ledger that covers portfolio and partnership accounting in one schema. Instruments, positions, cash, and ownership live in that unified model, which reduces cross-module reconciliation and makes history easier to load and verify. A central security master manages identifiers, and unmapped instruments do not post. For intake, standardized import templates, API endpoints, and AppUniverse connectors route banks, custodians, and third-party systems into the same canonical model instead of bespoke spreadsheet bridges.

Managing change and staying on track

During migration and dual-run, predictable handling of change matters. Inbound files are validated against defined templates before data reaches the books, which helps catch layout changes early. Corrections are recorded as replacements with full lineage rather than layered as new entries, which avoids duplicate quantities or cash and preserves a clear record from source to ledger line.

After go live, you need simple ways to see what is working and what needs attention. Power BI dashboards pull directly from FundCount data to monitor feed completeness, timing, and break aging during the first closes on the new system. Once reconciled, the same dataset feeds internal and investor reporting so last-mile rekeying does not reintroduce errors.

Budgeting and change control should feel predictable. Public materials describe the ledger as the system of record for family-office structures and a phased methodology as standard practice. Pricing pages outline core licensing and maintenance, and open connectivity is positioned to reduce reliance on proprietary adapters. The practical outcome is a plan you can cost once, integrations that follow defined contracts, and a support path that is measured against agreed milestones rather than open-ended best efforts.

Implementation lessons from the field

To ground this in lived experience, we are including a short conversation between Jon Carroll and Dominika Halka, Managing Director and COO at Evolve. She explains why her team chose to change systems, how the actual timeline compared with their expectations, and where the software met or exceeded what they hoped for. She closes with five practical lessons any family office can apply to keep a project on schedule and to get to reliable numbers faster.

Conclusion

Handled this way, cutovers stay on schedule and the numbers hold. Your team spends less time chasing issues and more time on decisions.