I’m involved in a good half a dozen different businesses and do all the bookkeeping/accounting for most of them. Over the past 15 years I’ve got pretty comfortable with the main desktop accounting product in Australia/New Zealand, MYOB. Over the past five years or so I’ve used and reviewed pretty much every cloud-based accounting product on the planet and now run a handful of businesses in Xero, probably the solution of choice from the bunch.

My main reason for not moving more of my businesses from MYOB to Xero is the pain of migration – despite having reasonably extensive bookkeeping skills it’s a real pain to move – the logistics involved in getting data out of one solution and into another really does suck.

Which is where LiveMigrate comes in – a few months ago, myself, the awesome team at DJCA (who are one of the most successful Xero partners) and Trineo (a development shop with extensive experience building Xero products) got together and came up with the idea for LiveMigrate.

Essentially LiveMigrate is the best of both worlds – it take some awesome automation technology and mixes it with a high capability New Zealand based team of technicians to create a solution that automates what is best to be automate, but leaves in the human touch for when it’s appropriate. Judging by the response from folks that we’ve talked to, we’ve really honed in on an important need that people have.

Our system is super simple – users register on the site, upload their MYOB datafile and we run a series of both manual and automatic processes in a highly secure way. At the end of the process customers have their Xero account all ready with their data from MYOB – accounts, contacts, balances etc.

We’ve also introduced a tiered service – at the basic level people can get their trial balance and contacts into Xero. Our “Full Monty” service sees the full gamut of information bought into Xero including a full seven years of historical data!

Obviously I’m a (highly) biased party but I first mooted the idea of a migration service about four years ago. While it’s true that it’s crazy its taken so long to get one off the ground, its super exciting that the day has come. We’ve got plenty more ideas for LiveMigrate – we’ll be offering services for other desktop accounting products in the months ahead but for now, if you’re dreaming of a way to escape the confines of MYOB, LiveMigrate is already to help you in that process – check it out!

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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