I am working on an upgrade right now with a client and have a quick tip to share, that may save a little bit of time in your testing, depending on how many company databases you have.

Common Time Wasters

One very common problem with upgrades that I’ve seen is specific to people who, shall we say, are less than organized.  Before you know it, you’ve printed off reams of paper and reports to compare data or whatever the reason, and they all look the same!  Yes, you suddenly can’t remember which report is from GP 2010 and which report is from GP 10, or whatever the situation.

Quick Tip

Before you start printing anything, rename your company, temporarily, to include a tag line - version, environment, whatever will help you in testing.  For me, I renamed mine when I was printing data validation reports so the company name, when printing on the report headers, said “GP 10 Pre-Upgrade Test Company” for instance, as shown below.

Now, instead of hand-writing a notation on every report you print of what you just printed from - or worse, printing a pile of reports and forgetting - it’s pre-printed on the report.  Circle or highlight it and move on to other testing.

I hope this helps someone out there… it’s a simple tip, but one that saves some time during testing.