Avoid These 7 Mistakes When Migrating away from Nexonia

Picking a replacement for Nexonia takes a few weeks. Actually migrating without breaking your AP workflows, payroll feeds, and month-end close takes months of planning. Get it wrong and you're looking at delayed reimbursements, broken ERP exports, and a month-end close that takes twice as long.

Done well, you come out the other side with tighter policy enforcement, fewer manual touchpoints, and reporting that actually matches your GL. But done poorly, it can delay reimbursements, disrupt AP workflows, and create reconciliation headaches that take months to sort out.

If you’re planning a transition, avoiding a few common pitfalls can make the difference between a smooth migration and a costly one.

If you don't have a transition plan yet, start here: referencing this guide on how to migrate from Nexonia without disrupting your AP and expense workflows.

Mistake #1: Treating Migration as an IT Project Instead of a Finance Initiative

One of the most common mistakes is assuming that migration from Nexonia is purely technical.

Nexonia encompasses:

• Expense approvals
• AP workflows
• ERP integrations
• Payroll data flows

If finance and accounting teams aren’t leading the process, critical workflow requirements can easily be overlooked.

Finance should own the requirements: approval chains, GL coding, cost allocation rules, and export formats. IT handles the plumbing. If those roles are reversed, you'll end up with an integration that works technically but doesn't match how your team actually processes expenses.

Lifeworks made the switch after years of running separate legacy systems for timekeeping and expenses. Their IT team initiated it, but the project only succeeded because finance defined the requirements.

Mistake #2: Not Mapping Current Workflows in Detail

Most organizations underestimate how customized their workflows have become over time.

Approval chains, coding structures, and reporting fields don’t seem complicated until they break during migration.

Without in-depth documentation of every process, approval hierarchy, cost allocation logic, and policies, teams risk losing critical functionality in the new system. Otherwise you end up with a newer system that still requires your AP team to manually re-key data.

When CALIBRE, a government consulting firm, migrated its time and expense workflows to DATABASICS with Microsoft Dynamics SL, the implementation team mapped every approval chain, cost allocation rule, and billing structure first. The result: invoicing time was cut in half.

Mistake #3: Breaking ERP Integrations

If your expense system doesn’t connect to your ERP, you could run into:

• Incorrect GL coding
• Failed exports
• Manual reconciliation work
• Reporting inconsistencies

Run a test export to your ERP before you go live. Map every GL account, cost center, and project code. If any of those fail to sync, stop and fix them before cutting over. If you’re replacing Nexonia with DATABASICS, you can use the provided test site to make sure that the ERP integration is working.

Search for Common Ground, an international nonprofit with 1,000 employees across 30+ countries, needed their new time and expense system to sync with Sage Intacct without interrupting donor billing. DATABASICS configured the integration before go-live, mapped every GL account and project code, and ran test exports before cutting over.

Mistake #4: Migrating at the Wrong Time

Timing matters more than most teams realize.

Switching systems during month-end close, payroll processing, or active reimbursement cycles can introduce serious complexity and delays that become a nuisance for the entire organization.

Plan your cutover for the first week after a month-end close, when reporting is done and the next cycle hasn't started. That gives you two to three weeks of breathing room before the next close.

Pathfinder International, a global nonprofit with 1,400 employees in 19 countries, went live with DATABASICS in under 40 days by aligning implementation with a planned operational window.

Mistake #5: Ignoring Historical Data Needs

It’s easy to focus on the improvements ahead and forget about the past. But finance teams still need:

• Audit trails
• Historical reports
• Expense records
• Compliance documentation

Failing to archive or migrate this data can create long-term reporting gaps that become a problem later. If your organization is subject to DCAA audits or grant reporting requirements, failing to archive this data isn't just an operational inconvenience. It's a compliance risk.

Mistake #6: Skipping Parallel Testing

Going live without testing is a sure-fire way to introduce errors to the new system.

Parallel testing the existing software alongside the new one gives issues a chance to surface before real transactions are impacted.

When testing, teams should:

• Validate expense submissions
• Confirm approval routing
• Test ERP exports
• Catch discrepancies early

Parallel testing also exposes how responsive your new vendor actually is when something breaks. During testing, you're going to find mismatches: an approval that routes to the wrong manager, a GL code that doesn't map correctly, an export that drops a field. What matters is how fast those get resolved.

DATABASICS assigns a dedicated implementation lead to every migration. That person owns the configuration, runs testing alongside your team, and fixes issues before go-live, not after. The company holds a 4.95 out of 5.0 customer support rating, and it's not because nothing ever goes wrong during implementation. It's because when something surfaces in testing, the response time is hours, not days.

If your new vendor can't tell you exactly who will be handling your implementation and how fast they respond to issues during parallel testing, that's a red flag worth paying attention to.

Mistake #7: Choosing a System that Requires Rebuilding Everything

Not all replacement platforms are built for accounting continuity.

For example, some require teams to rebuild approval workflows or reconfigure integrations — both of which add time, risk, and operational strain.

Choosing a system that’s designed for finance workflows, like DATABASICS, helps preserve existing structures and reduces the need for rework.

When Rare moved from Nexonia to DATABASICS, their finance team didn't have to rebuild approval workflows or reconfigure integrations. Their finance lead called DATABASICS “the best staff they never hired.”

A Smooth Migration is About Avoiding Preventable Risk

More often than not, most Nexonia migration challenges are the result of overlooked dependencies and rushed planning.

By avoiding these common mistakes, organizations can protect their AP processes, maintain reporting continuity, and transition to a new software more smoothly.

If you’re planning a migration from Nexonia, book a demo to see how DATABASICS has migrated organizations off Nexonia, Concur, and legacy systems without disrupting their AP workflows. Book a demo to see how it works for your setup.