When to re-implement instead of upgrading

With the high cost of upgrading from old versions of NAV, one big question is start over and import an initial set of transactions and implement only the mods you need and in the way that uses new NAV technology.

First thing to consider is do you love your data. If most of your data is important for decision making, then you probably want to do the data upgrade portion - the easiest part of the process - usually.

Next the mods - do you like them exactly the way they are, then do a straight move as much as possible, but take advantage of events to move some of the code out of the standard NAV objects. If the mods are not that good - bad code or functionality, then define what you need in the new system. You can take advantage of old code when it fits to save time, but treat the mods as new, and use good NAV development techniques.

Now if your data is messy, then here is the chance to start over - the same way you would if you were moving to completely different software.

Things to consider:

Misuse of standard NAV tables where they are not really standard anymore.

Data is not consistent - does not tick and foot.

Manual edits have been done to related tables making them unreliable.

Mods used spaghetti code or significant hard coding of options making them best to redo for maintainability.

NAV was used as a development platform and the development after years of mods is hard to follow and hard to move.

Also, though I hate to write this, does NAV still fit. Maybe you have a customized real estate management system for example and you could move to an off the shelf package that is a much better fit. Maybe you should upgrade to something other than NAV in this case.