BonaVista Pools: from BusinessVision to Spire

The situation on BusinessVision

BonaVista's work runs on work orders: new pool builds, spring openings and fall closings, weekly maintenance, chemical deliveries, and sales at a retail counter. BusinessVision held the accounting and the inventory. Scheduling and work orders lived in a separate field service system. Technicians worked from a mobile app we had built for BonaVista in 2013.

A link we maintained joined the two: when a technician closed a work order, it became an invoice in BusinessVision. A chemical delivery, for example, became a standing order with no labour on it, just the date and the chemicals. That link was how field work got billed, so any move off BusinessVision had to keep it working.

Why they moved

BonaVista wanted its accounting, its field service system and its technician app working from the same live numbers, with room to build more on top. Spire keeps its data in a standard database with an API that other software can connect to, which made that practical.

BonaVista moved years ahead of BusinessVision's end of life. The list of what the business wanted next was specific: cost and revenue by department across retail, construction, service and maintenance; labour and materials tracked against each job; a way for customers to pay invoices and see their history online; and one item for a part that comes from several manufacturers and vendors at slightly different prices.

What the conversion involved

We did the conversion ourselves. We ran it over the winter: the data work ran from late December 2020 to mid January 2021, and testing ran through February. Spire went into production in March 2021. The work had five parts.

• The data. Customers, vendors, inventory items, open receivables and payables, and the general ledger all came across.
• The chart of accounts. Instead of carrying the old chart across, BonaVista started its new fiscal year on a new one in Spire.
• The forms. The documents staff print or send were rebuilt for Spire: sales orders, invoices, point-of-sale receipts, order acknowledgements, customer statements, purchase orders and cheques.
• Payroll. Payroll moved to Spire as well, including payroll cheques and direct deposit.
• The connections. The work order to invoice link was rebuilt against Spire. Spire runs on BonaVista's own server in AWS, and staff reach it remotely.

What was hard, and how we handled it

The conversion itself was the short part. The work that ran longest came after it.

Keeping field work billable

The work order to invoice link could not stop on cutover day, because it was how BonaVista billed for service. We rebuilt it against Spire and tested it through February with the rest of the system. February's work was billed out of BusinessVision by the end of the month, and from the first of March completed work orders became invoices in Spire.

Parts

BonaVista sells the same part at small price differences under several manufacturer and vendor numbers, so the move meant deciding what counts as one item. Consolidating supplier part numbers was still going on in September 2021, six months after go-live.

Forms

Forms are the part of an ERP your customers and suppliers actually see. We built the first ones in early February 2021, before go-live, and revised them over the following months: how addresses wrap on invoices, how the balance due shows, and service charges on customer statements. The last of those changes was in September 2021.

Where they are now

BonaVista has run on Spire since March 2021. Nexus, the software we build on top of Spire, reads BonaVista's Spire data live. The Nexus page covers what it is and how it works with Spire.

We have worked with BonaVista since 2013: first on the technician app, then on the move to Spire, and now on Nexus.