Prepare your PTP data for migration

You'll need to do some data preparation before you start the migration process. How much preparation depends on how many clients you have and whether you have multiple PTP products.

Elements manages clients a bit differently from PTP.

In PTP, you need a client record for the same entity for each product you own. In Elements, there is a single client record per entity - no matter how many products you subscribe to.

For example, you have a client called Business Industries Ltd. You do corporation tax returns and accounts for them in PTP. This means you'll have a record for Business Industries Ltd in PTP Corporation Tax, and a record for Business Industries Ltd in PTP Accounts Production. These records do not sync up at all and you need to update them separately when making changes to client information.

In Elements, you will only need one client record for Business Industries Ltd. You'll be subscribed to Elements Tax Professional and Accounts Production Professional, but work from the same single client record for this client. If you later decide to subscribe to Elements AML, you will also do your AML work from this single client record. This is part of what makes Elements special.

When data is migrated into Elements from multiple PTP products, it avoids creating new client records for each data type by scanning existing client record details and using certain data points to figure out if the record already exists in Elements. The data points used to make a match will depend on what type of client they are, e.g. a sole trade will have different matching criteria than a trust.

You'll need to make sure that client records are consistent across each product. They also need to contain specific data points to be migrated, as listed below.

These data points must be consistent in all areas. Deduplication does not employ non-approximate matching (‘fuzzy matching’), meaning that a name or first line of the address, for example, must match exactly in order to resolve the duplicate.

It is strongly advised that before data is migrated, you set time aside to review client records and ensure that data contained in the fields noted below is consistent between all client records. Mismatches will result in a duplicate client record being created in Elements

Before you migrate your data, go through your client records in each of your PTP products and make sure each client type contains the following information:

Incorporated entities (limited companies, LLPs, incorporated charities)

  • Company registration number

Unincorporated charities

  • Charity registration number

Sole trades and partnerships

  • Business name

  • VAT number

  • First line of address

  • Postcode

Individuals

  • National Insurance Number

  • First name

  • Last name

  • First line of address

  • Postcode

Trusts

  • Trust name

  • VAT number

  • First line of address

  • Postcode

How client records are migrated

Client records are migrated from PTP Accounts Production by initially synchronising all clients with your Elements account. This is triggered and managed from within PTP Accounts Production, you can:

  • Enable 2-way synchronisation of clients between PTP Accounts Production and your IRIS Elements account

  • Choose the client records you wish to synchronise

  • Prevent duplicate client records from being created in Elements by match PTP Accounts Production clients with existing Elements client records

Enabling the synchronisation of client data from PTP Accounts Production only migrates the client record; accounts production data is migrated separately and this can be done either before or after the migration of tax data. This differs from the migration of PTP tax data, where the client and the tax return data are migrated at the same time.

Next step: Enable PTP client sync