RapidStart Services in Microsoft Dynamics NAV

RapidStart Services is a great tool to help companies migrate data from one system into Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The most common method of transferring data typically involves creating an Excel Template in a Configuration Package, then populating the relevant columns with the data and then importing it into NAV.

This gives the user full control over the content of the data that they are importing into NAV.

Furthermore, NAV will validate the data and report any errors in the data before applying it to the NAV database. This tool makes the lives of NAV users much easier especially when you need to import a large number of records into the system.

However, for all of the great things that RapidStart can do, NAV users should be aware that it requires a great deal of processing power to import, validate and apply the data to the NAV database.

In my experience, importing 1,000 records will take about 5 minutes. Furthermore, it would take an additional 5 minutes to validate the data and an additional 5 minutes to apply the data; meaning that it will take a total of 15 minutes to migrate the data into the NAV database (excluding the time it would take to resolve errors).

One client had about 20,000 records to transfer into NAV. It took me about 1 hour to import the data, 1 hour to validate it and 1 hour to apply the data; totaling 3 hours to successfully transfer it into NAV.
Please note that this does not take into account the time it took to resolve errors that NAV reported after I validated the data.

If you are tasked with transferring hundreds of thousands of records, it would be a good idea to break the number of records into smaller batches and import the data in increments.

So a heads up, when importing a large number of records, it’s good to be conscientious of the time it may require to successfully import the data and be prepared to set aside a large part of your day to complete this!