Just to confirm: off-list, Pete and I are working on getting his company migrated. The results of the efforts are being taken back into the code base of the project. One of the results is a major refactoring of the upgrade process (the code) in
setup.pl; the new way of coding highlighted discrepancies between upgrades from LedgerSMB 1.2 and SQL Ledger 2.8 and 3.0 -- a very nice result. Another result is that the upgrade code in 1.7 had a number of issues which break migration full stop. For 1.8, those will be resolved.
A lot of back-and-forth off-list between Pete and myself as resulted in a new script being available for 1.8 which I have added to the repository on Friday as "bin/migrate-company". The script migrates LedgerSMB 1.2 and 1.3 databases to LedgerSMB 1.7+. Once the database migration for SQL Ledger 3.0 and 3.2 is done, that migration will be supported too.
The script has a number of rough edges and while Pete and I continue to refine it, it would benefit from broader testing. Please contact me (on- or off-list) if you want to migrate your 1.2 or 1.3 database to 1.7 too. I'll help run the tool (coaching through the steps - I don't need access to your database). The benefit I'll get from that is that it allows me to both finetune the tool and start writing the manual.