Years of records move across. Not all of them should.
Every vendor promises to migrate everything. Then week nine arrives and a third of it turns out to be duplicates, half-typed entries and fields nobody has filled since 2019. We run the whole migration as a rehearsal first, and tell you what will not survive before you commit to anything.
Rehearsed on a copy · Verified by you · Old system stays readable
What actually happens to one messy row
A real shape of a record pulled from an old system, and every change made to it on the way across. Nothing is altered silently.
The blank owner had no safe default, so it was flagged rather than assigned to whoever happened to be first in the list.
Nothing moves forward until you sign the stage before it
Migrations go wrong when a decision gets made on your behalf to keep the schedule. Each stage ends with something you approve in writing.
Inventory
Every source located and counted — the CRM, the spreadsheets, the register, the inbox nobody mentioned.
You confirm the source list is complete.
Rehearsal
The full migration runs against a copy. Nothing touches live data, and the output is the report above.
You review the dry-run report before we go further.
Rules
Field mapping, duplicate-matching rules and every transformation written down in plain language.
You sign the rules, including how ties are broken.
Verification
You pick the sample — your oldest records, your largest client, the ones you know are awkward.
You verify the sample yourself, not a summary of it.
Cutover
Final run against live data, with the old system left readable rather than switched off.
You confirm before anything is frozen.
Five things that usually cannot come with you
None of these are unusual, and none of them are anyone's fault. What matters is hearing about them in week one rather than discovering them after cutover.
Attachments stored outside the system
Links point at a shared drive or a laptop that has since been wiped. The reference survives; the file does not.
Notes referring to records that no longer exist
Free text mentioning a deal or contact deleted years ago. It migrates, but the trail it describes will not reconnect.
Custom fields abandoned mid-process
A field populated for six months in 2021 and never again. We keep it if you want, but it will not report usefully.
Audit history the old system never exposed
Many products keep change history internally and offer no export. What was changed and by whom is genuinely gone.
Records the previous vendor purged
Retention policies delete on a schedule. If it went in 2022, no migration recovers it — check backups before you cancel.
If a vendor tells you all of this will migrate intact, ask them how. The answer is usually that nobody has looked at your data yet.
Send us an export and we will tell you what is in it
A sample file is usually enough to estimate duplicates, spot the fields that will need repairing, and tell you honestly how much of your history is worth carrying forward.
- Rehearsal before you commit to anything
- Duplicate and transformation rules in writing
- You verify the sample, not a summary
- Old system stays readable after cutover